Chapter 171

Chapter 171
Linnet's POV


The message came at 7:52 in the morning, while I was still standing at my locker trying to remember which textbooks I needed for first period.

My phone buzzed once, then twice in quick succession, and I pulled it out half-expecting something from Bryson—a good morning, a check-in, maybe a photo of whatever bruise his father's hand had left on his face.

Instead the sender was a number I didn't recognize, and the message itself was just three lines long, but those three lines hit me like a fist to the sternum.

[Ms. Mellor — Please report to the Financial Aid Office at your earliest convenience today. There has been a development regarding your scholarship status that requires immediate attention. — Office of Academic Finance, St. Pellan Academy]

I read it twice. Then a third time. The hallway noise around me seemed to recede, voices and locker doors and the squeak of sneakers on linoleum all blurring into an undifferentiated roar while I stood there with the phone in my hand and felt the floor shift beneath my feet.

Scholarship status.

The words sat in my chest like swallowed glass. I'd been on full academic scholarship since sophomore year—the Pellan Excellence Award, which covered tuition, fees, and a modest stipend for materials. I'd known I was always eligible to get the full scholarship. I wouldn't just accept it.

I made myself walk to the Financial Aid Office rather than run, because running would have meant admitting to the fear already coiling through my ribcage, and I wasn't ready to give Cole Doyle that satisfaction even when he couldn't see me.

The woman at the front desk—Ms. Pruitt, fiftyish, reading glasses perpetually sliding down her nose—looked up when I came in, and I saw something in her expression that she was trying hard to keep neutral. Sympathy, maybe. Or the particular discomfort of someone required to deliver news they hadn't authored and didn't endorse.

"Linnet," she said, and gestured toward the inner office. "Dr. Fairbanks asked me to send you straight in."

Dr. Fairbanks was the Director of Academic Finance, a careful, precise man who had always treated me with the kind of methodical respect he probably extended to all his scholarship students.

He was standing when I entered, which told me more than anything else could have about the gravity of what was coming, and he waited until I'd sat down before he settled back into his own chair and folded his hands on the desk between us.

"I'll be direct with you," he said, which was both a relief and a warning. "The Board of Trustees convened an emergency session yesterday evening at the request of its chair. A motion was passed to initiate a formal review of your scholarship eligibility, pending investigation into what the motion terms 'conduct inconsistent with the values and reputation of St. Pellan Academy.'"

I heard the words. Processed them. Felt the cold spread outward from my sternum to my fingertips.

"What conduct?" I asked, and I was proud of how even my voice came out.

Dr. Fairbanks looked genuinely uncomfortable, the kind of discomfort that came from a man who prided himself on institutional fairness being asked to execute something that was neither fair nor particularly institutional.

"The motion references a public incident in the main hallway yesterday afternoon, described as behavior unbecoming of a scholarship recipient and damaging to the school's community standards."

Kissing my boyfriend. That was the conduct. Kissing Bryson Doyle in front of a crowd of students, refusing to be invisible, refusing to stay in whatever lane Cole had decided a girl like me belonged in.

"I want to be clear," Dr. Fairbanks continued, "that this review has not concluded and no final determination has been made. You retain your scholarship in full for the duration of the investigation. However—" He paused, and I could see him choosing his words with the care of someone navigating a minefield. "The timeline is accelerated. A determination is expected within seventy-two hours."

Seventy-two hours. Three days. I had three days before Cole Doyle potentially dismantled the entire architecture of my future with a phone call and a board meeting.

I thanked Dr. Fairbanks—which felt absurd, thanking the messenger for the message—and walked back out into the hallway, where the school continued its ordinary Tuesday morning around me with complete indifference to the fact that my life was quietly being taken apart.

I found a quiet corner near the east stairwell and typed out a message to Bryson with hands that I had to consciously steady: [He moved against my scholarship. Emergency board review. 72 hours. I need to see you.]

His reply came back in under a minute: [I'm on my way.]

---

I found him near the athletic wing, coming from the direction of the locker rooms, and the sight of his face stopped me in my tracks for just a moment—his left cheek was bruised in shades of purple and yellow that makeup couldn't quite conceal, the skin tight and swollen along the line of his jaw.

He'd tried to minimize it, clearly, but there was no amount of careful grooming that disguised the fact that a grown man had put his hand across his own son's face.

He reached me in a few long strides and took both my hands in his, searching my expression before I'd even said a word.

"Tell me exactly what they said," he said, his voice low and tight with something that wasn't quite anger yet but was heading there.

I did. I told him everything Dr. Fairbanks had said, the language of the motion, the seventy-two-hour timeline, the careful bureaucratic framing of what was transparently an act of retaliation.

As I spoke I watched Bryson's jaw tighten progressively, watched the muscle work in his cheek above the bruising, watched his hands squeeze mine harder without him seeming to realize he was doing it.

When I finished, the silence between us lasted about four seconds.

"No," he said.

"Bryson—"

"No." He stepped back, releasing my hands, and I could see something shift in him—not breaking, not panic, but the particular quality of stillness that preceded a decision already made. "He doesn't get to do this. He doesn't get to go after you because he can't control me. He can't."

I felt the shape of what he was thinking before he said it, and my stomach dropped. "Bryson, wait—"

"I'll find you after," he said, and he was already moving toward the athletic wing with the focused purposefulness of someone who had made up their mind and was done arguing with himself about it.

I watched him go, and I couldn't find the words to call him back—not when he was standing there with his father's handprint still visible on his face and Cole's retaliation spreading outward to touch everything in both our lives.