Chapter Thirty-One
DEAN
The ruling came at eleven-thirty the next morning.
We were at Avery's apartment. Where else would we be.
She had her laptop open and was working on a client deck with the specific focused calm of someone who'd decided that waiting for things to happen was less useful than continuing to exist in the meantime. Micah was on a call that he'd muted four times. Isaac was reading something.
When the message came from Marin — I have the ruling. Call me. — Avery saw it first.
She looked at her phone. Then looked at us.
"Marin," she said.
I called Marin on speaker.
"The panel ruled in favor," Marin said. "Mate Integration Recognition approved.
All three petitioning pack members — Avery Yates, Micah Kent, Isaac Price — named in the recognition order.
The alpha/alpha bond between Kent and Price is also formally documented as a recognized pack bond.
" A pause. "The ruling was unanimous. Judge Osei-Kofi wrote a specific note.
It will be included in the formal filing. "
"What did she say?" Avery said.
Marin read: "'The question before this panel was not whether the law accommodates this specific beta.
The question was whether the law's current failure to accommodate her is a function of biological reality or a function of political choices made at a specific historical moment.
The evidence compels the panel to conclude the latter.
Ms. Yates's presence in this pack is not incidental.
It is structural. The law should say so. '"
The apartment was quiet.
I watched Avery.
She had that expression she got when something was reorganizing: still, systematic, processing. Her hand was flat on the table. She wasn't moving.
Then Isaac made a sound I'd never heard from him before — something that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite the other thing either — and Micah closed his eyes for a moment and opened them, and I felt my own face do something that I probably shouldn't have been surprised by.
"Avery," I said.
She looked at me.
"It's done," I said.
She nodded.
"You did that," I said. "You wrote the language and you filed it and you went in and you said the true thing and you did that."
She looked at her hands.
"We did that," she said.
"Yes," I agreed. "We did that."
She picked up her phone and looked at it for a moment. Then she set it back down and looked at the three of us.
"Can someone order food," she said. "I've been running on adrenaline for eighteen hours and I need to eat."
Micah was already picking up his phone.
I laughed. Actually laughed, the full thing, and Isaac made the sound again that was better than a laugh, and Avery's face did something that was more than the eye-version.
We ordered food. Too much food, because Micah ordered for situations and situations called for excess.
We ate it at Avery's kitchen table, the four of us, in the specific volume of people who'd been very careful and restrained for a very long time and had now been given permission to feel the thing they'd been holding.
It was not the most dramatic afternoon of my life. It was better than that.
It was just the four of us, at a table, at the beginning of the thing we'd built.
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