Something moved across the professor's face. Not surprise, exactly. The expression of someone who has just discovered that two separate things they have been carrying alone have found each other.
"You know her," Ren said.
"She was one of my students," Marsh said quietly. "She was one of the best students I have taught in 31 years. She withdrew her complaint in her second year. I have thought about her frequently since."
"Coach Tusk has been in contact with her," Ren said. "She may be willing to provide a formal statement about the circumstances under which she withdrew."
Marsh sat back down. She was quiet for a moment. The office was very still. Outside the window, the Stole Athletics Center caught the last of the late afternoon light and held it in its glass facade.
"What do you need me to do?" Marsh said.
Ren told her.
That evening, Ren walked home through the campus as the last of the day's light left the sky. The oak trees were dark shapes against the early dark. The lamp posts came on one by one as she passed them. A few other students moved along the paths in pairs, talking, not looking at her.
She was thinking about Deanna Marsh in Columbus, and the decision she was weighing overnight. She was thinking about what it costs to come back to something you have tried to put down. The weight of reopening something that you have spent 2 years learning to carry without it pulling at you every day.
She knew that cost personally. Not in the same way. But she knew what it was to close a door on something that mattered, and to build a whole new life in the space on the other side of that door. She knew what it asked of a person to walk back toward it.
She could not make that decision for Deanna. She could not make it easier or lighter or less costly than it was. What she could do was make sure that if Deanna came back, she did not come back alone.
She let herself into her apartment. She put the kettle on. She took the velvet pouch out of her backpack and set it on the desk. She sat down and opened the evidence folder on her laptop and went through everything in it methodically, the way she would approach a technical problem. Looking for gaps. Looking for assumptions she had made that needed to be verified. Looking for the places where the structure she was building could be made stronger.
She worked for 2 hours. She found three things that needed to be checked and added them to the second column.