Veil Nova board requests transparency on Vale's personal decisions. One financial column ran a piece titled simply dos Saraphina Vale still fit to lead. Malik read none of it past the first paragraph of each. He had learned in 15 years of emergency work that the noise around Kamikaris was rarely where the actual problem was. He looked for the problem.
It arrived in the form of a certified letter from Brena's attorney on Thursday. The letter was four pages long and said in careful legal language what Brena could not quite bring herself to say directly that the marriage to Sarafhina Vale raised serious concerns about Malik's stability and judgment. That exposing Ken to a volatile public situation was not in the child's best interest and that she was formally requesting the court revisit the custody arrangement before the 90-day evaluation period concluded. Malik set the letter on the kitchen counter and stood there for a moment with his hands flat on the surface. The way he used to stand over a patient, he wasn't sure he could stabilize.
Then he picked up the phone and called his attorney. Dorian Vale sent no letters. He didn't need to. Malik had met him once briefly at the brownstone. A tall man in his mid-4s with a specific kind of charm that came from never having been told no often enough.
Dorian had shaken Malik's hand with both of his smiled broadly and said he was so glad Saraphina had someone looking out for her. The smile hadn't reached anywhere near his eyes. Since then, Dorian had been quietly doing what quiet men with resources did when they felt threatened. He'd called two members of the Veil Nova board. He'd arranged for a financial journalist to receive certain documents about Saraphina's recent decision-making, and he had, according to Saraphina's assistant, begun CCing himself on internal communications that had nothing to do with his role as director of operations.
He's done this before, Saraphina told Malik one evening. Sitting at the kitchen table of the brownstone with a cup of tea she hadn't touched. Every time I've been sick, even a bad flu, he starts circling. He's been waiting for a real opening for years, and now he has one. Malik said, "Now he thinks he has one. " She looked up.
There's a difference. Malik watched her for a moment. She said things like that, small corrections, precise and unhurried. And he was beginning to understand that it wasn't arrogance. It was the habit of a woman who had survived long enough in rooms full of people waiting for her to fail, that she'd stopped giving those people the satisfaction of seeing her waiver.
He respected it. He also knew it cost her more than she let on. It was Ken who said the thing that mattered most that week. He'd overheard enough. Not the details, but the shape of it.
The tension that had moved into the apartment. The way weather moved in. Gradual and then all at once. He was a perceptive kid. Callen.
He noticed things and filed them away and produced them later with the timing of someone twice his age. They were washing dishes after dinner on Friday night when he said without looking up from the plate he was drying. You're helping that lady find her kid, right? Something like that. Malik said.