Deanna listened without interrupting. When Ren finished, Deanna was quiet for a moment.
"That is more than I had," she said.
"You didn't have two years of watching what happened to you as a blueprint," Ren said. "I did. You are part of why this is possible."
Deanna looked out at the oak trees. A leaf came loose from the nearest one and turned slowly in the still air before settling on the path.
"What do you need from me?" she said.
"A statement about what happened to your scholarship during the two days before your scheduled hearing. What was said to you, by whom. The exact language, as closely as you can recall it."
"I remember it exactly," Deanna said. There was no hesitation in her voice. The way you remember things that have cost you something.
"And I need you to be willing to say it in that room this afternoon," Ren said. "In front of the committee. On the record."
A pause. Not the pause of someone deciding. The pause of someone who has already decided and is taking one full breath before walking through the door.
"Yes," Deanna said.
They sat together on the bench for another few minutes. Not talking much. Just being there, in the particular solidarity of two people who had been in the same place at different times and were now, for the first time, in it at the same moment.
Then Ren stood up. "I'll show you where the committee room is," she said.
They walked together through the campus, past the oak trees and the fountain and the brick buildings. And the afternoon light was very clear and very cold, and made everything look sharper than usual, like the world had been defined in a higher resolution.
At 1:45, the corridor outside the student conduct committee room was not empty.
That was the first thing Ren noticed when she arrived. She had expected to walk into a procedural space. Institutional, contained. The formal machinery of a university doing its official business in the particular way universities do official business, which is carefully and without unnecessary witnesses.
Instead, there were people in the corridor.
Seth was there, with his notebook and his dark-rimmed glasses and his expression of someone who had made a decision and was fully committed to it. Professor Marsh was there, with the two binders under her arm and her reading glasses on their chain and the posture of 31 years of standing at the front of rooms. Coach Tusk stood beside her, straight-backed, with the quiet authority of someone who has nothing left to prove and therefore nothing to perform.