15. Terms of Testimony
Terms of Testimony
By noon, everyone wanted the truth to be simpler than it was.
Talia stood at the head of the conference table in Halcyon Academic Affairs with a yellow legal pad, three color-coded folders, and coffee that had gone cold forty minutes ago.
The room smelled like printer heat, old carpet, and the sharp lemon polish facilities used when they wanted a space to feel more official than honest. Outside the narrow window, fresh snow had started again, whitening the quad in soft, deceptive layers.
Inside, nothing was soft.
“We need to be realistic,” Associate Provost Elaine Mercer said, fingertips pressed together over a stack of board memos. “The institution cannot absorb a finding that suggests systemic academic fraud absent ironclad evidence of systemic intent.”
Talia did not sit.
Across from Elaine, Dean Robert Kessler shifted in his chair with the restless energy of a man who wanted this meeting over before anyone said anything quotable.
Beside him, Compliance Counsel Jenna Ruiz kept her face blank and her notes meticulous.
Two representatives from student conduct had dialed in by speakerphone, their voices flattening in and out under static.
Realistic.
That word had become everybody’s favorite weapon this week.
Talia flipped open the top folder. “What is realistic,” she said evenly, “is distinguishing between what we can prove, what we strongly suspect, and what people would prefer for institutional convenience.”
Elaine’s mouth tightened. “No one is suggesting convenience.”
No. Just minimizing blast radius. Protect the university. Protect donor confidence. Protect the conference relationship. Protect the version of North Lake that looked good on brochures and glossy fundraising mailers with students in wolf-gray scarves smiling under snowfall.
Talia had spent three years in higher-ed policy learning how often the language of stewardship meant deciding in advance whose damage counted.
Jenna spoke before the room could slide into semantics. “The issue is narrower. At present, we have irregular tutoring logs, access anomalies in Player Services, one confirmed deletion of archived corridor footage, and conflicting statements regarding who authorized adjustments in recordkeeping.”
“And public pressure,” Kessler muttered.
Talia looked at him. “Public pressure is not evidence.”
“No,” he said, with a quick glance at the window as if he could see beyond the snow to the students massing outside administration, “but it is a reality.”
She knew. She had walked through it to get here.
Half the quad had been lined with handmade signs and megaphones.
Some of the protesters were undergrads from her discussion section.
Some were graduate workers from the union.
Some were athletes from other programs who had spent years watching men’s hockey swallow money and sympathy in equal measure.
Their anger was not invented. Their timing was not accidental.
NO MORE SPECIAL TREATMENT.
IF A STUDENT CHEATS, THEY’RE OUT. IF AN ATHLETE CHEATS, WHY IS IT A COMMITTEE?
HEADS SHOULD ROLL.
One sign had simply said TELL THE WHOLE STORY.
That one had gotten under her skin.
Because yes. Exactly. The whole story. Not the clean version administrators could survive and not the blood version students could chant.
Elaine turned to her. “Doctor Shah, your relationship to several relevant students and athletes has already become a talking point.”
There it was.
Talia kept her expression still. “My academic and investigatory contact with them has been fully disclosed.”
Elaine arched a brow. “Academic and investigatory.”
The implication was light, polished, almost elegant.
It still made something cold move under Talia’s ribs.
Jenna cut in again. “We are not here to speculate on impropriety without evidence.”
“Speculation is already happening,” Kessler said. “Campus blogs are naming her.”
Talia looked at him directly. “Then perhaps campus leadership should stop feeding a vacuum with strategic silence.”
His jaw ticked. “That’s unfair.”
“No,” she said. “It’s precise.”
The room went quiet except for the speakerphone hiss and the soft tap of sleet turning to snow against the glass.
She knew how she looked from their side.
Young for the room. Too composed to be easy to dismiss, which made some people try harder.
A doctoral candidate, not yet tenured into bureaucratic immunity.
Brown woman from a program everybody liked quoting when they wanted to sound principled, less so when principle got expensive.
And now—through no action of her own beyond refusing to be blind—adjacent to the face of the campus’s most visible athletic scandal.
Noah Mercer had become a contamination point.
Not because she had defended him. She hadn’t. Not because she had protected him. She hadn’t done that either.
Because proximity, in these rooms, always looked like bias when the wrong man was involved.
Elaine folded her hands. “Let me be direct. If this ends with a limited finding tied to record mishandling, individual overreach, and insufficient oversight, the university can address the matter proportionately. If it broadens into allegations of culture-level corruption without conclusive proof, we invite litigation and conference intervention on a scale that helps no one.”
There it was again. Helps no one.
As if truth were a grenade she was irresponsibly fond of holding with the pin loose.
Talia drew a breath. Marker squeak from the whiteboard behind her scratched at the edge of the room; someone had written TIMELINE in block capitals before she arrived. Under it she had added dates, access logs, names, tutoring entries, deletion points. Order against panic. Sequence against spin.
“I am not writing a finding to optimize for public relations,” she said. “I am writing one that survives scrutiny.”
“And if scrutiny destroys the season?” Kessler asked.
Something in her sharpened. “Then perhaps the season should not have been built on choices nobody wanted scrutinized.”
Silence.
On the speakerphone, one of the student conduct reps exhaled audibly.
Elaine’s smile looked exhausted and brittle. “No one is asking you to lie.”
That was always how they did it. They asked for framing. For balance. For prudence. For institutional care. Never a lie. Just strategic architecture around the truth until it resembled safety.
Talia closed the folder. “Good. Then we understand each other.”
Jenna’s pen stilled. For the first time that morning, something like approval flickered across her face.
The meeting broke twenty minutes later with nothing resolved except the fact that everyone left less happy than they had arrived, which Talia considered proof she was probably still doing her job.
The hallway outside Academic Affairs hit her with fluorescent glare and the smell of wet wool.
Students moved in clumps, voices low and urgent.
A pair of campus reporters hovered near the stairwell pretending not to wait for someone important.
One of them spotted her, straightened, and opened his mouth.
She gave him one look and kept walking.
Her phone vibrated as she hit the first-floor corridor.
Mina.
Talia answered without slowing. “Please tell me you’re calling with lunch.”
“Worse,” Mina said. “I’m calling with democracy.”
Talia pushed through the side exit into cutting cold. Snow lifted off the stone steps in dry, needling gusts. Across the quad, the protest had thickened. Someone with a bullhorn was leading a chant she couldn’t quite make out over the wind.
“Mina.”
“There’s an open student forum in forty-five minutes at the union. Coalition for Academic Equity is demanding administrators name names today.”
“Of course they are.”
“And because the universe enjoys you specifically suffering, a flyer with your face on it is circulating.”
Talia stopped dead on the steps. “What.”
Mina’s pause was full of apology. “It’s not terrible.”
“That sentence has never once introduced something manageable.”
“It says, COMMITTEE OR COVER-UP? ASK WHO INVESTIGATES THE INVESTIGATORS.”
Talia closed her eyes for one second against the sting of snow. “Creative.”
“Mean, but yes.”
A group of bundled undergrads surged past her, one carrying poster board, another a thermos the size of a fire extinguisher. From the open union doors came heat, coffee, and the dense rising roar of people who had decided their anger was righteous enough to share.
Mina lowered her voice. “Do you want me to go nuclear on somebody?”
The offer was real. Mina, who taught labor history like a blood sport and loved Talia with practical, terrifying competence, would absolutely light a student senate vice president on fire with footnotes if asked.
Talia huffed a breath that might have been a laugh if she were less tired. “No. Not yet.”
“Yet. I like that. Very prosecutorial.”
Talia descended the steps carefully; ice had slicked the edges silver. “I’m not worried about students being angry.”
“You should be worried about students being simplistic. Angry students ask for reform. Simplistic ones ask for a public sacrifice.”
She was already there. She knew.
At the edge of the quad, a student she recognized from her ethics seminar raised a hand. “Dr. Shah?”
Talia turned.
The student, bundled in a maroon scarf and indignation, looked younger out here than she did in class. “Can I ask you something off the record?”
“No,” Talia said, not unkindly. “You can ask me something, but you can’t ask me to violate process.”
The student flushed. “Right. Sorry. I just—people are saying the hockey players are getting protected again.”
Again. Not inaccurate historically, if one zoomed out beyond this scandal and this season and this one beloved alternate captain with taped thumbs and a smile that made rooms relax.
Talia tucked her gloves tighter into her pockets. “People are saying many things.”
“Okay, but are they?”
The wind snapped the edge of the student’s sign: FAIRNESS ISN’T FLEXIBLE.