She texted Derek and told him what she'd found. He texted back three words. I knew it. Then, what do we do? She texted Cole.
One message. It said, "I have 11 pages." He texted back four minutes later. One word, "Good." She turned off her light at 12:30 and lay in the dark and thought about Marcus.
She still hadn't been able to reach him. His number went straight to voicemail. She had left a message, careful clear, explaining who she was and why she was calling. She didn't know if he'd call back. She thought about him at that gas station running into Derek explaining what had happened like it was a story about someone else.
The way people tell stories about painful things when they have had long enough to get distance from them. She thought about what it had cost him. Not just the program, but the moment when he had to rearrange his understanding of what was possible for him. The moment when he had to look at the door he'd been trying to walk through and accept that it had been closed on purpose. She fell asleep with her notes on the desk and Dererick's list on her phone and a specific kind of anger in her chest.
Not the hot consuming kind, but the clean purposeful kind. The kind that doesn't burn you up. The kind that runs like an engine. The meeting with Dr. Reyes happened at 7:30 the next morning before Dr. Reyes first class. Emily laid the 11 pages on her desk.
Dr. Reyes read them without speaking. She was a compact woman in her 50s with reading glasses that she had a habit of touching when she was thinking hard and she touched them 11 times while reading Emily's documentation. Emily counted. When she finished, she set the pages down and looked at Emily over the top of her glasses. How did you get all of this in one night?
She said, I called them. Six of them in one night. The other three I'm still trying to reach. Dr. Reyes looked at the pages again. This is a pattern, Emily.
This isn't a manager having a bad day. This is a systematic. She stopped, started again. If these dates are accurate, he's been doing this for at least 18 months. Derek thinks longer.
He only started counting 14 months ago. And the district manager backed him up when my dad asked him to produce the policy over the phone in front of witnesses. Dr. Reyes took her glasses off. She set them on the desk. She looked at Emily the way people look at something when they're deciding how much of it they believe.
Not because they think the person is lying, but because the full weight of what they're hearing takes a moment to settle properly. This goes beyond the store. She said, "I think so, too." Emily said, "The district manager had to know the orders weren't being fulfilled. There are purchase order records.
There are state scholarship records. If nine approved orders are going into that store and the equipment isn't leaving the numbers, don't reconcile. Either nobody looked at the numbers or or someone looked and decided that wasn't their problem. Dr. Reyes stood. She walked to her window.
She had the posture of someone who had spent decades navigating institutional systems and had developed a precise understanding of exactly how institutions protect themselves. If the district manager covered for him, even passively, this becomes a liability issue for the corporation, not just a personnel issue for one store. She turned around. Emily, do you understand what you're sitting on? I think so.
You need legal advice before you go to the scholarship compliance office. If there's corporate level liability, filing a complaint through normal channels might trigger an internal investigation that buries the evidence rather than surfaces it. Emily had not thought about that. She thought about it. Now, "Who do I talk to?"
She asked. "There's a legal aid clinic at the university that handles consumer rights cases." "I know the supervising attorney. Her name is Janet Marsh. She's sharp and she doesn't mess around."
Dreas picked up her phone. "Let me call her right now. Is there a better time?" Emily looked at her notes at the 11 pages at the name Marcus Teller at the bottom of Dererick's list still unreached. "No," she said.
Right now is good. Janet Marsh had time at 2 that afternoon. Emily went to class in the morning. She sat in her structural mechanics lecture and took notes and answered two questions and felt the whole time like she was managing two separate versions of herself, the student in the seat and the person underneath who was running a constant background process, sorting information, building timelines, filling in the gaps in the picture that was becoming clearer and more damning with every hour. She reached Marcus Teller at 11:15 between lectures.
Standing in the hallway outside the engineering building, he answered on the fourth ring. Hello, Nah. Mr. Teller, my name is Emily Dawson. I'm a student at Montana Tech. I got your number from a former employee at Mountain Peak Supply in Silver Creek.
His name is Derek. He said you came into the store several times to pick up equipment for a welding certification program. A long silence. Yeah, Marcus said. His voice had the quality of someone who has been caught off guard by something from a direction they weren't watching.
That was a while ago. I know. I'm sorry to bring it up out of nowhere. Emily kept her voice steady. Direct.
I'm putting together documentation about what happened at that store. I've spoken to five other students who had the same experience you did. I was hoping you could tell me what happened from your end. Another silence longer this time. Why?
Marcus said, not hostile, just genuinely asking. What's it going to do? I don't know exactly, Emily said. But a man named Richard Caldwell decided that people like you and me didn't deserve what we were approved to receive. And I think enough of us talking about it at the same time might actually make something happen.
She paused. I can't promise you anything, but I can tell you I'm going to try. The silence this time lasted almost 10 seconds. She let it sit. He told me my scholarship organization wasn't on the approved list.