Chapter 64 INVENTORY PART TWO
Whitney was at her desk when Annabelle came back, hunched over her laptop in that exact way someone looks after pulling an all-nighter and stopped noticing the hours passing.
She looked up and saw the folder.
She was on her feet before Annabelle even closed the door.
“Well?”
Annabelle dropped David’s file on the desk.
Whitney opened it in seconds, her ink-stained fingers moving through the pages fast, like she’d been imagining this moment for five years. Her face shifted—hope, then confusion, then that controlled expression people wear when they’re trying to keep their feelings from running ahead of the facts.
She closed the folder.
Pressed both hands flat on the cover.
Looked at the desk.
Then looked up.
“There’s nothing here,” she said, her voice steady but tight, like she was holding herself together. “Clean transcript. Perfect attendance. It’s like someone went through and left just enough to prove he existed but took everything that showed he mattered.”
“I know,” Annabelle said. “But that’s not even the worst part.”
She slid her phone across the desk.
Whitney looked at the photo of the note.
Read it.
Read it again.
Her eyes scanned the lines and Annabelle watched her face go completely still—a rare thing.
“This is in your file,” Whitney said.
“Yes.”
“They profiled you. Before you even got here.”
“Yes.”
Whitney set the phone down carefully.
“How many of us do you think have files like this?”
Annabelle thought about Justin Court. How he always seemed to know just what to say, when to say it. She’d thought it was genuine. Now she wasn’t sure what genuine even meant in a place that had been building profiles on her before she’d unpacked a single box.
“I don’t know,” she said. “More than we want to know.”
“This is what happened to David,” Whitney said, her voice speeding up, like she was firing on all cylinders. “They don’t just recruit students here. They select them. Every scholarship kid, every legacy with something to prove, every person who came in with a weakness they could document and use.”
She looked Annabelle straight in the eye.
“We’re not students. We’re inventory.”
Annabelle looked down at the paperclip star in her palm.
One second.
Then she looked back at Whitney.
“What do we do about it?” she asked.
“We document everything first.”
Whitney was already moving, pulling out her notebook and flipping to a fresh page.
“Every file we can get. Every pattern we can map. We build the case like any case—piece by piece until it’s too solid to ignore.”
She paused.
“But we don’t do it alone. Not anymore.”
“The others,” Annabelle said.
“The others,” Whitney agreed.
“All of them. Tonight.”
Annabelle pulled a chair from the corner and sat down across from Whitney.
David’s file between them.
Dawn creeping in at the window, pale and thin, the campus still quiet below.
“Okay,” Annabelle said.
She put the paperclip star on the desk between them like it was evidence.
“Then let’s start.”