Chapter 31 Wren Tells Callum

Chapter 31 Wren Tells Callum
POV: Wren

He knows about Jamie.
Four words and I was already moving, walking fast toward the library entrance where Callum was standing with his phone still turned toward me and the afternoon going on around us like nothing had shifted.
"Who sent that," I said.
"Unknown number. New one." He pocketed the phone. "Third unknown number this week."
"Someone inside the operation who keeps finding new ways to warn us." I kept my voice low, not because anyone was nearby but because low felt like the right register for what we were doing. "Same pattern as the locker note. Same pattern as the library text. Someone who knows what's moving before it moves."
"And right now what's moving is Jamie."
"Yes."
We walked. Not toward anywhere specific, just away from the administration building and the conference room and the recorded conversation still sitting on my phone. Movement felt better than standing still when something was closing in from a direction you couldn't fully see yet.
I called Carol's number. It rang four times and went to voicemail, which it had never done before, Carol always picked up, Carol had been picking up on the second ring since the first call. Voicemail meant the phone was on but she was not answering, which meant she already knew something was wrong and was being careful.
I left nothing on the voicemail. Hung up.
"Tonight," I said to Callum. "My place. Bring the folder."
He was there at seven with the folder and two coffees and said nothing about the coffees, just put them on the desk the way he put things on the desk now, without asking, without making it a production, just there because they were useful.
I played him the recording from the beginning.
He listened the whole way through without moving, without asking me to pause, without reacting visibly to any of it except once, at four and a half minutes, when the foundation's relationship with the oversight committee came through the speaker and something in his expression did a quick thing and then settled back.
When it finished I moved the timestamp to five forty-six and played the six-minute section again without him asking.
Your scholarship has been a point of interest since your first semester.
He sat back.
"He knew about you before you enrolled," he said. "We were right."
"We were right," I said. "And now it's in his own voice."
"The complaint." He looked at the phone on the desk. "He submitted it, or Thrace submitted it on his instruction, to put something in front of the scholarship committee before your review. Something that gives them a reason to delay or deny that doesn't look like interference."
"It looks like a conduct concern from an anonymous student," I said. "Which is how those things always look."
"He is trying to get you out of the story before the story runs."
"I know."
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the desk, at the folder, at the recording still visible on the phone screen. Then he looked at me directly.
"What do you need," he said.
Not what's the plan. Not what do you want to do. Those were questions about next steps, about strategy, about the investigation. This was different and I registered the difference before I had a word for why it was different.
I looked at the question.
It sat there in a language I understood grammatically but was slower at than I should have been. What do you need. Not what can we do. Not what's the next move. What do you, specifically, need.
I looked at the desk. At the sourced legal version of the draft on my laptop. At the folder with fourteen months of gambling arrangement documentation. At the recording. At the conduct concern document with its word-for-word description of an agreement that only two people had signed.
"The board records," I said. "From Crestfield. The original ones, not the amended version in the public record. The ones that show what decision was made, when it was made, and what was changed afterward and by whose instruction." I picked up my pen. "Those records are the difference between a story that can be disputed and a story that cannot. Everything else I have can be explained away individually. The board records show the whole sequence in institutional documentation."
Callum looked at me. "You know who has them."
It wasn't a question. He had been in enough of these conversations to know when I said something with that specific flatness that I was not theorizing.
"Yes," I said.
"Jamie?"
"No. Jamie has the emails. The emails show the communication between Thrace's firm and Crestfield's administration. They're essential but they're correspondence. The board records are official minutes. They show the formal decision-making process and where it was altered." I put the pen down. "The person who has them has been sitting on them for three years. They sent me the original article with the three circled names. They've been inside this operation the whole time and they've been trying to hand me pieces of it without surfacing themselves."
Callum went still.
"The person who left the note in your locker," he said.
"Yes."
"You know who it is."
I looked at the laptop screen. The draft. The legal version with all its careful sourcing and all its documented connections running back to Thrace and Marcus and a coach who was now a former employee with personal reasons.
"I have a name," I said. "I've had it for four days. I've been waiting until I had enough of everything else that approaching them wouldn't spook them." I looked at Callum. "I have enough now."
His phone buzzed on the desk. He looked at it.
Then he turned it toward me and his face had gone back to the very still version, the one that was doing structural work.
A news alert. Local outlet, timestamped eleven minutes ago.
Crestfield High School board announces emergency session. Agenda: review of historical records and administrative decisions. Session open to press.
The board records were about to become public.
Someone had forced the session before I could get to them first.