Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Beckett
Ifind out about Kinsley’s meltdown the way the rest of campus does, through my phone going off during morning Econ.
The first text is from a girl in my Business Ethics seminar. Have you seen Kinsley Adams’s insta???
The second is Zane. Get to the house. Now.
The third is from Cameron. No message. Just the image.
I open it under the desk and everything in me goes cold.
It’s a grid post on Kinsley’s main account, not the second account Tyler found but the public one with twelve thousand followers.
Three photos side by side. The restaurant footage from Riverside, grainy and unmistakable, Reese at our team dinner with her face flushed and her eyes half shut and a hand under the table that isn’t hers.
A shot of Reese leaving our house at six in the morning with her hair wrecked, wearing one of Bo’s flannels.
And a screenshot of Reese’s student profile with the designation field circled in red.
Beta. Kinsley’s put her own word across it in white block letters. LIAR.
The caption reads: When someone files a fake harassment complaint to cover up the fact that she’s been sleeping with her entire team and lying about her designation to the university. Receipts below. #SableRidge #OmegaExposed #ProtectWomensRowing
Four hundred likes. Twenty minutes old.
I’m out of my seat before Professor Dalton finishes his sentence about market externalities. He says something after me and I’m already through the door with the phone at my ear.
Gray answers on the first ring. “I know.”
“Where’s Reese?”
“In Tyler’s class. She doesn’t know yet. Bo’s on his way.”
“How bad?”
“Southeastern Sports Network picked it up. Kowalski reposted it with a developing-story tag.” Gray’s voice has gone past anger into the cold register. “Kinsley tagged the athletics department, the dean’s office, and three local outlets.”
“She found out about the complaint.”
“Her family has connections all over the university. Somebody probably told her before the ink dried.” A pause. “Get to the house.”
I cut across the quad at a half-jog and go around a group of freshmen who stop to watch me pass. One of them says something to her friend and holds up her phone.
They’ve seen it.
The house is filling up when I get there. Zane’s walking a trench into the living room carpet. Jackson’s on the couch, bent forward with his hands laced behind his neck and his head down between his shoulders, which is what he does instead of putting a fist through drywall.
“Eli?”
“Upstairs, on the phone with Tyler’s contact in the registrar’s office.” Jackson doesn’t lift his head. “The profile screenshot is real. Somebody accessed her actual records. If it was pulled and handed over without authorization, we’ve got a FERPA problem on top of everything else.”
“Or Kinsley faked it.”
“She didn’t.” Zane stops long enough to hold his screen up. Student ID number, enrollment date, designation field, all of it genuine. “Somebody on the inside gave it to her.”
The front door opens. Bo comes in first with a hand at Reese’s back. She’s white to the lips and holding herself so tightly I can see the tendons in her neck. She’s seen it. She walks straight to the dining table, pulls out a chair, and sits.
Nobody says anything.
“Okay,” she says. Her voice is thin and level, like a line with too much weight on it. “Walk me through it.”
Gray comes out of the kitchen with the laptop. “Posted at eight forty-two. Three images. The restaurant photo is Riverside. The morning shot was taken from a car parked across the street, probably last week. The profile is genuine.”
“Which means somebody with access to university records may have pulled it without authorization.” Eli comes down the stairs with his phone still in his hand. “Tyler’s contact is checking the access logs. If they find an improper access or disclosure, the university has a serious problem.”
“The hashtag is trending locally.” Tyler’s on speaker. He’s left class too. “Kowalski hasn’t written anything yet, but she’s DMing people on both teams looking for quotes.”
Reese takes all of it without moving.
I watch her the way I watch everybody, for the cracks and the tells and the gap between what somebody shows and what they’ve got. Her hands are flat on the table. Her breathing is even. She isn’t coming apart. She’s running numbers.
“Comments?” she asks.
“Mostly her side right now.” Zane doesn’t want to say it. “The women’s rowing community is closing ranks. A lot of protect-women’s-spaces and Omegas-don’t-belong.”
“Any support?”
“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.”
She slows half a step. “Shut up, Monroe.”
“That’s more like it.” I bump her shoulder with mine, light, two teammates on their way to class. “For the record, you’re handling this with more composure than Kinsley has managed in her entire life.”
“For the record, I’m going to throw up in about fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll hold your hair.”
“I’m wearing a ponytail.”
“Then I’ll hold your jacket.”
One side of her mouth moves. It’s gone before it turns into anything, but I’ll take it.
Halfway across the quad, Kinsley Adams is set up on a bench near the humanities building with Olivia and Madison either side of her like posts. Phone already out and pointed our way.
Filming again.
“Don’t stop,” I murmur.
“Wasn’t planning to.”
We pass inside ten feet. Kinsley stands.
“Reese.” She’s pitched it to carry, and heads come around. “Nice jacket. Does the whole team get matching ones, or only the ones you’re fucking?”
Reese doesn’t break stride or turn her head. She walks past like the bench is empty.
“Must be nice.” Kinsley’s louder now, working the crowd. “Filing fake complaints to cover up that you spread your legs for eight guys and lied about what you are to get on the team.”
People are stopping. Phones are up. Everything in me wants to put myself between them and make her choke on it, and Reese asked me to walk with her, not fight for her.
Reese stops. Turns. Looks straight at her.
“Are you done?” Calm. Nearly bored.
Kinsley blinks. She was expecting tears or fury or at minimum a flinch. “Excuse me?”
“I asked if you’re done. I have a ten o’clock and I’d hate to be late.”
“You think this is funny? I have proof—”
“Of what? That I filed a complaint about months of stalking and harassment and physical intimidation?” Reese tips her head, the small amount she does on the water when she’s reading a line.
“Because you just told about thirty people that you know it exists, and most of them are filming. Your Title IX coordinator is going to have a wonderful afternoon.”
Color crawls up Kinsley’s neck. Olivia takes her arm and Kinsley shakes it off.
“You’re a liar. You lied about your designation. You manipulated the whole team with pheromones. Everyone knows.”
“What everyone knows,” Reese says, without a fraction of a wobble in it, “is that you got into my student records, posted revenge content to twelve thousand followers, and are publicly harassing me the day after I filed a formal complaint.” She lets that sit.
“Keep going. Every sentence is another exhibit.”
Kinsley’s attention snaps to the phones around her, then to the students who have stopped walking. She’s finally realizing she isn’t exposing anybody. She’s conducting her own prosecution on camera in front of a crowd.
Madison takes her elbow. “Kins. Let’s go.”
Kinsley pulls free. I shift my weight forward in case she comes at Reese, and she just stands there shaking, staring at her like she can’t work out why none of this is working.
“This isn’t over,” she says.
“I know,” Reese says. “That’s what the Title IX office is for.”
She turns and walks. I go with her, and behind us Olivia and Madison are steering Kinsley the other way with their voices going sharp.
We get around the corner of the humanities building before Reese takes my arm and steers us behind the bike rack, out of sight of the quad.
“Okay,” she says. “Now I’m going to throw up.”
She doesn’t. She bends at the waist with her hands on her knees and pulls air through her teeth for a solid minute, and I stand between her and the sidewalk so nobody going past can see her do it.
“That,” I tell her, “was the most devastating thing I have ever watched a person do with a straight face.”
“I can’t feel my hands.”
“Adrenaline. It passes.”
She straightens. Her eyes are bright and wet, but she keeps blinking it back. “She won’t stop. This isn’t going to be enough.”
“No. But she just went after a complainant on camera in front of thirty phones. She confirmed somebody told her about the complaint before she should’ve known.
She practically announced that she has your student records.
And she did the whole thing in public before ten in the morning.
” I put my shoulder against the brick beside her.
“Kinsley Adams set fire to every bridge she had left.”
Reese nods, working it through. “What about Quinton?”
Her hands are still shaking and she’s already two moves ahead.
“Quinton’s been quiet, which is the part that worries me. He’s watching this happen.”
“So he’ll cut her loose.”
“If he’s as calculated as Tyler’s messages make him look, he’s already deciding whether she’s worth the risk.”
“And after this?”
“Probably not.”
Reese presses her lips together. “Scared people make mistakes.”
“So do angry ones. And you just made her very angry.”
“Good. Angry and scared is sloppy. She’ll overreach again, and next time Okafor already has the retaliation on file.” Reese comes off the wall and squares up. “Come on. I really do have a ten o’clock.”
We walk the rest of the way without talking, and it’s the comfortable kind.
I hold the door to the lecture hall. She goes through with her chin up and her back straight, and if anybody in that room has seen the post, not one of them could tell from looking at her that anything in her life is less than entirely in hand.
I take my usual seat two rows behind her. She opens her laptop and starts on her notes like it’s an ordinary morning.
My phone buzzes.
Gray: How is she?
I look at the back of her head. The tight line of the ponytail. The set of her shoulders. Her fingers moving over the keys, quick and certain, like she’s already filed this morning under things that happened and are over.
But I’m two rows back, and I can see what the room can’t. The fine tremor in her right hand when she reaches for her water bottle. The fact that she doesn’t drink any of it. She just holds it, because she needs something solid in her hand.
Me: Terrifying. In the best way.
And then, because he needs this too.
Me: Quinton hasn’t posted. Hasn’t texted anybody on the team. Hasn’t reacted at all. That bothers me more than anything Kinsley did.
Gray answers straight away.
Gray: Same. He’s letting her burn.