Professor Thomas Quinn felt as though the sky were falling.
He knew his daughter well.
Lena had always been serious, responsible, and fiercely independent, the kind of person who preferred solving problems herself and would keep digging until she found an answer, and normally Thomas considered that persistence one of her best qualities.
But surely she was not supposed to be so stubborn that she studied herself into a fever.
What did she mean by asking whether stealing a child was illegal?
Was that really a question that should come from Lena Quinn, a top graduate who had studied law for years and was already practicing as an attorney?
“No, Dad, I’m serious.” Lena took a deep breath, confusion still lingering in her eyes.
Everything Adrian had told her at Blackwood & Reed two days earlier had been so outrageous that she had spent the following days repeatedly going through the Criminal Code, trying to find the flaw in his reasoning.
The problem was that the more she searched, the stranger things became.
Because according to the statutes…
It really did seem legal.
“Sweetheart, are you sure you don’t have a fever?” Thomas still looked worried enough to reach over and press the back of his hand against her forehead, only to find that her temperature felt perfectly normal.
Lena frowned and pushed his hand away.
“Dad, listen first.” “All right.” She organized her thoughts before asking, “Suppose a lawyer takes a child away in order to fulfill a client’s request.
Would that constitute a crime?” Although Thomas still had no idea where she was going with this, he answered according to the information she had given him.
“Of course it could.
If someone abducts a child with the relevant intent for profit, that can constitute child trafficking.” It was such a basic question that Thomas barely needed to think about the statute.
Lena immediately followed up.
“What if the client is the child’s biological mother?” Thomas paused.
“The mother?” He rubbed his chin, thought for a moment, and replied, “That can still be unlawful depending on the circumstances.
If another person lawfully possesses custody rights, taking the child could infringe those rights, and depending on how it is done there could also be criminal issues involving unlawful restraint, forcible taking, or violence.” Lena had clearly been waiting for him to finish.
“Then what if the father is already dead, the biological mother is the only surviving parent, and the child is merely staying with close relatives who have no custody rights?” Thomas stopped.
Lena continued before he could respond.
“If the mother goes there and takes her own child back, would that be illegal?” Thomas stared at her.
“Wait…
give me a second.” The sequence of conditions had caught him off guard badly enough that he had to reconstruct the situation in his head.
The father was dead.
Only the mother remained.
Then guardianship should normally rest with the mother.
But if she already had guardianship…
Why would she need to steal her own child?
Thomas’s expression suddenly changed as the pieces came together.
“Lena, are you talking about Clara Hayes’s case?” His voice echoed through the small bedroom.
A dead father, a child being kept by close relatives, and a surviving biological mother who had already been fighting over custody—it matched Clara’s situation perfectly, especially since Lena herself had handled the custody case connected to Pine Hollow.
“Yes.” Lena nodded without trying to hide it.
Thomas immediately stared at her as though he had discovered an entirely new side of his daughter.
Wasn’t Lena supposed to be an idealist like him?
Since when had she started thinking about stealing children?
Thomas could no longer remain comfortably seated.
He stood and said urgently, “Lena, I know the case is difficult, and I understand that getting the child back through enforcement could take time, but you cannot simply decide to steal the child because the normal process is inconvenient.
That is absolutely not how this is supposed to work.” Lena sighed.
“Dad, answer the question first.
Under these circumstances, is taking the child illegal?” Thomas opened his mouth to say yes.
Nothing came out.
He already knew the basic facts of Clara’s case.
Ethan was dead, Clara was alive, and as the surviving parent she possessed the strongest claim to guardianship.
But still— “Custody would need to be determined by the court before you could—” “It already was.” Lena interrupted him immediately.
“Clara won the custody case.” Thomas fell silent again.
Lena added, “And Clara herself would be there when the child is taken.
The lawyer wouldn’t go alone and secretly remove him.” She looked directly at her father.
“So, Dad, is it illegal?” Thomas hesitated.
His face slowly began to redden as his thoughts accelerated.
Was it illegal?
Clara already had both the custody judgment and guardianship rights.
Legally speaking, the boy was supposed to be with her, while Walter and Martha had no competing custody rights recognized by the court.
So rather than a stranger stealing someone else’s child…
Wouldn’t this amount to a mother taking her own son back?
And whose rights would be violated by doing so?
Walter and Martha’s?
No.
They did not have custody.
As long as Clara and the people accompanying her did not assault anyone, unlawfully enter somewhere they had no right to enter, restrain anyone, or commit some other independent offense…
Simply taking the child back was disturbingly difficult to classify as either a civil wrong or a crime.
“This…” Thomas’s face grew redder.
“This isn’t right.” His instincts rejected the conclusion even while his legal knowledge kept dragging him toward it.
This was not how judicial procedure was supposed to work.
Ordinarily, the proper process was to obtain a judgment, wait through the compliance period, argue with the losing side when they refused to cooperate, apply for compulsory enforcement, wait through the enforcement process, and eventually have the judgment carried out through official channels.
That was how the system operated.
You did not obtain a custody judgment and immediately decide— Fine, we’ll just go take the child ourselves.
And yet, under the conditions Lena had described, the plan seemed to have slipped neatly through the gaps between all the obvious offenses.
Thomas felt almost offended on behalf of the legal system itself.
“No.” He looked at Lena, his chest rising and falling with agitation.
“Who gave you this idea?” Lena did not answer directly.
Instead, she reached across the desk and handed him several pages Adrian had prepared explaining the legal reasoning behind the plan.
She had asked Adrian whether she could have someone else review the documents because she still felt uneasy about the whole thing, and Adrian had agreed as long as she did not reveal confidential details unrelated to the legal analysis.
Thomas immediately took the papers from her.
The moment he began reading, his expression changed.
The document covered essentially the same argument Lena had just presented, but in much greater detail.
It cited the relevant statutory language, broke down the subjective and objective elements of the possible offenses, analyzed guardianship and custody rights, and carefully explained why taking the child from Walter and Martha and returning him to Clara did not satisfy the required elements of child abduction.
That alone would have been enough to irritate Thomas.
But Adrian had gone even further.
Half a page was devoted to identifying the ways in which Walter and Martha themselves might be acting unlawfully by continuing to withhold the child from the person holding lawful custody and guardianship.
Thomas stared at the pages.
Then he read them again.
And again.
As a senior legal scholar, he could not remember the last time a few sheets of paper had made him feel this bewildered.
The document was not merely provocative.
It was meticulously provocative.
For decades, Thomas had built his understanding of law around statutes, procedure, institutional expectations, and the proper way legal rights were supposed to be exercised, yet Adrian’s argument had taken those same rules and assembled them into something Thomas instinctively disliked while still struggling to identify the precise provision that prohibited it.
He turned the pages over as though a hidden flaw might be printed on the back.
Nothing.
He returned to the beginning and read it again.
Still nothing obvious.
After watching her father stand there in silence for far too long, Lena finally could not endure it anymore.
“Dad?” Thomas looked up as though waking from a dream.
“Hm?” Lena pointed at the papers.
“Is it illegal?” Thomas fell silent.
He looked at his daughter’s sincere expression, then back at the document, and after another long pause finally forced out an answer.
“This is unethical!” Lena raised an eyebrow.
“So is it illegal?” “This lacks professional ethics!” Thomas repeated himself more loudly, his face becoming even redder.
He clearly had no interest in answering the exact question she had asked.
Lena stared at him for a moment.
Then realization appeared in her eyes.
“You can’t find anything illegal about it, can you?” Thomas said nothing.
That silence was enough.
Lena’s eyes widened slightly.
“It really isn’t illegal?” She had already suspected as much after spending days checking Adrian’s reasoning, but hearing her father—an academic authority who had spent his life studying law—fail to identify a clear offense still left her genuinely shocked.
Then another part of Adrian’s plan suddenly came to mind.
Martin Hayes courageously intervened to protect armed police officers.
Her lips twitched.
The trial was only two days away.
With Adrian Cole preparing to walk into a Greenwood City courtroom carrying arguments like that, Lena suddenly felt a little sorry for the local prosecutors.
Only a little.
The thought almost made her laugh.
Now that her biggest concern about whether the child-recovery plan itself constituted a crime had finally been settled, much of the tension that had weighed on her for days disappeared.
“All right, go eat your breakfast.
I need to change.” Before Thomas could recover, Lena stood and gently pushed him toward the door.
A moment later, the door clicked shut behind him.
Thomas remained outside for a long time without moving.
His expression shifted between confusion, shock, and something dangerously close to horror, as though a fundamental law of nature had just been disproven in front of him.
He barely remembered walking back to the dining room or sitting down at the table.
Margaret Quinn looked up from her breakfast and studied her husband, who had returned from their daughter’s room looking as though his soul had been left somewhere behind.
“Thomas, what are you thinking about?
You look completely out of it.” He slowly came back to himself.
Thomas looked at his wife, opened his mouth, hesitated, and then this respected law professor, academic authority, and one of the leading legal scholars in the country asked a question from the depths of his soul.
“Margaret…
tell me something.” She waited.
“Is stealing a child actually illegal?” Margaret stared at him.
Then her expression changed in exactly the same way his had a few minutes earlier.
“Have you lost your mind from a fever too?”