SELENA We accepted because refusal would have been a confession.Kael said it first, standing in the sealed room with the specialist’s message still glowing on my phone. His voice was flat, stripped of the earlier violence, replaced by something colder and more practical.“If we say no, we hand them the report they want. Uncooperative. Isolated. Parent refuses court-appointed observation. Clara won’t need to invent a narrative. We’ll have written it for her.”He was right. I hated that he was right.So by the next afternoon the house had been adjusted into a version of itself that could survive a stranger’s eyes. The most obvious guards were pulled back from the front elevation. The petition papers were gone from the coffee table. Sienna was dressed in soft yellow, hair brushed, dragon under one arm. I covered the last faint shadow on my throat with a high collar I almost never wore. Kael wore a shirt with no rolled sleeves, no open collar, nothing that looked like a man prepared fo
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