"2021."
He was quiet for a moment. He had watched that championship. He remembered the final match. He remembered the call that had gone the other way at the end.
"I watched that final," he said.
"I know. You wrote about it in the judo coaches' newsletter."
He looked at her steadily. "The judges got it wrong."
"Maybe," she said. "Or maybe I let it get too close."
He kept looking at her. She did not look away, and she did not fill the silence with anything unnecessary. And that told him as much as everything else had.
"Why are you here?" he asked. "Why does no one on this campus know who you are?"
She was quiet for a moment. When she answered, her voice was measured, but underneath it there was something genuine. Something she had decided, carefully, that she was willing to say out loud.
"Because I wanted to find out if I could be a person without being an athlete first," she said. "I wanted to know what it felt like when people saw me before they knew what I could do. Whether they would treat me the same way."
Tusk nodded slowly. It was the nod of someone who understood something that had taken a long time to come to.
"And how has that been going?" he asked.
A pause.
"Today was difficult," she said.
He looked at her left cheek. The redness there had mostly faded, but not entirely. He had spent enough years around athletic injuries and the aftereffects of physical contact to recognize what he was looking at.
"Derek Stole," he said.
She did not confirm or deny. She did not need to.
"He has done this before," Tusk said. His voice was level, but there was something underneath it. Something that had been there for a long time and had not found the right place to land. "Not always this directly. But the pattern has been there for 4 years, and every time, the institution has found a way to make it quiet."
"I know," Ren said.
He looked at her. "You know?"
"I read the student newspaper archives before I transferred here. His name comes up in the letters section. Always vague, always framed as a misunderstanding, always resolved without anything on record."
He studied her face for a long moment. "You transferred here knowing he was a student here."
She did not answer that question directly. She picked up the small towel she had set on the fence post and wiped her hands with it, folding it carefully before setting it back down.
"I transferred here because Harwick has one of the better mechanical engineering programs in the state," she said. "And because I was tired of being somewhere small where everyone already knew my whole story."