Chapter 9: The Scholarship Girl Christian Doesn't Know

"I'll call you back." Christian's voice goes clipped into the phone. "I'm not doing this over the phone, and I'm not doing it in front of her."

In front of her. Me. I'm standing two feet away, watching him turn into someone I don't recognize. Careful. Contained. Nothing like the boy who had his hands in my hair thirty seconds ago.

He hangs up and doesn't look at me right away. When he finally does, something apologetic crosses his face, there and gone fast, replaced by the mask I'm starting to know too well. The one he puts on the second the Ashworth name walks into a room ahead of him.

"I have to go," he says. "I'll find you after my last class. I promise."

"Christian."

"I know." He's already grabbing his jacket, already halfway out the door even though his body's still standing in front of me. "I know that word means less every time I say it. I'm going to fix that. I swear."

Then he's gone. I'm alone in a dorm room that still smells like him, holding a phone with a stranger's bank account glowing on the screen, and it feels like someone lit a fire and handed me the matches to explain it.

I don't go back to my room. I go to class, because class is the only part of my day that still makes sense, the only hour where nobody's opening accounts in my name or denying they know me in a stairwell. I take my usual seat in row four, out of habit, even though Christian isn't in this lecture, and I try to listen to a professor explain supply curves while my brain keeps circling back to his father's voice. I ended it for the last one.

I don't understand what that actually means until lunch.

The dining hall is loud the way it always is at noon. Trays clattering. A hundred conversations layered on top of each other. I'm three steps past the salad bar when I hear my own name, badly disguised as a question for somebody else.

"Rebecca, right? The scholarship girl?"

I turn around. Dom's leaning against a table with two girls I don't know, grinning in a way that tells me this was never really a question. Sloane sits just behind him, stirring her coffee slow and unhurried, like she already knows exactly how this scene plays out.

"That's me," I say, because walking away without answering only makes it worse. I've learned that the hard way, more than once.

"Christian's partner. The one from the seating chart." Dom says it loud enough that half the room catches it, and I feel heads turning the way they did yesterday in Lindqvist's seminar, strangers filing away a name they've never once bothered to learn. "I heard you're on a full ride. That true?"

"It's true." My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

"Must be nice." He says it like a compliment and swings it like a blade. "Must be nice having somebody else pay for everything. Some of us actually earn our spot here."

The girls beside him laugh, soft and mean, the kind of laugh that's aimed at me even though it's pointed at the air above my head. Sloane doesn't laugh. She just watches, spoon circling slow in her cup, something patient and pleased in her face, like she's watching a plan land exactly on schedule.

I don't see Christian until it's too late to pretend I haven't.

He's at the next table, close enough to have heard every word of it, tray half finished in front of him. For one long second our eyes meet across the space between us. I watch something move behind his face, something that might be shame, might be the start of him standing up, and I wait. I actually wait, some stupid hopeful piece of me still expecting the boy from this morning's dorm room to show up here too.

He looks back down at his tray.

"Guess the full ride doesn't cover a sense of humor," Dom says, and the table laughs again, and I stand there with my tray like it's the only solid thing left in the room. Christian doesn't say a word. Doesn't look up. Just pushes food around his plate like my humiliation is weather he's waiting out.

I don't cry. Six years of practice not crying in rooms like this one, and I use every bit of it now, setting my tray down with careful hands and walking out at a pace that refuses to look like running, even though every part of me wants to.

Priya finds me twenty minutes later on the library steps, the same ones where Sloane ambushed me last night, and I tell her everything in a voice flatter than I mean it to come out. Like the humiliation burned off all the feeling and left only the facts behind.

"He didn't say anything," I finish. "He was right there. He heard every word, and he just looked at his food."

"Rebecca." Priya's voice is gentle in a way that almost undoes me more than Dom's cruelty did. "I want to say this once, clearly, and then I'll drop it. This isn't love. This is a boy letting you absorb the cost of his own comfort."

"I know that."

"Do you? This morning you were texting me about his hands in your hair. This afternoon he watched you get humiliated and ate his lunch."

I don't have an answer for that, because she's right, and because some stubborn, wounded part of me is already building him an excuse anyway. Already rehearsing whatever he'll say tonight. Already deciding, in advance, that I'll believe it.

My phone buzzes. For one terrible second I think it might be him, an apology dressed up as an excuse, but the number isn't his. It's the blocked one again, the same one that sent the warning about the account and the message about Kate, and my stomach drops before I've even opened it.

You saw what he let them do to you today. Imagine what he'll let his father do. Check the account again. There's a new deposit.

I open the banking app with shaking hands, Priya leaning in close beside me, both of us holding our breath the way we did last night.

The twenty five thousand dollars is gone.

In its place is a new number, almost three times the size, and underneath it, a transaction note typed in by whoever has access to an account that was never supposed to exist in the first place.

For services rendered. Keep her quiet.