Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sophia
The day of the interview does not feel like a movie. There’s no dramatic storm, no ominous music, no symbolic bird crashing into a window. Just late summer in Missouri.
Ten days since filing the complaint. It feels like it’s all happening too fast, yet I want it all to be over with.
The cabin suddenly looks wrong for this—too small, too lived-in, the rumpled bed far too visible behind me if I sit at the desk.
I can’t make a career-defining Zoom call with my pillow in the background.
The conference room might not feel like mine, but at least it looks like a place where serious work happens.
Humidity presses against the windows of my cabin and slips inside. Someone laughs outside—sharp, bright, and utterly indifferent to the fact that my career might tilt on its axis in a few hours. My alarm has gone off twice. I’m already dressed.
Black pants. Soft, slate-blue blouse. The blue cardigan I always wear when I need my body to feel like it has a portable wall.
I stand in front of the mirror and try to assemble my face.
Not neutral—neutral reads as cold. Not smiling—smiling gets read as appeasing. Somewhere in between. Competent. Steady.
“I am competent and steady,” I tell my reflection.
My reflection doesn’t argue.
On the table, my laptop bag waits, already packed: printed copy of the timeline, backup USB, notebook, three pens, fidget stone. The complaint folder is as organized as it’s going to get.
What’s left isn’t preparation. It’s endurance.
A knock taps on my door. Two knuckles, gentle.
Flavius.
“Come in,” I say, and my voice almost doesn’t shake.
He fills the doorway like he always does—broad shoulders, worn T-shirt, jeans, boots. No armor, no swords. The only thing that marks him as different from any other man is… everything.
He studies me for a long, quiet second.
“You look ready,” he says.
“I feel like my insides are a swarm of bees,” I say honestly.
He nods. “Bees can still fly.”
A tiny huff of breath escapes me that might be a laugh.
He steps inside and lets the door fall shut behind him. The air shifts—less like a closed space, more like a held one.
“Time?” he asks.
“Two hours,” I say. “Laura’s letting me use the small conference room by admin. Zoom at eleven.”
He nods again, as if this matches some internal battle map he’s been building.
“Good,” he says. “We have time to breathe.”
He reaches for my hand—slow, visible, giving me every chance to refuse. I don’t. His palm closes around mine, warm and steady, and he leads me to sit against the headboard.
“Legs out,” he says gently. “Back supported.”
I obey. Automatic. Trust at the level of reflex.
He sits beside me, angled toward me, one knee bent between us so he can face me fully.
“Breathe first,” he says. “Then hands.”
I let my shoulders drop one notch.
“In through your nose for four,” he reminds me. “Hold for four. Out for six. Like waves. You showed me on your phone.” His mouth curves, soft. “Tried to make me love graphs.”
“You do love graphs,” I say weakly.
“Yes. Do not tell the others.” His gaze flicks over my face. “Ready?”
I nod.
We breathe together. Four in. Hold. Six out.
The first cycle feels like nothing.
The second, like a small lever lowering somewhere behind my ribs.
By the fourth, my hands stop tingling. The bees in my chest start lining themselves into tidy rows.
“Good,” he murmurs. “Now the rest.”
He shifts closer. His hands rise—not to grab, not to restrain. To work.
He starts at my shoulders, thumbs pressing gently into the muscles along my neck where they’ve been bunched for days. It’s not a massage like in a spa brochure. It’s something older. Intentional.
His touch follows a pattern—deliberate points along muscle and bone, like he’s moving through steps he learned long before he had words to describe them. There’s technique here, not guessing. Knowledge.
“You always know exactly where to press,” I murmur before I can stop myself.
His hands stop moving for a breath. “Philos,” he says quietly. “Two thousand years later, and his knowledge is helping you now.”
I love that he was trained to mend as much as to fight.
“This one,” he says softly, pressing just above my collarbone. “You said is where your body keeps panic.” He waits for my nod, then holds the pressure until a strange, sweet ache blooms and then eases.
His hands move down my arms, tracing tendons, circling joints, mapping tension like he’s reading battle damage.
“In my time,” he says quietly, “before a fight, the men who lived longest did not jump and shout and wave swords. They sat with someone who knew how to put their pieces back in place. Breathing. Touch.” His mouth twists. “We did not have a name for it. Only ‘he makes me less likely to die.’”
“Catchy,” I whisper.
He huffs a soft laugh.
His thumbs dig into the arches of my feet—another point he discovered weeks ago when he first showed me these techniques. Electricity shoots up my calves, stutters my breath, then drops into something like… relief.
“You cannot control them,” he says, voice low, focused. “The people in the little window.” His hands move back up, fingers circling my wrists, grounding me. “You cannot control their thoughts, their past, their fear. Only your truth. Only this.”
I swallow. The words sink in like warm water.
“You told me that in your time,” I say, “the arena didn’t care if you were fair or worthy. It just… was.”
“Yes.” His gaze is steady on mine now. “So men who lived longest learned this: Do not waste your strength on what you cannot move. Save it for the thing you can.”
“So, what can I move?” I ask.
“Your words,” he says. “Your spine.” One corner of his mouth lifts. “Your very sharp brain.”
I snort, a small, ridiculous sound that still manages to puncture some of the pressure behind my eyes.
“Say it,” he urges.
“I can’t control them,” I murmur.
“Louder.”
“I can’t control them,” I repeat. My voice doesn’t break.
“Again. Tell your bones.”
“I can’t control them,” I say. “Only… how I show up. What I say. Whether I disappear or not.”
He nods, satisfied.
“That is your arena,” he says. “No one else’s.”
We sit like this for a moment, breathing the same air, his hands wrapped around my wrists like bracers.
“Whatever happens,” he adds softly, “when you come back out, the fight is over. You will have done your part. They can only decide for themselves if they want to live with how they answer.”
My chest tightens, but not in the panic way. In the way it does when someone names something I’ve never had words for.
“I wish my college advisor had been a Roman gladiator,” I say.
“Your college advisor sounds weak,” he says dryly.
A startled laugh bursts out of me for real this time.
The tension breaks. Not vanishes—just eases.
“I’ll walk you there,” he says. Then he waits.
He doesn’t finish the sentence. Doesn’t assume.
I think about it for a real moment—the pull of wanting him beside me, his steadiness, his certainty. And then I think about what I actually need the committee to see.
“Thank you,” I say first. “For offering. It means everything that you would.”
He nods once, waiting.
But I want to do this alone. Just me in the room.
My words. My case. I meet his gaze. “Your memory is exact—I know that. If I walked in there with you, they’d lean on you instead of my documentation.
I need them to see the evidence stands on its own.
That I stand on my own.” I pause. “Your memory already did its work. Every conversation you confirmed, every date you corroborated—it’s all in my notes. ”
Something shifts in his face—pride, relief, the barest flicker of what might be disappointment quickly folded away.
“Yes,” he says simply. “That is right.”
“I know,” I say. “I want to do this myself. I’m ready.”
“Good.” He squeezes my fingers once. “Then I will be outside. Close. Not in the way. When you are finished, you find me. Yes?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll find you.”
He lifts my hand as if he might kiss it, then seems to think better of it and instead presses my knuckles briefly to his chest, over his heart. Some wordless vow.
“Let them ask their questions,” he says. “You just tell the truth. That is enough.”
It doesn’t feel like it will be.
But I nod anyway.
Because if I can’t trust that, I can’t trust anything.
The conference room is too bright at first—clinical, impersonal—but at least it looks like a place where serious work belongs.
No rumpled bed in the background, no soft cabin clutter, nothing that reads as unprofessional on camera.
Just neutral walls and a table that could belong to any university office.
Exactly the kind of backdrop I need them to see.
Fluorescent lights glare off the polished table. The air conditioner hums with the kind of mechanical buzz that makes me clench my teeth. Someone in admin tried to make the space friendly—a fake plant, a framed print, and a little bowl of individually wrapped mints.
It still smells like bureaucracy.
Laura set up the Zoom link already. The laptop waits, lid half-closed, camera eye like a tiny black pupil.
I force my feet to move.
One step. Two. Eight from the door to the chair.
My files line up neatly in front of me the way I laid them out last night. Timeline. Emails. Copies of draft proposals. The notebook where I wrote questions, then answers, then counter-answers.
My fidget stone sits beside the keyboard. I pick it up. The smooth weight fits into the hollow of my palm like it grew there.
When the clock on the wall clicks over to 10:59, I open the laptop.
The screen wakes.
Zoom launches.
For a heartbeat, there is only my face—small, pale, determined.
Then three rectangles spring to life.