Don Juan shrugged. He was reticent to get into too many details, reluctant to make this another conversation like the one on Christmas Day with all his family standing around expressing their various forms and degrees of disappointment.

"Solicitor complicated," he said as though he didn't know anything deeper than that. He had the sense that the solicitor didn't really want him to discuss it with anyone, anyway, so this wasn't much of an exaggeration. They weren't telling him the details of how they planned to proceed with the case, because they assumed the more he knew the more he'd be able to fuck up, either intentionally or accidentally. He wasn't feeling optimistic about their outcome regardless; it would take a persuasive solicitor indeed to convince anyone that he was more fit to raise a child than Klaas Spaans was.

As for whether he'd been planning to tell Dean... the question confused him, honestly. Even if he hadn't forgotten that Dean didn't already know, this wasn't an issue for the pair of them. It was something his parents were doing, and now something people were talking about, but it wasn't as though it had anything to do with Dean. Even if they somehow won custody of Kaatjie, it wasn't as though Don Juan was going to be bringing her by here. Unless Dean thought this was another thing he'd end up having to worry about, sooner or later, the way he'd been the one picking up the pieces when Adriana had died and Don Juan had gone sulking by a frozen lake about it.

"I've only met her once," he said, hoping to give some reassuring evidence towards the point that he wasn't going to go spiraling if the court case didn't go their way. "She sort of ambushed me."

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