She read it. She took a photo of the screen with her second phone, the old one she kept charged for exactly the kind of situation where you needed a record of something that might be deleted. Then she added the photo to the evidence folder.
Then she set her phone down and went back to her notes.
Seth was watching her. "What was that?" he asked.
"Someone who thinks this is the kind of thing that stops," she said.
She kept writing.
The following morning, Ren arrived at Professor Marsh's classroom 5 minutes early and took a seat in the front row. Not behind the pillar. The front row, where the sight lines were clear and the light was good, and there was no structural obstacle between her and the board.
When Marsh walked in, she noted this without comment. She set her briefcase down and arranged her notes. Students filtered in. The room filled. Marsh began the lecture.
40 minutes in, she assigned a group problem and moved among the tables. When she reached the front row, she paused beside Ren's desk. She looked at Ren's notes. They were thorough. More thorough than the lecture required, with additional annotations in the margins that indicated independent reading. The habit of someone who comes to class having already done the work, and uses the lecture to deepen rather than establish.
"You're the student who was placed in the back corner on Tuesday," Marsh said quietly, for Ren's ears alone.
"Yes," Ren said.
"How is your view from the front?"
"Much better," Ren said.
Marsh looked at her for a moment over the top of her reading glasses. It was the look of someone who has been teaching long enough to read a situation in a small number of details.
"Come by my office at 5," she said.
It was not a question.
"Yes," Ren said.
Marsh's office was on the third floor of the engineering building. A room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a window that looked out over the section of campus where the old gymnasium had been, before it was demolished to make way for the Stole Athletics Center. Marsh had a framed photograph of the old gymnasium on the wall behind her desk. Ren noticed it when she walked in. She suspected it had been placed there deliberately.
Marsh poured two cups of tea without asking whether Ren wanted one and set one in front of her.
"You're being talked about," Marsh said. She sat across the desk, both hands around her own cup. "Among the faculty, I mean. Not loudly, but I hear things."
"What are they saying?" Ren asked.