جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 60

POV: Callum and Jaxon (Alternating)'JAXON'I walked out of Dara's office with two things.The confirmation I didn't want. The clarity I needed.Richard's firm. A formal legal filing. Not a phone call to an outlet, not a brand associate acting without authorization, not the careful distance of someone who'd learned to make things happen without his name appearing on them.This one had a reference number that traced directly back.No distance. No associate. Him.Callum was in the hallway.Moving toward Dara's office, which meant Dara had already called him, which meant we had exactly the window between the office door and the next person walking past. Thirty seconds. Maybe less.He saw my face.'He always sees my face.'"It was him," I said. Low. Fast. "Dara has documentation."Callum looked at me.One second. Two."Tonight we play football," he said."Callum—""Tonight." His voice was steady in a way that wasn't performed. Just. Settled. "We play. Everything else is tomorrow."He walk

POV: CallumWe spent the morning at my kitchen table.Marcus stayed on the couch with his leg up and his laptop open but he was in the conversation, which was its own thing, the particular way Marcus participated in rooms he wasn't technically supposed to be the center of.We mapped it out.What Garrett knew. What he'd had access to before the suspension and what he might still have access to if someone hadn't properly removed him from the program's private channels. What the timeline of his communications with outside parties looked like based on what Marcus had pieced together from a sophomore who'd apparently seen something and decided Marcus Webb was the person to tell.Marcus had been busy.For a man on a recovery protocol that was supposed to involve rest, elevation, and limited activity, he'd been running something that looked a lot like a parallel intelligence operation from our couch. The specific sophomore in question had spotted Garrett at an off-campus café with someone wh

POV: CallumShe arrived at seven with coffee.Three cups. Already made, from somewhere, carried in a tray with the particular ease of someone who'd done this enough times to know that the people she was about to talk to needed coffee before they needed questions.'She's been here before. Not this kitchen. This situation.'I let her in. Jaxon was already at the table. He'd arrived ten minutes before seven without texting first, which I'd expected, because that was the thing he did when something mattered enough that he didn't want to give himself time to reconsider.We sat.Me. Jaxon to my left. Simone across.She set up the recorder. Opened her notepad. And then she didn't ask anything.She just. Waited.'Oh she's good.'I'd prepared for questions. Leading ones, soft ones, the kind that were technically open-ended but had an answer embedded in the structure of the asking. I'd prepared responses for all of them.She didn't give me questions.She gave me space.Which was harder.Space r

POV: Callum Two pm. Film room. Door closed. I walked in knowing exactly what the room was. Not hostile. But not supportive either. It was tense, so tense that it felt like they had seen something and hadn't finished deciding what to do with it. The particular quality of a locker room that had been private and had become publicly discussed and was now sitting with what that meant for the people inside it. I took my usual seat. Jaxon came in two minutes later. He sat at the front the way he always sat at the front. Quarterback at the front. Three years of that. He didn't look at me when he came in and I didn't look at him and neither of those things were avoidance. Just. The room required a certain quality of normalcy right now and we were both capable of providing it. Dara came in last. Closed the door himself. He stood at the front and he addressed it directly. 'I didn't expect that.' Dara managed by indirection usually. The oblique comment. The practice drill that

POV: JaxonShe sent the recording at five forty-five.I sat on my floor with the guitar in my lap and my back against the couch and I pressed play.Richard's voice came through the phone speaker and I felt the particular thing I always felt when I heard it unexpectedly, the automatic recalibration my body did before my brain caught up. Then I caught up and I just. Listened.He'd called her to express concern.His word. Concern.He was concerned about the legal work Elena was undertaking on behalf of a scholarship inquiry that, he wanted to be clear, he had no direct involvement in. He was concerned about her motivations. Whether they were purely professional or whether, and he said this with the particular warmth of someone raising a question they already believed the answer to, whether personal history was influencing her judgment.He used the word appropriate four times.'There it is. That word.'Appropriate involvement. Appropriate professional distance. Whether Elena's participati