And in a dorm room on the third floor of Carver Hall, a girl from Harlan County drank her water and watched the morning arrive.
She was ready.
* * *
Thirty-three days.
That number sat in the back of Reagan's mind like a quiet clock. Not anxious, just present. The way a deadline is present when you respect it enough to keep track.
She'd been at Caldwell for nine days now.
In those nine days, she had learned the layout of every building she needed. The fastest route from Carver Hall to the gym. The professor who locked her classroom early, and the one who left it open. The maintenance schedule for the ground floor, important because the gym was cleanest and emptiest between 5:00 and 6:30 in the morning.
She had also learned the shape of Shane Whitfield's operation. Not completely, but enough.
Shane worked in layers.
Reagan had started to think of it like an onion. Not because it was complex, exactly, but because every time you pulled back one layer, there was another one underneath. And the further in you got, the more it stung.
The outermost layer was social. The rumors, the withdrawal of access, the invisible tax on anyone who chose to associate with Reagan. That layer had been in place since day three and was now running smoothly on its own. Shane didn't have to maintain it actively. The social ecosystem did it for him.
The second layer was academic.
Reagan had noticed it first in Thursday's sociology class. The small interruptions when she spoke. The whispered exchange between Pierce and Derek, timed precisely for when Reagan was mid-sentence, designed to break her rhythm without being overt enough to get a reaction from Dr. Gale.
Small things. Easy to dismiss individually. Designed to accumulate.
The third layer, Reagan didn't fully see yet. But she felt it, the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm arrives.
Something was being built. Something more deliberate than social friction or classroom noise.
She wrote all of it down every evening. Dates, times, what was said, who was present.
Dr. Gale had said the truth needs enough paper to stand on.
Reagan was building the paper.
* * *
On Monday of the second week, the campaign moved into the third layer.
Reagan found out from Delia. Not because Delia was being dramatic about it. Delia wasn't dramatic by nature.
She just came back to the room after dinner and sat on her bed and didn't immediately say anything. Which was unusual enough that Reagan looked up from her reading.
"Something happened," Reagan said.
Delia looked at her.
"Someone filed a complaint with the academic integrity office," she said.
"About me?"
Reagan closed her book. "Saying what?"
"That I submitted work that wasn't my own."
Delia's voice was steady. She'd had time to process this on the walk back.
"Specifically, the first response paper for Intro to Research Methods. Which I stayed up until 1:00 in the morning writing myself."
"Who filed it?"