Word of the incident spread faster than anything before it. Not because Josie told anyone. She didn’t say a word about it beyond that evening. But because three other customers had witnessed the whole thing from inside the diner, and small towns don’t need much more than that to get a story moving.
By the next morning, half the regulars at the Lantern had heard some version of events. Most of them landed close to the truth, that Dalton Reeve had knocked over an elderly man outside the diner and laughed about it instead of helping. But a different version was circulating, too. One that traveled faster in the places that mattered most to Dalton, which was to say the university’s administrative offices.
Dalton, coached carefully by his father over a dinner conversation that evening, filed a formal complaint the following morning against Josephine Callaway, alleging that she had been harassing him for weeks, that she had created a hostile environment during their group project, and that she had recently made a public scene outside a local business, humiliating him in front of witnesses over what he described as a minor, unintentional accident.
He attached the edited video as evidence. He did not mention Harold Puit at all. Josie received the notice from the Office of Student Conduct three days later, a formal letter requesting her presence at a disciplinary hearing to address allegations of harassment and public misconduct. The hearing was scheduled six days out.
She read the letter twice, sitting alone in her dorm room, hands trembling slightly, though whether from anger or fear, she couldn’t quite tell. The letter explained in careful administrative language that if the allegations were found credible, she could face suspension from the university and forfeit of the academic scholarship that had made her attendance possible in the first place.
Everything her father had worked for, everything she’d promised her mother she would hold on to no matter what, six days away from being taken from her over a lie built from an edited video and the word of a young man whose father sat two floors above the very committee that would decide her fate.
She thought about calling home, then didn’t, unwilling to let her mother carry this weight, too. Instead, she walked to the Lantern that evening, sat down in her usual booth, and for the first time since arriving in Milbrook, she let herself cry quietly, carefully, the way a person cries when they’ve been holding something in for far too long.
Walter saw her from behind the counter and came over immediately, sliding into the booth across from her without a word, simply present, the way an old friend did before asking any questions. “They’re saying I attacked him,” Josie finally managed, voice cracking. “That I’ve been harassing him this whole time. There’s a hearing. Six days. If they believe him, I lose my scholarship. I lose everything my dad worked for.”