Chapter 24 The Scandal Hiding in Plain Sight

Chapter 24 The Scandal Hiding in Plain Sight
POV: Lila Monroe

I did not close the laptop.
That was the first decision, made somewhere below the level of deliberate choice, because closing the laptop would have meant stopping, and stopping would have meant sitting with what I had found without continuing to understand it, and I needed to understand it before I could decide what to do with it.
I opened a second tab. Then a third.
The annual reports went back seven years in the public database. I started at the reallocation year and worked forward through each one, carefully tracking the three programs, and then backward from the reallocation year to see what they had looked like before the motion was filed. The numbers were clear once you knew where to look, and the pattern, once visible, was not subtle. Three programs, steady and funded and functional for four years, and then in one quarter, gutted.
Not cut. Gutted was the right word. Reduced to amounts that were nominal, kept on paper, names still listed in the university's marketing materials where they showed up in the section about supporting diverse student populations.
The marketing materials still listed all three of them by name, with language about the university's commitment to access and equity. The funding had disappeared three years ago and the language had not been updated.
I cross-referenced the reallocation figure with the board minutes, which were also publicly available, shorter and more heavily redacted than the financial records but still present. The motion had been filed under the heading of strategic endowment reallocation and the discussion section of the minutes was listed as closed, meaning no public record of what had actually been said in the room that day.
The finance subcommittee had five members. Edmund Kane's name was first. The second name I recognised as a trustee who had been introduced to me at the gala that evening, which was a detail I filed with a specific kind of steadiness that came from understanding how things were connected even when you did not yet know what to do with the connection.
I sat back from the screen.
The scholarship I held ran through the merit supplement program. That was one of the three that had been reduced. Which meant that three years ago, before I arrived at Westfield, before I had any decision to make about how to fund the gap, someone had created the gap.
Not accidentally. Not through general budget pressure. Through a specific motion at a specific meeting, approved unanimously, by five people whose names I now had.
I thought about my first semester at Westfield. The letter from the scholarship office explaining that my disbursement would be lower than the amount advertised in the programme materials, due to a recent program restructure that the letter did not explain further. I had been eighteen years old. I had read the letter and done the math in about four minutes and started looking for solutions within the week.
I had never gone back to ask why the program had been restructured. I had just adapted.
That was what I did. I adapted. I had been adapting to conditions other people created for as long as I could remember and I had never once stopped to consider who had set those conditions and why, because the conditions were real and the adaptation was what was required and there had not been time.
There had been two hundred and twelve other students enrolled in the same program during the academic year the reallocation happened.
I looked that number up. It was in the diversity report from three years ago, also public, also available, also completely accessible to anyone patient enough to look.
Two hundred and twelve students who had come to Westfield on merit supplements or financial hardship grants, who had received the same letter I had received, who had done their own math and found their own solutions, and none of it had been their fault, and the person who had created the condition that required those solutions had stood in front of me at a drinks table an hour ago and smiled at me like he was genuinely interested in what I would become.
Something settled in my chest that was not the cold from before. Something with more weight to it. The cold had been shock. This was different.
This was the specific feeling of understanding something completely for the first time after having lived inside it for years without knowing what it was.
This was not about me specifically. And it was also entirely about me. Both of those things were true at the same time, and the connection between them was Edmund Kane's name on a subcommittee list, and the gap in my scholarship, and the forum I had used to fill that gap, and the envelope under my door, and the fact that I was now sitting in his son's orbit in a green dress he had sent to my room.
I pulled up the subcommittee member list again and wrote all five names in my notebook, in order, with the date of the motion and the vote count beside each one.
Then I closed the financial records and opened a new document and started writing down everything I knew, chronologically, from the reallocation three years ago to the envelope this morning.
It took close to forty minutes. When I finished I had four pages. I read them back. Then I saved the document under a filename that looked like a course assignment and put the laptop away and picked up my phone.
It was late. Later than I usually called him, but Eli kept late hours anyway, and I needed to hear his voice, which was not something I would have admitted if asked but was true.
He picked up in two rings.
I said his name.
And then I stopped.
Because the quality of his "hey" was wrong. Not the tired wrong, not the in-a-lot-of-pain wrong that I had learned to read across three years of late calls and early calls and calls from hospital waiting rooms. This was a different wrong, the soft careful wrong of someone who had been braced for this call and had things they needed to say before I asked any questions.
"What happened," I said.
A pause. Just long enough.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "And I need you not to do anything for a minute after I tell you. Just listen."
I gripped the phone.
"Okay," I said quietly.