12. Justin
JUSTIN
The benefits of coming to St Augustine’s today are twofold.
The first is Dean Stockton.
He’s been hounding me for a week now—emails marked urgent, phone calls that somehow always come when I’m unavailable, vague requests for meetings that never quite say what they mean. Today, I finally give him what he wants. Or what he thinks he wants.
His office blinds are half-drawn, cutting the light into narrow strips across his desk. He doesn’t offer me a seat. I take one anyway.
He launches straight into it.
William Scott-Evans. The incident. The near tragedy. The unfortunate sequence of events that everyone is very eager to label isolated.
I let him talk. People reveal more when they think they’re filling silence instead of being interrogated.
When he finally winds down, I fold my hands loosely in front of me and say, calmly, “There’s nothing to investigate.”
He blinks. Swallows. Nods too quickly.
“Yes, well—of course. I just thought—given your position—that perhaps a closer look—”
“It doesn’t warrant one,” I repeat. “From what I’ve seen, it’s contained.”
That’s when I see it.
Not relief or agreement. Fear.
It flashes across his face before he can stop it. A tightening around the eyes. A stiffness in his jaw. Like I’ve just confirmed something he was hoping—desperately—wouldn’t be true.
I tilt my head slightly. “You seem unusually invested in the wellbeing of Scott-Evans.”
He stiffens.
“Are you sure,” I continue evenly, “that there’s nothing more to this than what you’ve already indicated?”
For a fraction of a second, he looks like a man standing at the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to jump or step back.
Then he backpedals. Laughs too loudly. Waves a hand as if embarrassed by his own concern. Tells me he’s probably overreacting. That stress gets to him. That the responsibility of the institution weighs heavily these days.
All of which confirms exactly one thing. He’s hiding something. Whatever it is, it’s not small. And it’s not about Scott-Evans alone. But it’s also not my priority today.
So I stand. Smooth my jacket. Close myself off piece by careful piece and tell him the matter is settled.
The relief hits him instantly. It loosens his shoulders, softens his expression, seeps into the space between us like a breath he’s been holding too long. He doesn’t try to hide it—and he doesn’t have to. It’s unmistakable.
He gives me three thank you before I even reach the door. By the third time, I don’t look back.
The second reason I’m here is Rowan Hale.
I hadn’t planned on sitting in on a class. It wasn’t operationally necessary. But timing is a strange thing, and curiosity has a way of making decisions for you when you’re not paying attention.
The lecture hall is already full when I slip in through the back, unnoticed. I take a seat near the door, where I can leave quickly if needed.
The room has been converted into a makeshift courtroom.
And Rowan is on the stand.
She looks different up there. Not smaller—sharper. Focused. Contained. Her posture is steady, hands braced on the edge of the table, as though preparing for an imminent attack.
The premise becomes clear quickly enough.
She’s the defendant. Charged with killing her husband. Her defence? She didn’t mean to do it.
The professor is openly hostile. Incensed, even. He challenges her, raises his voice, tries to rattle her into retreat.
But she doesn’t retreat. She argues intent with precision. She draws lines most people don’t know exist. She doesn’t appeal to emotion—she dismantles assumptions. When the student prosecutor pushes too hard, she doesn’t flinch. She waits. Then answers in a way that reframes the entire question.
It’s controlled. Intelligent. Dangerous.
I watch the room change around her. Watch scepticism give way to uncertainty and doubt take root.
For anyone else, this would be the performance of a lifetime. But for Rowan Hale, this is precisely how her brilliant mind works.
When recess is called, the energy in the room fractures. Everyone starts talking all at once. Rowan steps down from the stand, immediately intercepted by the prosecutor—a male student. He leans in too close and smiles too wide.
She shuts him down absolutely.
I intervene before it escalates, more out of instinct than intention. The warning I give the other student is quiet, unambiguous. He understands it immediately.
Rowan doesn’t thank me. She doesn’t even look at or acknowledge me.
She grabs her bag and leaves, fast, like the room itself has turned hostile.
I follow.
Outside, the campus looks deceptively calm. Students drift between buildings. The stone paths are still damp from the earlier rain. Everything looks normal. Harmless.
She stops abruptly and turns on me, giving me an earful for intruding in her life. When she tells me not to come to her classes again, I agree easily. There are other ways to observe her.
She walks away without looking back.
I stay where I am, watching until she disappears into the flow of campus life.
For the first time in a long while, something shifts.
Rowan Hale isn’t just a variable.
She’s a fault line running straight through a system that’s already under strain. And she has my full attention.
I’m fairly certain now that I’m finally starting to crack her icy exterior.
Which means it’s only a matter of time before she starts cracking mine.
I watch Rowan Hale from across the road.
She doesn’t know it, of course. That’s the point.
She moves like someone who has spent a lifetime learning how to take up as little space as possible—head slightly down, pace measured, expression neutral.
Not timid, but controlled. As if attention is something she’s trained herself to slip past unnoticed.
It almost works.
Almost.
The fact that her background check came back empty has me concerned. She exists on paper just enough to be enrolled, just enough to function, and nowhere else.
People don’t live like that by accident.
Every search I’ve run on her has led nowhere. I’ve widened parameters. Cross-referenced records. Dug through academic databases, housing registries, financial aid logs. Nothing unusual, nothing illuminating. Rowan Hale is a ghost in a system that documents everything.
Which means she’s either exceptionally careful—or deliberately hidden. So I watch her instead.
Rowan doesn’t make it hard.
She doesn’t linger. Doesn’t socialize in obvious ways. No coffee rituals. No study groups. No predictable haunts. She attends class, leaves promptly, walks alone.
That’s what bothers me most.
People her age cluster. They orbit each other, loudly, carelessly. Rowan moves like someone who has already learned what happens when you let people get too close.
I don’t know where she learned that.
I know where she lives. I know what her apartment smells like. Dust, old wood, and books. I know the books she keeps by her bed, the careful order of her drawers, the way she’s stripped her space of anything sentimental enough to be used against her.
Except one thing. The photograph.
A single picture, tucked into a drawer she clearly thought was secure. Two girls. Younger. Smiling in a way Rowan never does now.
In the absence of any information on Rowan, I’ve turned to Missy for what I need. I’ve had someone run the scanned photo through facial recognition, missing persons databases, archived local records. Nothing yet. No confirmed ID. No hits that stick.
But that kind of attachment doesn’t vanish without consequence.
I’m waiting for the system to catch up.
Today, I’m watching from my car as Rowan crosses the street and enters a narrow building adjacent to campus. Old brick. Unremarkable. I already know what’s inside.
The campus newspaper. Interesting.
She doesn’t hesitate before going in. That alone tells me this isn’t her first visit.
I consider following her inside. The urge is sharp, immediate. Catch her in the act. See what she’s writing. Who she’s talking to. How deep she’s already digging.
Instead, I wait.
Fifteen minutes later, she comes back out.
And she’s not alone.
Rowan steps through the doors of the building with her arm looped casually through another man’s.
They’re close enough that their shoulders brush, close enough that whatever he’s saying has pulled her fully into his orbit.
Her head tilts back as she laughs, unguarded, real.
The sound carries faintly across the street, light and sharp and entirely unreserved.
My jaw tightens.
The man beside her is tall and lanky, all long limbs and easy confidence.
His skin is dark, smooth, catching the late afternoon light, and his hair is a shock of yellow—an afro cropped close to his skull like it’s been sculpted there on purpose.
He gestures as he talks, animated, hands cutting through the air, and at one point he reaches out without thinking, fingers settling briefly at Rowan’s elbow as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Something shifts low in my abdomen.
She doesn’t pull away.
She leans in instead, listening, smiling up at him like she trusts the space between them.
Something sharp and ugly drives straight through my gut.
Jealousy.
The realization lands almost as hard as the feeling itself.
I don’t do jealousy. I catalog threats. I assess variables. I observe and adjust. This—this visceral, possessive spike of irritation at the sight of someone else’s hands on her—doesn’t fit anywhere in my mental framework.
It makes me lose my footing.
The man adds something else, grinning now, clearly pleased with himself, and Rowan laughs again. Her fingers tighten briefly where they’re hooked into his arm, an unconscious squeeze. Familiar. Comfortable.
Intimate.
I shift my weight, annoyed by the sudden tension coiling through my shoulders. By the heat creeping up my spine. By the irrational urge to cross the street and remind him—whoever the hell he is—to move his hands.
Ridiculous.
I don’t know him. I don’t know what he is to her. For all I know, he’s harmless. A colleague. A friend.
And still, my mind supplies a thousand scenarios I don’t want to examine too closely.
This is a foreign, unwelcome emotion clawing for territory it hasn’t earned.
When they finally part—when she steps away and he lingers, calling after her with another grin—I don’t feel relief.
I feel something colder.
Because whoever he is, whatever he represents, one thing is suddenly, painfully clear: Rowan Hale is not as alone as I thought.
And for reasons I don’t yet understand, that bothers me far more than it should.