"I put a man I barely knew in a legal marriage because I thought I had 6 months. You did what you needed to do for Anelise. " He said that part wasn't wrong. She looked at him then. Really looked the way she hadn't quite allowed herself to before. You didn't have to do any of this.
Last night, I told you to leave. You did? He agreed. Why didn't you? Malik thought about Ken's note on the kitchen counter, about the trembling paper star in the child's room.
About a 16-year-old girl sitting on the floor of a community center, showing his son how to draw a boat. Because you still needed someone, he said, and I was still there. The legal piece moved quickly once the medical piece was established. Saraphina's attorney filed for an emergency injunction against Dorian's access to Veil Nova's internal systems. Within 24 hours of the ethics board's preliminary findings, the board of directors, presented with documented evidence of data manipulation tied to the director of operations, voted to suspend Dorian pending a full investigation.
The criminal referral followed 2 weeks later. Wire fraud, medical data tampering, breach of duchary duty duty. Brena, for her part, withdrew her custody challenge quietly. Her attorney sent a one paragraph letter citing a reassessment of the circumstances. Malik read it once and filed it without comment.
Malik's custody hearing was rescheduled for the following Thursday. He stood in front of the same judge who had divided his marriage into line items 6 weeks earlier and said without a prepared statement that he had spent the past month helping a desperate mother to find her child because he understood what it felt like to be afraid of losing one and that at no point during any of it had he made a single decision that put Ken second. The judge looked at him for a long moment. Then she confirmed the original custody arrangement and closed the file. Malik walked out into cold December air and stood on the steps for a moment, hands in his pockets.
His phone buzzed. A text from Ken. Did we win? He typed back. Yeah, we won.
3 seconds later. Cool. Can we get tacos? He laughed. A real one.
The kind that came from somewhere below the chest. Then he put his phone away and went to get his son. Saraphina asked to go back to Marin's point alone. Malik drove her anyway. Not because she couldn't manage it herself, but because she didn't argue when he said he would, which told him everything he needed to know about how she was feeling.