Because the work inside still mattered.
College gradually made Westbridge feel smaller.
Janelle studied journalism, joined the campus paper, made friends who had never heard of Sophie Caldwell, and learned that Chicago winter made Virginia cold seem imaginary.
For almost an entire semester, nobody knew about the video.
Then her roommate discovered it.
“Is this you?”
Janelle closed her eyes.
“No.”
“It is definitely you.”
“Then why ask?”
Her roommate watched the full clip.
Not only the fight.
The books.
The shove.
The first punch.
Ethan helping afterward.
When it ended, she asked, “What happened before all this?”
Janelle smiled.
“That’s the right question.”
She told her.
Not thirty seconds.
A year.
The brochure jokes.
Money assumptions.
Northwestern.
The screenshots.
The no-contact order.
By the time she finished, the fountain scene felt less like the beginning and more like what it actually was.
An ending that should have been prevented months earlier.
Years later, Janelle became an investigative education reporter.
Editors noticed she was unusually interested in timelines.
When was the first complaint?
Who knew?
What changed after the warning?
Did the language change while the behavior remained the same?
Janelle understood that dramatic incidents rarely appeared from nowhere.
Institutions simply noticed them late.
The old courtyard video resurfaced periodically.
Some posts claimed Sophie had been expelled.
She had not.
Others said Janelle secretly belonged to a billionaire family.
Definitely not.
One version claimed Ethan jumped into the fountain to save her books.
He had leaned over the side.
Ethan sent that version to Janelle himself years later.