Chapter 11: What He's Really Scared Of

"What is he really scared of?" I say it out loud before I mean to, staring at the message like it might answer back if I ask it directly enough.

Christian goes quiet beside me, the kind of quiet that tells me he already has a theory and doesn't want to say it.

"Christian."

"My father doesn't scare easily." He shoves the phone back in his pocket, jaw tight. "I've seen him lose business deals worth more than this entire campus and barely blink. If he moved that fast to close an account, it's not because of the gala, and it's not because of Kate."

"Then what?"

"I think," he says slowly, like each word costs him something, "he's scared of what you'd find if you kept looking."

The wind cuts across the quad, sharp enough that I pull my coat tighter, and for a second neither of us says anything, both of us staring at the same gap in the story neither of us can fill yet.

"I need to talk to Julian," I say finally.

"Who's Julian?"

"Editor at the campus paper. He's been trying to get me on an investigative piece for weeks. I kept turning him down because I didn't think I had the stomach for it." I meet Christian's eyes. "I think I might have the stomach for it now."

Something flickers across his face, pride and fear tangled together in a way I'm starting to recognize as his most honest expression. "If you go digging into my father's finances, Rebecca, you need to understand what that actually means. He doesn't lose gracefully. Ever."

"Neither do I." I surprise myself saying it, but it's true, truer than it's been in years. Six years of making myself small in rooms that weren't built for girls like me, and something about today, about watching him actually choose me on a phone call instead of just promising to someday, has cracked something open in me that I don't think closes back up easily.

Julian is exactly where he always is at this hour, hunched over a laptop in the newsroom's back corner, three coffee cups deep and a red pen tucked behind one ear like a permanent fixture. He looks up when I walk in, surprise then genuine pleasure crossing his face.

"Rebecca Hale. Come to finally take me up on that investigative slot?"

"I need everything you have on the Ashworth Foundation." I set my bag down across from him, pulling out the chair like I belong in it, because for the first time in this building I actually feel like I do. "Donations, scholarship funding, anything that moves money in or out in ways that don't quite add up."

Julian's eyebrows climb. "That's a big ask for someone who turned down a column on dining hall food two weeks ago."

"I have my reasons."

"Does one of those reasons happen to be six foot two and sitting in Lindqvist's seminar?" He says it with a grin, but there's a real question underneath it, and I decide he's earned an honest answer.

"It's complicated."

"It's always complicated with people like that." Julian pulls up a file on his screen, scrolling through older archives with the ease of someone who's spent years learning exactly where a university buries its uncomfortable paper trails. "I've been chasing a thread on the Foundation for a semester now. Every time I get close to something, the source goes quiet or the document disappears from the registrar's database. Whatever they're protecting, they're protecting it well."

"Show me everything you have."

We work for two hours, the newsroom emptying out around us as evening settles over the quad outside, and somewhere in the middle of cross referencing scholarship disbursement dates against Foundation board meetings, I feel something shift in my chest, a kind of clarity I haven't felt since this whole thing started. I'm not just the girl Christian denies in public anymore. I'm not just the girl with an account in her name she never signed for. I'm someone building a case, piece by careful piece, the same way I've built everything else in my life that was worth having.

"Here." Julian spins his laptop toward me, tapping a line item buried three pages deep in a donor report. "Scholarship disbursement, four months ago, routed through a private account before it ever touches the general fund. Twenty five thousand dollars."

My stomach drops straight through the floor.

"That's the same amount," I say, voice gone thin. "That's the exact amount that was in my account before it got replaced with seventy thousand."

Julian's face goes very still. "Rebecca. Whose scholarship is this money funding?"

I lean in, scanning the recipient line, already half knowing what I'm going to find before my eyes land on it, because the universe has apparently decided this is the week nothing gets to stay simple.

My own name, typed in flat black ink, sitting beside a scholarship fund I've received every semester since freshman year and never once questioned where the money actually came from.

"It's mine," I say. "My scholarship. It's funded by the Ashworth Foundation."

Julian sits back slowly, understanding dawning across his face in real time. "Rebecca. Did you know that before tonight?"

"No." The word comes out barely above a whisper, because the ground I thought I was standing on, the ground I built my entire college education out of, the thing I was proudest of, earning my own way here through nothing but grades and grit, just revealed itself to be something Christian's family has been quietly funding the entire time, and I have no idea yet whether that makes me a project, a liability, or something far worse than either.

My phone buzzes once more in my pocket, and this time when I read the message, my hands don't shake from fear anymore. They shake from something closer to fury.

Now you know why he's scared. You were never a scholarship, Rebecca. You were an investment. Ask him what he expects in return.