They walked out onto the campus in the late afternoon light, five of them, into the October air that was sharp and clean and carried the smell of leaves and distant cold. The oak trees were almost bare now. The sky above the campus was the particular blue of late afternoon in autumn. Deep and clear.
Deanna walked beside Ren. After a moment, she said, "I thought it would feel bigger when it was over."
Ren thought about that.
"I think it will," she said. "Not right now. Right now, it just feels like it's over. The bigger feeling comes later, when you have had time to understand what actually happened."
Deanna was quiet for a moment.
"What did actually happen?" she said.
Ren looked at the campus around her. At the brick buildings and the lamp posts coming on one by one in the early dark, and the students moving between them, unaware of what had just concluded in a committee room on the fourth floor of the student affairs building.
"A few people decided not to wait," she said. "For someone else to go first."
They walked to the student union. They sat at a table by the windows, the five of them, and ordered food and ate it while the campus darkened outside, and the lamp posts made their small circles of gold on the paths.
They talked and did not talk. Seth explained something about his mechanics homework to Deanna that made her laugh, with the sudden, unguarded laugh of someone who had not laughed without reservation in a while. Professor Marsh told a story about a student from 1998 that had nothing to do with any of this and was simply funny. And Tusk drank his tea and was mostly quiet, but had the quality of someone who was exactly where he wanted to be.
After a while, Ren excused herself and stepped outside for a few minutes.
She stood on the steps of the student union in the cold October air. She reached into her jacket pocket and took out the velvet pouch. She held it in her palm, the familiar weight of it, and looked at it in the light from the door behind her.
She thought about Tuesday morning. Walking onto this campus with her backpack and her map and her careful, deliberate invisibility. The plan to be unknown. The plan to simply be a student, undefined by what she could do or had done.
She thought about what her father had said. "Let them think it. The truth will introduce itself when it needs to."
She turned the pouch over in her hand.