Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The petition to the Warden review board took Declan two days to draft properly, careful language, every claim backed by something concrete: the sealed drawer, the sealed office door, Josie's control-number evidence, the pattern of it laid out plainly enough that even a board inclined to protect Kestrel would have to actively choose to ignore what was in front of them.
He rewrote the opening paragraph four times, unwilling to let a single overstated claim give anyone an excuse to dismiss the whole document on a technicality.
He submitted it Thursday morning, hand-delivered to the board's clerk himself rather than trusting it to interoffice mail, and watched it get logged, stamped, and filed before he let himself leave the building.
By Thursday afternoon, before the board had even acknowledged receiving it, Josie called him, her voice tighter than he'd heard it in three weeks.
"They're trying to expel me."
"What."
"An order. Expedited withdrawal, effective immediately, delivered to my dorm an hour ago.
Her voice had the particular flatness she used when something had scared her badly enough that flatness was the only register left available to her.
"Academic dismissal for violation of archive access protocols.
Kestrel's seal on it. They're not even waiting for the misconduct hearing's outcome. They're just removing me from the university before the hearing can happen at all."
Declan was already moving, coat half on, before she'd finished the sentence. "Where are you."
"My dorm. They gave me until six tonight to vacate university housing."
"Don't sign anything. Don't pack anything you don't have to. I'm coming."
He found her in her dorm room twenty minutes later, having crossed the campus faster than he'd have thought possible, the expedited order spread on her desk beside an open duffel bag she'd started filling on some old, exhausted reflex: the specific instinct of someone who'd learned, a long time before this week, that when an institution told you to leave, arguing rarely changed the outcome and packing quickly at least preserved some dignity in how you left.
"Stop," he said, gentler than he meant it to come out. "Stop packing. This isn't final."
"It says effective immediately. She didn't stop folding a sweater, hands moving on autopilot, the kind of motion that kept a person from having to feel the thing happening to them in real time. "It says six o'clock. That's about as final as language gets."
"It's an order signed by a Provost trying to remove the one witness whose evidence could expose him before a review board he can't fully control gets a chance to see it. That's not final, Josie. That's panic, dressed up in official letterhead."
She stopped folding, finally, and looked at him, something raw and frightened showing through the careful flatness for the first time since the chapel three weeks ago, not the guarded wariness he'd learned to read past, but something rawer, more honest, a fear she hadn't let him see before now.
"What if it doesn't matter that it's panic," she said. "What if panic still gets me thrown out of the only place I've ever actually belonged, and nobody with actual power cares whether the reason was legitimate."
He crossed the room and took the sweater out of her hands, gently, and set it back in the drawer she'd pulled it from, a small physical refusal of the packing itself.
"You belong here," he said. "Whatever this order says.
Your mother belonged here twenty-three years ago too, and they made her leave believing something similar, and I am not going to stand in this room and watch the same thing happen to you without every single fight left in me spent trying to stop it first."
Something in her face cracked, just slightly, the flatness giving way to a rawer thing underneath it that she clearly hadn't planned on letting him see. She sat down abruptly on the edge of her bed, as though her legs had simply decided the conversation required it.
"I keep thinking about her," she said, quiet. "My mother. Sitting in a room somewhere in this exact building, twenty-three years ago, getting told the same thing I'm being told now. Leave quietly.
Don't fight it. It'll be easier for everyone if you just go."
"She didn't have anyone fighting for her position. Not really. Whatever your father.
Whatever Rowan did, in the end, he signed the release instead of contesting it. Declan crouched in front of her, meeting her eyes at her own level rather than standing over her. "You have people fighting for yours. Ferris.
Your advisor, once he gets that envelope. Thorne, whether he'll admit it plainly or not. Me.
That's already a different equation than the one she faced."
"The review board," she said. "Your petition. Have they responded."
"Not yet. It's been six hours. He pulled out his phone, checked it again, the same habitual motion he'd repeated every twenty minutes since submitting it. "But Thorne's pushing on the inside too.
He owes me exactly nothing, and he's spending political capital on this anyway, which tells me he believes it matters more than protocol usually allows him to admit out loud."
"And if they don't respond before six."
"Then I'm not letting you leave this campus alone tonight, board response or not.
Whatever that costs me. He met her eyes, steady, meaning every word of it in a way he hadn't let himself mean anything this plainly in three years of careful Warden training.
"You are not walking out that door by yourself. "
"That's not really your decision to make. Where I go, if they force the issue."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't. But whether you go alone or not: that part's mine to decide, and I've already decided it."
She didn't answer that directly. But she sat back further onto the bed, the half-packed duffel bag pushed aside, and let him sit beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and for the first time since the expedited order had arrived, some of the frantic packing-reflex tension went out of her hands.
"I'm scared," she admitted, quietly, the words costing her something visible to say out loud. "I don't say that. Ever. But I'm scared right now, and I don't know what to do with that except keep folding sweaters like folding them faster will somehow fix it."
"You don't have to not say it. Not with me."
She let out a breath, long and unsteady, and leaned, just slightly, into the solid warmth of his shoulder beside hers, an unconscious motion she didn't seem to fully register making.
They waited together, the clock on her wall ticking toward six, both of them watching Declan's phone for a reply that hadn't come yet, and neither of them said anything else for a long while, but neither of them needed to, the quiet itself doing the work that words couldn't quite manage.