“Thank you,” she said finally, because there did not seem to be a bigger word available that fit. “Don’t thank me yet,” Earl said, and something in his voice sharpened slightly. Businesslike now, the tone of a man used to briefing soldiers before a difficult task. “I’ve been hearing things around this school about that quarterback and his friends. About what happened with your gym bag, about what happened to your friend’s arm this week.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’ve kept my distance because that’s what your father asked of me. Quiet, not hovering. But I’m not going to stand here and watch this get worse without stepping in when it counts.” “What do you mean?” “I mean,” Earl said, “when the time comes that you need someone to vouch for what kind of person your father was and what kind of training you actually have, I’ll be there. I’m not asking your permission. I’m telling you, it’s already decided.”
Joe felt something loosen in her chest. Something that had been wound tight for three long years. “He’d be glad you kept that promise,” she said quietly. Earl’s eyes were bright for a moment, though he blinked it away quickly, the way men of his generation often did, clearing his throat instead of letting the moment sit too long in the open. “Get home safe,” he said. “And Joe, keep writing things down. Whatever you’ve been doing, keep doing it.”
She almost asked how he knew about the notebook. Then she remembered who had taught her to keep one in the first place and understood that some habits simply run in families, passed down quietly, the way this whole promise had been passed down, one careful hand to another.
That same week, in a dorm room three floors up, Nora Bennett was pursuing a very different kind of investigation. She had not stopped thinking about the sealed letter at the bottom of Joe’s bag, nor about the strange, careful way people around campus had begun treating Joe since the cheating accusation broke. Something about the timing bothered her. The suspension had come not long after the gym floor incident, not long after Joe had without meaning to impressed half the campus in a way that seemed to sit badly with certain people.
Nora did not believe in coincidences. Her mother had taught her that too alongside the newspapers. She started small. She talked to a friend on the volleyball team casually over lunch and learned that the shared locker room had been left unattended during Tuesday’s practice, the exact afternoon before the pages were found. She talked to another friend who worked part-time in the campus security office, filing paperwork three afternoons a week, and asked as casually as she could manage whether the hallway and locker room cameras had picked up anything unusual that day.
The answer surprised her. Yes, actually there had been footage, a grainy angle covering the locker room entrance timestamped showing someone entering during the empty practice window. But by the time Nora asked, the footage had already been flagged for deletion as part of routine monthly storage clearing, standard procedure. Nothing suspicious about the timing on paper except that Nora’s instincts told her otherwise.
She could not access it herself. She was not staff, but her friend, a sophomore named Delia, who worked the security desk, mentioned almost in passing that the automatic deletion was not scheduled to run until the following Monday. That gave Nora four days. She spent two of them working up the courage to ask Delia for a favor that could, if discovered, get them both in serious trouble. She spent the third day deciding it was worth the risk anyway.