The rest of that evening unfolded quickly. The way things tend to once a truth finally breaks the surface after being held under for too long. Ruth Palowski approached Gary Priestley before he had even managed to leave the building, her spiral notebook still in hand. “I think,” she said, “Monday’s funding vote is going to look very different than you were expecting.”
Gary tried briefly to salvage the evening, insisting the fabricated testing records were a clerical oversight, insisting Tanner’s conduct was a misunderstanding blown out of proportion. Nobody in the room was inclined to believe him anymore. The council voted the following Monday unanimously against the expansion grant, and within the month, Ironclad Academy quietly changed hands, sold to a new owner with no interest in keeping either Priestley on staff.
Gary’s own seat on the council became a topic of quiet conversation around town in the weeks that followed. He did not seek reelection that fall, citing in a brief statement to the Gazette a desire to focus on family matters, a phrase most of Mil Haven read exactly the way it was intended to be read.
Tanner’s certification was formally revoked by the regional testing board once Frank’s documentation and Samuel Devo’s statement were submitted through proper channels. He left Mil Haven within a few weeks of the showcase, taking a job at a gym two states over, where, as far as anyone in town ever heard, nobody knew enough about his history to ask any uncomfortable questions.
Cole Priestley faced an internal review over his handling of both the original complaint and the fabricated incident report involving Curtis. He kept his job narrowly after fully cooperating with the investigation and submitting a corrected statement that finally included Curtis’s admission about Tanner’s instructions before the drill. He thought, filling out that paperwork, about a hardware store and fourteen cents and found he could finally sign his name to something without any hesitation at all. It cost him his cousin’s friendship for good. He decided in the weeks that followed that the trade had been worth making.
Curtis, for his part, apologized to Joe personally the following week. Mortified by his role in the whole affair, even though nobody blamed him for following an instructor’s direction the way he had been trained to, he found her during a quiet stretch at the diner on a Tuesday afternoon, turning his cap over in his hands, the way nervous men sometimes do.
“I should have said something the night it happened,” Curtis told her, “about what Tanner told me to do beforehand. I just didn’t want to make things worse for myself. And after everything you did for me that week, sending me to the hospital, telling me who to ask for, it makes it worse somehow. You looked out for me, and I ended up being the reason things got so hard for you.”