Why are you telling me this? Vera asked. Josie looked at her for a long moment. Something raw moving behind her eyes.
Because I watched what happened in that dining hall. The way you just walked away. Didn't flinch. Didn't apologize for it.
A pause. Nobody's ever done that before. Not around him. And I got scared for you the second I saw it because I know exactly what that kind of confidence costs a girl like us around here.
A girl like us. The phrase settled into Vera's chest and stayed there. I found something, Vera said slowly, deciding right there in that moment with no real plan behind it to trust this stranger with a piece of the truth. A connection between his father's law firm and something from my past before I moved here.
Josie's eyes sharpened. What kind of connection? I don't know yet. I'm still figuring out how deep it goes.
Be careful how you figure it out. Josie stood brushing off the back of her jeans, glancing once more down the walkway with that same practiced weariness. They don't just come after you directly. They come after everything that's holding you up.
Your grades, your money, your record, whatever's loadbearing, that's what they go for first. She left before Vera could ask another question. Vera sat on the stone wall a long while after that, notebook open on her knee, pen still, because there was a new entry to write now, and it didn't fit neatly into a date and a single line description. She wrote it anyway.
October 19. Spoke with Josie Marsh. Pattern of prior incidents. Institutional cover exists, not isolated.
Six words at the end, underlined twice because some truths need underlining just to survive being written down at all. Not isolated. She called her mother that night before Eleanor got home from her shift, sitting on the small apartment balcony with her knees, pulled up to her chest, phone in hand, deciding for the third time that week not to call, and then dialing anyway. Except she didn't call to talk about Beckett.
She called to ask a single question, phrased as carefully as she could manage. Mom, do you remember the name of the lawyer? The one who who handled the plea deal for the driver. Silence on the line.
The particular silence of a parent recalibrating, deciding how honest to be with a daughter old enough to handle honesty and still too young in a mother's eyes to ever fully deserve carrying it. Why are you asking me this, sweetheart? I just need to know, Mom, please. Eleanor exhaled slow.
Callaway something Callaway. Big firm out of Austin, I think. Why? The rest of the sentence didn't matter.
Vera had already stopped hearing it. The confirmation landing in her chest like a stone dropped down a well she'd already known was bottomless. No reason, she said. Just settling something in my head.
Vera, I love you, Mom. I'll see you when you're home. She hung up before her mother could ask the follow-up question sitting right behind the first one because she wasn't ready yet. Because some truths need time to finish arriving before you can say them out loud to the person who'll be most destroyed by hearing them.
The weeks that followed blurred together in a way that felt. Looking back on it later, less like separate days and more like one longheld breath. Friday, someone let the air out of two of her tires again. This time in the campus lot itself in broad daylight.
Cameras that would later be found conveniently pointed at the wrong angle. Monday, a note slid under her dorm adjacent apartment door. No return address. Three words in block capitals.
Nobody believes you. Wednesday, a professor pulled her aside after class. Voice low, expression careful. I heard some things about a situation.
Just wanted you to know my doors open if you ever need it. Kind, genuinely kind, but careful in a way that told Vera the professor had also heard somewhere in a faculty meeting or hallway conversation exactly whose name not to say out loud. Each incident smaller than a slashed tire. Each one alone dismissible.
Just a coincidence, just kids being kids. Just an overreaction from a girl still grieving her father. Poor thing. Except together they formed a shape.
And the shape had a face, and the face smiled at her every time they passed each other on the quad, because that was the crulest part of it. Beckett never once raised his voice at her again after that first day in the dining hall. He didn't have to. He'd built an entire machine to do the raising for him.
And now he could stand back and watch it run. The disciplinary hearing happened almost by accident. Vera hadn't planned to file a formal complaint, hadn't trusted after Josie's story, that the process would do anything but announce her name to the exact people trying to erase it. But the fake social media account resurfaced, this time tagging real students, real professors, spreading fast enough that the university's own systems flagged it before Vera even reported it a second time, which meant for once the institution moved first.
She was called into a small conference room in the student affairs building on a gray Tuesday afternoon folding table. Fluorescent lights, a box of tissues placed in the exact center like a piece of furniture nobody wanted to acknowledge. Across from her sat a university disciplinary officer, middle-aged, tiredeyed, flanked by a notetaker who typed everything without once looking up. We take these matters very seriously, the officer said in the specific voice people use when they've said the sentence so many times it's lost all shape.
Can you walk us through the timeline of incidents? Vera did, calm, methodical, her notebook open on the table, dates and details laid out in the same neat handwriting she'd used to record them in the first place. The officer nodded along, took notes of her own, asked follow-up questions that seemed in the moment genuinely probing. For 11 days, nothing happened.
On the 12th day, Vera received a form letter. After careful review, the university has determined there is insufficient evidence linking the reported incidents to a specific individual. This matter is considered closed at this time. She read it twice, then a third time in case the words might rearrange themselves into something that made more sense.
They didn't. Insufficient evidence. The exact same phrase Josie had used weeks before, sitting on a stone wall in afternoon light, word for word, as if the phrase itself was a form pulled from a drawer somewhere and reused and reused and reused. Whenever the person accused had a father with a plaque on the training facility wall.