Nadine Fuller stood near the committee room door. When she saw Ren, she nodded. A small, precise nod. The nod of someone who has done what they said they would do.
And there were others.
Ren did not know all of them. Three women she had not met before stood together near the water fountain at the end of the corridor. One of them caught Ren's eye and held it for a moment. There was a recognition in it that was not personal. It was the recognition of a shared experience. The way people sometimes look at each other across a room when they understand, without needing to say it, that they have been in the same place.
Tusk came to stand beside her.
"Word got around," he said quietly. "Fuller mentioned to two faculty members that the hearing was proceeding. Marsh mentioned it to three others. People came."
Ren looked down the corridor at Deanna, who had stopped when she saw the people there and was looking at them with something on her face that Ren did not have a word for and did not try to name.
"They are not all here to testify," Tusk said. "Most of them are just here to be present. To make it visible that this is happening, and that people know." He paused. "Sometimes that is what the institution needs to understand. That it is being watched."
Ren looked at the committee room door.
"Let's go in," she said.
The committee room held a long table at the front, where five faculty and administrative members of the student conduct committee were seated. Behind a smaller table to one side sat a representative from the dean of students office.
There was a respondent's table, where Derek Stole sat with two others beside him. One of them had the polished, prepared look of someone who had been formally briefed. The other was a man in his 50s, wearing a suit that had not been bought for a university disciplinary hearing, but for a different kind of room entirely.
Ren noted him. She noted the suit and the posture, and the way he sat slightly forward with his hands on the table, in the manner of someone accustomed to this kind of proceeding. She noted that he was not a university official. She made a mental note to establish on the record who he was.
She sat at the complainant's table with Deanna beside her. Seth sat in the witness chairs along the side wall. Professor Marsh sat directly behind Ren, with the binders on her lap. Coach Tusk sat beside Marsh. Fuller stood near the door, not seated, in her capacity as the administrator managing the proceeding.