The meeting took place in a carefully arranged neutral setting — a private room at Priya Chandra’s office, chosen specifically for its calm, unremarkable atmosphere, a supervisor present to ensure the encounter remained exactly as safe and controlled as Sam had requested.

Sam’s biological father, a man named Derek Voss, arrived looking considerably more nervous than Lucien had expected from someone attempting to disrupt a stable adoption — thin, weathered in the particular way of a man who’d spent recent years in circumstances that had aged him beyond his actual years, hands twisting anxiously in his lap as he waited for his son to arrive.

Sam entered holding tightly to...