“So what does that mean? For me? Am I in trouble?”
“Absolutely not,” I say firmly.
I cross the room and lay a hand on his back until he lets me turn him around. His eyes are wet but furious, not broken.
“You’re not in trouble. He is. What it means is that we can prove a pattern. We can press charges. We can get restitution. This is leverage, Oren. The kind that tips the scales all the way in your favor.”
His breath shudders. “He stole from me.”
“Yes.”
“And I didn’t even—” His voice cracks. He bites his lip, shoulders shaking. “I didn’t even see it. God, how stupid?—”
“Don’t,” I cut in, sharper than I mean. I tilt his chin up until he has no choice but to meet my eyes. “Don’t call yourself that. He’s a predator, Oren. He targeted you. That’s not your fault.”
His lip trembles, but he nods. “So… what do we do?”
“We fight back,” I tell him.
The lawyer in me is already cataloguing next steps, but the Daddy in me makes sure my voice softens around the edges.
“We file civil. We press criminal. We make sure he pays back every cent and walks away with a record that follows him forever.”
He leans into me then, against my chest, hair brushing my jaw. His words are muffled but clear.
“Then do it, Daddy. Make him pay.”
And I promise him I will.
The kitchen islanddisappears under paper. Case law printouts, financial statements, Oren’s careful notes in his looping hand, my own scrawled highlights in neon yellow and bleeding red pen. It’s not food that fills the counter, but a feast of evidence—every screenshot Oren saved, every strange e-mail, every late-night text that seemed too weird to delete. All of it lining up into something that looks less like random chaos and more like a trail we can follow.
Oren perches on a stool, legs tucked under him, Quackers balanced against his chest like an emotional support paralegal. He’s watching me shuffle documents into piles, but he’s listening hard. He doesn’t just want me to win this for him. He wants tounderstand.
“This stack—” I tap the folder with the tabs sticking out. “Civil. Fraud, identity theft. This one—” I nudge the slimmer pile, bank records clipped together. “Criminal. We file both. We go after restitution. We clear your name. We make sure when Vince’s is typed into a database, it comes back poisoned.”
Oren blinks, wide-eyed, but doesn’t shrink. His grip on Quackers tightens for one heartbeat before he makes himself loosen it.
“And… I don’t have to talk in court yet, right?”
“Not yet. You’ll give statements, but you won’t be ambushed. You’ll know when. You’ll know why. No surprises.”
He nods. It’s a small motion, but it has the weight of someone agreeing to step into a storm because he knows I’ll be holding his hand the whole time.
Adiel drops by after work, sleeves rolled up and a hunger for justice burning in his sharp eyes. He brings a flash drive loaded with transaction logs and financial statements. My paralegal arrives with copies of subpoena requests. The apartment hums like a command center—war room energy, except the enemy is bureaucracy and a man who thought he was clever enough to get away with it.
And through it all, Oren sits at the table, pen in hand, making his own list of witnesses, moments, and questions. He pauses sometimes to ask me things like,If I testify, do I wear a tie? Do I call the judge ‘Your Honor’ or just ‘sir’?Little worries that show how deeply he’s letting himself imagine this future where Vince doesn’t get to own him anymore.
At one point, I find him biting his lip, staring at a spreadsheet with numbers he doesn’t really understand. His cheeks are pink, his eyes shining bright.
“Hey.” I touch his shoulder, firm enough to ground him. “This is the boring part. The good boring. You don’t have to solve it, you just have to trust me with it.”
“I do.” His voice is quiet but firm. Then, with a glance up at me, almost shy, “It’s just… the first time it doesn’t feel like he wins by default.”
And right there, amid the coffee mugs and highlighters and whirring laptops, the war room doesn’t feel like war at all. It feels like Oren learning how to fight back by letting me fight beside him.
