POV: Jackson
"You are telling me," I said, leaning forward with my hands flat on the table, "that a woman who has been in this family for less than five years is more entitled to my son's legacy than the man who built the company she inherited."
Priya did not move. She sat across from me with her hands folded over the file, her back straight, her face carrying the specific stillness of a woman who had heard this argument before and had decided in advance how far she was going to let it run.
"I am telling you," she said, her voice even and precise, "that your son made a legal decision with the full capacity of his mind, and that decision is not subject to your approval."
"My son was twenty-eight when he wrote that will."
"Your son was twenty-eight, sober, advised by independent counsel, and clear about what he wanted," Priya said. "The will has been reviewed. The transfer of shares has been reviewed. You have no standing to challenge any of it, and you know that, which is why you are sitting in this room arguing tone instead of law."
The sentence landed clean. The woman did not waste syllables.
"Jasmine was not his wife," I said. "She was his fiancée. The wedding did not happen. There is a legal distinction —"
"There is no legal distinction in the will," Priya said, and her voice dropped half a register. "He named her by name. Not by title. Not by marital status. The document does not care whether she walked down an aisle."
I sat back.
She had taken my argument apart the way a surgeon took apart a body — methodically, without malice, each cut placed where it would do the most structural damage.
I tried the other angle. The one I had been holding in reserve.
"Aurora is my granddaughter," I said. "By blood. That is not a legal argument. That is a fact."
Something shifted in her face. A fraction of a degree — the smallest recalibration behind her eyes. She had not expected me to say it quietly. She had not expected the absence of performance.
The pause lasted two seconds.
Then she set her pen down. She looked at me directly, without deference, without the careful social lubrication every other lawyer in my life applied to their gaze before meeting mine.
"Jackson," she said, and the use of my first name was deliberate. "Aurora is your granddaughter. That is true. And if you had called Jasmine at any point in the last four years — when Aurora was born, when she took her first steps — you would have standing in this conversation that you do not currently have."
She leaned forward.
"You did not visit when she was born. You did not visit when Liam was alive. You sent a box of gifts the week after the will was read, and every gift has been logged by my office because we both know what a paper trail looks like when it is being built."
Her voice did not rise. It did not need to.
"So let me be clear," she said. "You will not file. You will not send gifts without prior written approval. You will not contact Aurora directly. You will not contact Jasmine. If you want access, it goes through me, and I will deny every request that smells like strategy. Leave them alone."
The room went still.
I looked at her.
This was the part that should not have happened. This was the part where I should have felt the cold, efficient anger that had carried me through four decades of rooms like this one.
I did not feel anger.
I felt something I had not felt since Eleanor.
Eleanor had been the last person who could do this to me — sit across a table, dismantle my position, and make me want to stay in the room after the dismantling was complete. Eleanor had understood power the way I understood it — as architecture, as leverage, as the careful arrangement of pressure points.
Priya did not understand power that way. Priya understood truth. And truth, delivered without performance, without any need for my approval or fear of my disapproval, was a thing I had no defence against.
Eleanor had made me sharper. Priya was making me honest. I did not know yet which was more dangerous.
I picked up my pen. I did not open the file.
"You said something last week," I said, and heard my own voice arrive in a register I did not recognise. "You said you do not negotiate with people you respect. You talk to them."
Priya's eyes narrowed. Not suspicion. Assessment. She was reading me the way I read balance sheets — looking for the number that did not belong.
"I remember," she said carefully.
"Did you mean it?" I asked, and the question sat between us — not legal, not strategic, the kind of question a man asked when he had run out of better ones and was left with the one he had been avoiding.
She looked at me for a long moment. I watched her weigh the cost of honesty against the cost of distance.
"Yes," she said. "I meant it."
I nodded. I closed the file. I stood up.
"Then I will call you tomorrow," I said. "Not about Cadence. Not about Aurora. Not about the filing."
She did not stand. She looked up at me with an expression I could not read, and the inability to read it was the most unsettling thing that had happened to me in this room.
"Why?" she asked.
I put my hands in my pockets.
"Because I would like to talk to you," I said. "And I have not wanted to talk to anyone in a very long time."
I left before she could answer.
In the elevator going down I noticed that my hands were not steady. I put them deeper into my pockets. The doors closed. The car descended.
She had told me to leave them alone. I would. Not because she had the legal authority to make me. Not because the filing was dead. Because she had looked at me across a table and spoken to me as though I were a man capable of hearing the truth, and I did not want to be the man who proved her wrong.
The elevator opened. The city was dark and moving and entirely unconcerned with what had just changed in a conference room on the twelfth floor.
I was not sure what had changed. I knew only that the Cadence file was closed, and I did not want to open it, and the thing I wanted to open instead did not have a name yet.