Page 74 of Final Drive

“Some. People are calling out the revenge posting, and the privacy angle is picking up.” He scrolls. “Rivas from JV posted defending you. Said you’re the best cox he’s ever seen and designation doesn’t change that.”

“That was stupid of him,” Gray says. “They’ll come for him next.”

“He’s a sophomore Alpha with nothing to lose. Let him be stupid.” Reese looks at Gray. “The Title IX office. Does this hurt the investigation?”

“It helps document the pattern.” Tyler’s voice comes through the phone. “She publicly targeted you right after learning you’d filed. Okafor will want this reported immediately, and it supports the hostile-environment complaint.”

“So she handed us ammunition,” I say.

“She handed us evidence.” Tyler sounds almost offended by the distinction. “And if that student record came from somebody with university access, that’s another issue entirely.”

“Great. So on paper we’re winning.” Reese’s tone could take paint off a hull. “Meanwhile twelve thousand people have now seen a photograph of somebody’s hand under my skirt and my designation history is public property.”

Nobody has an answer for that.

She’s right. Tyler can talk evidence and procedure until his voice gives out and none of it takes back the fact that her face and her body and her private business are everywhere this morning. The process takes weeks. The humiliation already happened.

I pull out the chair beside her and sit down. I don’t touch her and I don’t say anything reassuring or strategic. I just get my shoulder an inch from hers and leave it there.

“I’m going to call Okafor,” Reese says eventually. “Report the retaliation. Then I’m going to class.”

“Reese,” Bo starts.

“I’m going to class.” She looks at him, and he stops. “If I hide in this house, she wins. If I skip practice, she wins.”

“At least let somebody walk with you,” Gray says.

“Fine. Beckett.” She turns to me. “You’re in my Business Strategy section.”

I nod, because it makes sense. I’m the one who can cross a campus with her looking like nothing’s happened, keep my face easy and my eyes everywhere at once, and read every person we pass without breaking stride.

“Everyone else, normal schedules,” she says. “Tyler, keep tracking the spread and document it all for Okafor. Eli, stay on the records issue. Gray, if Kowalski calls, say nothing. Jackson.” She waits until he looks up. “Do not go near Kinsley or her friends.”

Jackson goes very still. “I wasn’t going to.”

“You were thinking about it.”

“Thinking isn’t doing.”

“Keep it that way.” She stands. “Ten minutes. Then we go.”

She goes upstairs, and I wait until the footsteps stop overhead.

“She’s handling that better than any of us would,” Zane says.

“She’s handling it because the alternative is coming apart.” I know what deflection looks like from the inside, since I built an entire personality out of it. You learn to recognize the scaffolding in somebody else, and where it starts to give. “Give her the ten minutes. Nobody go up there.”

“Wasn’t going to,” Bo says, with his eyes on the stairs like he’s counting.

Ten minutes to the second, Reese comes back down in jeans and the black Sable Ridge crew jacket with her hair pulled back tight to her scalp. Armor. Jackson’s mark and Eli’s are under the collar, and mine sits high enough on her shoulder that the jacket covers it. Her chin is up, every part of her pulled tight and controlled.

We go out the front door together into a bright warm May morning, campus full of people drifting toward ten o’clock. Some of them look. Some of them stare. A few take out phones.

“Don’t look at them,” I say, matching her stride.

“I’m not.”

“You’re walking faster.”