Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 20: What a Judge Will See
The call from Patricia came on a Thursday evening.
Maya took it at the kitchen table, Jackson across from her with coffee and a bill from the shop he’d been reviewing, Emma already in bed. She had the phone pressed to her ear and she was writing notes in the small spiral notebook she kept for this purpose, and the kitchen was quiet enough that she could hear Patricia’s voice clearly and Jackson’s coffee cup being set down and not picked back up.
She wrote: *character witness – complicated*.
She underlined complicated.
“Derek’s lawyer is going to challenge anyone connected to the MC,” Patricia said. “It’s low-hanging fruit — gang association, criminal lifestyle, exposure to violence. Legally they don’t have much, but juries — and judges — respond to implication. The question is whether Mr. Cross testifying as a character witness helps you more than the optics hurt you.”
“He’s not in a gang,” Maya said.
“I know that. You know that. The other side is going to use the word regardless.” Patricia’s voice was even. “I’m not advising against it. I’m flagging the risk. Whatever we decide, it needs to be a deliberate choice, not an accident.”
“What are our options?”
“He testifies. The cross-examination focuses on the MC. We prepare him thoroughly and let him speak for himself — frankly, he sounds like someone who can handle it. Or he doesn’t testify, and we lean on other character witnesses, the diner owner, Mrs. Peralta, the daycare.”
“If he doesn’t testify, does that look worse? Like we’re hiding something?”
“Possibly. There are ways to handle it. But if Derek’s lawyer is planning to make the MC a centerpiece of their argument, having him on the stand gives you a chance to counter the narrative directly.” A pause. “It also potentially exposes him to questions he may not want to answer about club operations. That’s a conversation you need to have with him.”
“I understand.”
She said goodbye and set the phone down and looked at her notebook, at the word she’d underlined. Across the table, Jackson was looking at her with his particular patient stillness, waiting.
She turned the notebook toward him so he could see.
He looked at it. Looked at her.
“She thinks you testifying could hurt the case,” Maya said. “The MC association. Derek’s lawyer is going to call it a gang, imply exposure to violence, criminal environment.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I want to testify.”
“I know you do.”
“It’s my right to —”
“I know.” She pressed her hand flat on the table. “I know it’s your right. I know you want to. But Patricia says —”
“Patricia doesn’t know what I’d say on the stand.” Something in his voice had shifted — not angry, but firmer, less accommodating than his usual register. “She’s working with an assumption about what the MC is. If I’m up there, I can change the assumption.”
“Or the cross-examination uses it to paint us both as —”
“As what?” He looked at her directly. “As people living outside the system? As people who don’t fit what a family is supposed to look like?”
She felt the edge of it — the slight sharpening, the thing that had been below the surface for weeks starting to press upward.
“It’s not about fitting,” she said carefully. “It’s about what a judge in this county is going to respond to.”
“A judge in this county has seen the MC for years. Knows we run a legitimate shop. Knows we do community work.” He set down his cup. “Half the people in this town would put in a word for us.”
“Derek’s lawyer doesn’t care about the town. They care about what they can imply in a courtroom.”
“Then we fight the implication.”
“By putting you on the stand and handing them a direct line to ask about every member of the Iron Skulls, every club operation, everything that’s even adjacent to anything that could be characterized as —”
“Nothing we do is illegal.”
“Jackson.” She heard her own voice go tight. “I know that. But can you say with absolute certainty that there’s nothing in the history of this club, nothing in the past five years, that a motivated lawyer couldn’t use against us?”
The kitchen went quiet.
He looked at her. His jaw was set in a way she hadn’t seen before — not anger, but something close to hurt, or close to the place hurt went in someone who wasn’t used to showing it.
“You’re asking me to step back,” he said.
“I’m asking Patricia’s advice to step back,” she said. “I’m telling you what she said.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“It’s not.”
“You’re sitting here telling me that my being involved in your life is a liability for your case.” He said it without accusation, but it landed.
“I’m not saying you’re a liability —”
“You’re saying what a judge will see.” He stood up from the table. Not storming out, not raising his voice — just standing, because he needed to be upright. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the last two months? I’ve been careful. I’ve kept the MC at distance from your case. I’ve gone through every legal channel, every proper process. I’ve done everything I could to make this work without giving anyone anything to question.”
“I know you have.”
“And you’re still sitting there looking at me like I’m a problem.”
“Jackson, stop.” She stood too. “I’m not looking at you like you’re a problem. I’m telling you what Patricia said, and I’m scared, and when I’m scared I go clinical, and I need you to not make that into something it’s not.”
A beat of silence.
He looked at her. Something in his face shifted — the set of the jaw loosening slightly, the forced stillness becoming something more real.
“You’re scared,” he said.
“I’m terrified.” She said it plainly, without decoration. “I am terrified that I’m going to go into that courtroom and do everything right and it’s still not going to be enough and someone is going to tell me that Emma belongs with the man who put me in the hospital.” Her voice stayed even. She kept it even because losing it was not an option. “So when Patricia flags a risk, I take it seriously. That’s all.”
He exhaled slowly. The line of his shoulders changed.
“I know,” he said.
“I’m not telling you to disappear from our lives. I’m not telling you what Patricia said means I think you’re bad for us.” She moved around the table toward him, because this was not a distance conversation. “You’re not a problem. You’re the best thing in our lives right now. But the hearing is three weeks away and I need us to be strategic, and I need you to help me think about this rather than react to it.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he put his hands on either side of her face — carefully, the way he always touched her, asking — and pressed his forehead to hers.
“I want to be there,” he said quietly. “In that room.”
“I know.”
“However you need me to be. But I want to be there.”
“I know that too.”
They stood like that for a moment, foreheads together, and she felt the fear and the love and the impossible complication of all of it, and she felt his hands steady on her face, and she breathed.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll talk to Patricia. Together. And we’ll decide together.”
“Together,” he said.
She pulled back and looked at him. There was something unresolved in his face — something that hadn’t been said yet, something she could feel pressing at the edges of the conversation.
“What?” she said.
He looked at her for a moment. Then: “What happens after? After the hearing.”
She blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean — you moved in here because it helped the case. Emma’s here. You’re here. But you said separate rooms, separate —” He stopped. Started again. “I need to know if I’m building something or if I’m —” He stopped again, and she realized she’d never heard him leave a sentence unfinished before. “I need to know what this is.”
She looked at him. At the uncertainty on his face — real, visible, rare. This man who was unshakeable about everything else, standing in his kitchen asking her what they were.
She thought about the morning she’d fallen asleep against his shoulder and woken in his bed. She thought about coffee outside her door and blueberries on Sunday and Emma’s “Reaper-Jack” floating through the house like it had always been there.
She thought about the hearing and the custody case and the three weeks standing between her and clarity.
She thought: I’m doing it again. Waiting for it to be safe to want something.
“After the hearing,” she said slowly, “I want to stop keeping distance.”
He looked at her.
“I want to stop — managing it,” she said. “I want to just —” She pressed her lips together. “Be here. Fully. If that’s still what you want.”
“You know it is,” he said.
“Then that’s what happens after.” She held his gaze. “Three weeks.”
He nodded once, slow.
Three weeks.
She went to bed that night with the fight still crackling at the edges — the tender spot where it had touched something real, where she’d felt the first shape of a future that included him entirely — and she lay in the dark in her room and thought about what she’d said.
After the hearing, I want to stop keeping distance.
She hadn’t planned to say it. She wasn’t sorry she had.
Three weeks.
She could do three weeks.
She’d survived so much worse.
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