Chapter 272: Rumours

Sean walked through the university gate at eight forty-three on Friday morning.

The campus was doing its usual thing. Students moving between buildings. Someone’s music too loud for earphones to fully contain. The particular smell of ground coffee drifting from the building on the left that had the small café on the first floor.

He had his phone out.

He was reading Clara’s cap table notes, the ones she’d sent at seven forty-two despite the Saturday morning agreement, which he’d expected.

He was three paragraphs in when he felt the shift.

Not dramatic. Just the specific change in atmosphere that happened when a room or a space had been talking about something and the subject of that conversation had just walked into it.

He pocketed his phone.

Two students near the gate were talking in the hushed quality of people relaying something they considered significant. A girl Sean recognized from his economics class was standing with a friend by the bulletin board, her expression carrying the specific mix of concern and interest that accompanied campus gossip about something real rather than invented.

He heard the name as he passed.

Rebecca.

And then the word bruises.

Sean kept walking.

His pace didn’t change. His expression didn’t change. Business Insight fired quietly in the background, the way it always fired when something in his environment was worth reading properly.

He stopped at the café and bought a coffee.

[8 dollars spent]

[Balance: $68,671,267]

[16 dollars received — 2x baseline]

[New Balance: $68,671,275]

He sat at a table near the window and opened his phone and texted Max.

Anthony Ruiz. I need everything you have on him in the last three months. Financial records, any police contact, anything that exists.

Max replied in two minutes. Already pulling. Is this about what I think it’s about.

Yes, said Sean.

Give me an hour.

He put his phone down and drank his coffee and looked at the campus outside the window.

He’d known this was coming. Not the specific details. Just the shape of it. Anthony had always been the kind of person who needed to be the most significant thing in any room. In the first life, that had expressed itself through the company, through Rebecca, through the particular predatory competence of someone who identified what other people valued and positioned himself as the source of it.

In this life, without the company, without the shares, without the professional leverage the first timeline had eventually given him, that quality had apparently found a different expression.

Sean thought about the bruises.

He felt something that wasn’t quite anger. Something colder and more deliberate than anger.

He finished his coffee and went to his first class.

—---------------------

The rumors reached full velocity by eleven.

The specific story, assembled from three separate conversations Sean moved through during the morning, was that Rebecca had shown up to campus Wednesday with marks on her face that she’d covered with makeup. A girl named Petra from Rebecca’s social circle had seen her in the bathroom that morning and had apparently described what she’d seen under the makeup to at least four people since then.

By eleven the story had the particular confirmed quality that campus rumors achieved when they had a direct witness and a specific detail that was harder to dismiss than the usual vague allegations.

Sean sat through his marketing lecture and thought about nothing particularly connected to marketing.

Max’s update arrived at nine fifty-four, longer than the hour he’d promised and considerably more detailed than Sean had expected.

He read it in the corridor between classes.

Anthony Ruiz. Twenty-one years old. Dropped two of his five courses in the second week of the semester citing personal reasons. Financial records showed he’d been bouncing between three different credit accounts for the last six weeks, overlapping purchases suggesting he’d been using one card to cover minimum payments on another. Two noise complaints filed against his apartment building in the last month, both dismissed as insufficient for follow-up.

And one more thing.

A police report filed and then withdrawn two weeks ago. The type of report that got withdrawn most often when the person who filed it changed their mind under pressure.

Rebecca had filed a report.

And then taken it back.

Sean looked at his phone for a long moment. Then he texted Max.

The withdrawn report. Is there enough in the original filing to reopen it without Rebecca’s cooperation if additional documentation of a pattern exists.

Max replied immediately. Depends on the documentation. Some jurisdictions allow prosecution without victim cooperation if evidence is strong enough. Are you thinking about building a case.

I’m thinking about getting Anthony Ruiz in a room with a prosecutor who has enough to not need Rebecca’s cooperation, Sean typed.

A pause. That’s a different kind of task. More expensive. Takes longer. And Sean.

What, said Sean.

He hits women, said Max. I want to be the one who builds this. No charge.

Sean looked at that.

Build it, he typed.

Already started, said Max.

—-------

He saw her at one fifteen.

Rebecca.

She was coming out of the humanities building as he was walking past it, which was the specific kind of accidental intersection that happened on campuses because campuses were not large enough to avoid people you knew for very long.

She was wearing more makeup than usual. Sean’s eye went to it immediately, the careful layering on her left cheekbone, the specific coverage of someone who had taken time rather than applied makeup quickly.

She saw him at the same moment.

Something happened in her expression that was complicated and immediate. Surprise. Then something calculated sliding underneath the surprise. And then, a fraction of a second later, the visible effort of composing the expression she’d decided she wanted him to see.

Sean kept walking.

She stepped into his path.

Not aggressively. Just in the specific way of someone who had made a decision and was executing it.

"Sean," she said.

He stopped. Not because he wanted to. Because walking through her would have been a choice of its own and he wasn’t ready to make that choice yet.