Chapter Twenty-Five
DEAN
Prepping for the hearing with Marin was not glamorous.
I want to be clear about that because there's a particular mythology around legal fights — the late nights, the passionate arguments, the dramatic moment of clarity.
What prepping for a hearing actually involved was sitting in Marin's conference room for seven hours going through every piece of documentation we'd submitted and finding the seventeen things that opposing counsel could use and figuring out what we were going to say about them.
Avery was good at this. She was better at it than I expected, which was probably something I should have already expected.
She approached legal prep the way she approached client work: systematically, without sentimentality, identifying the weaknesses before someone else could use them.
She'd sit across from Marin and say this phrase is soft, they can argue it could mean either thing and Marin would nod and make a note and they'd rewrite it, and then Avery would move to the next thing.
Oren Malloy had submitted his medical testimony, which was precise and well-documented and described the stabilizer effect with the specific clinical language that medical testimony required. That was good. What was less good was that Bastian Rook had subpoenaed a competing expert.
"Dr. Vanderveld," Marin said, in the flat tone she used for things that required controlled concern. "She's presented evidence in three previous MIR hearings. She lost all three."
"So she's lost before," Avery said.
"She's also made the argument that the stabilizer effect in non-bond-adjacent betas is replicable through artificial means. She'll argue that what you provide can be replicated, which means it's not biological necessity, which means you don't meet the sustained dependency standard."
Avery was quiet for a moment.
"Can it be replicated?" she said. "Actually replicated? Not just managed. Actually replicated."
"Oren's position is no," I said. "The specific regulation response to Avery's presence isn't replicated in any documented case of artificial management. It's a qualitatively different biological response."
"How do we prove that?"
"The past year," Marin said. "Your documented proximity events. The pre-heat records. The rut management records." She looked at Avery. "This is why the documentation matters."
Avery nodded.
"I know it feels invasive," I said.
"It does feel invasive," she said. "My biology being read as evidence is inherently invasive. But I filed the petition so I knew this was what it meant." She looked at her hands. "Tell me what specific documentation they'll focus on."
Marin went through it. The records from the nights Dean had been in pre-heat and Avery had been present. The biometric data Oren had been collecting, which was aggregate and anonymized but still specific. The voluntary statements from each pack member.
"The alpha/alpha bond records," I said, at some point. "Micah and Isaac's bond documentation. Is that fully included?"
"Yes. Your framework language includes it explicitly." Marin looked at me. "The opposing counsel will likely argue it's a non-standard inclusion that complicates the standard."
"Good," Avery said. "Let them argue it. The point of including it is to make the standard more accurate, not easier."
Isaac arrived at four, coming from a board deposition that had not been comfortable by any account he'd give. He sat down and looked at the spread of documents on the table and said, with the particular tired precision of someone who'd been in a different adversarial room all day: "Where are we?"
"We're at the competing expert problem," Avery said.
"Vanderveld."
"You know her?"
"By reputation. She's ideologically opposed to non-bond-adjacent beta integration.
She's going to say what she always says — that betas are beneficial but not essential, and essential is the legal standard.
" He looked at the table. "The way to counter her isn't medical.
The way to counter her is personal testimony that the lived experience of the pack doesn't match the medical replicability claim. "
"Avery testifies," I said.
"Yes," Isaac said. "And I'd like to be in the room when she does."
Avery looked at him.
"Not to manage it," he said. "To be there."
"We can arrange seating for all three of you," Marin said. "If Avery is comfortable."
"I'm comfortable," Avery said. After a moment: "I'd like all three of you there."
It was a small thing and it wasn't.
She'd spent months building careful distance and careful terms and careful exits from every situation that could hurt her, and asking to have us in the room when she testified was the particular version of choosing that she was still learning to do.
I reached across the table and touched her hand briefly. She didn't move it away.
"Prep continues tomorrow," Marin said. "I'll need the medical summary by end of day Friday and the personal statements filed by Monday."
"Done," I said.
We packed up at seven and went back to Avery's apartment, because that was where we went, and made food that was too simple to be dignified and ate it at her kitchen table and talked about something completely different for an hour because we needed to, and then everyone went to their corners and slept, and I lay on Avery's couch and looked at the ceiling and thought about all the things I was going to say when it was my turn to speak.
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