As Moreno puts her glasses back on, her eyes are wet, and she’s not hiding it. “Is this true, Sloane?”
I nod.
“First, I’m sorry this happened to you,” she says. “And secondly, this is the best piece of freshman writing I’ve read in a decade.”
“Thank you,” I say, so ungracefully grateful that something has fallen my way this week that I can’t hide my relief or my happiness.
“The woman at the center becomes the evidence for her own mishandling.” She reads my own sentence back to me, and in her voice it sounds like an argument instead of a wound. “If you want to build on this, I’ll support your application for a summer grant.”
I take a breath and let it sink into my lungs, relieved and content and at peace in a way I haven’t been since before I walked into the kitchen that night at Ironwood House. Because that sentence is proof that I can win at something, and it has nothing to do with them.
Not Harrison, not Mason, not Rowan.
This is mine.
It’s proof that my mind works, that my pain is legible, and that I belong.
I don’t need to be the Halden Girl.
Just Sloane.
“I’d like that,” I say, and my voice cracks on the last word, and Moreno pretends not to notice, which is how I know she’s good at this.
“The application’s due in a week.” She squares the essay against the desk and slides it into her folder. “And Sloane? Don’t make it smaller, okay?”
I nod, pick up my bag, and make it to the hallway before my eyes start to sting. This crying is different from the last time I left this office. That day, she looked at my mask and told me it was bullshit. But today, she saw me and said I belonged.
I take a minute to compose myself, still flushed but in a kind of sad-happy way, still mourning what it seems I’ve lost with Rowan even as I celebrate what just happened in that office with Moreno.
Outside, the quad is full of the usual late-afternoon traffic, and I notice something I haven’t let myself notice in days: nobody’s watching me. Not the careful, half-beat-late not-looking of a week ago.
The gossip has gone quiet.
The post came down — Luca just saidgive it a dayand looked pleased with himself, and nobody would tell me more than that — but stuff like that doesn’t disappear entirely, and I’ve decided I have to learn to live in a world where that’s true.
It’s part of why owning it with Moreno’s piece felt so good.
Across the quad, Luca clocks me and his whole face opens into a grin, and he lifts a hand like I’m someone it’s good to run into. I lift mine back. And I know why. Luca’s a Raven, and standing close to the team is its own kind of cover.
I pull out my phone and call my mother before I can talk myself out of it.
She picks up on the second ring.
“Sloane,” she says. “I was going to call you this afternoon like usual.”
“I know.” I smile and half-sob. “I’m calling you.”
There’s a pause, and I can hear her recalibrating, because I don’t initiate these calls. She calls, I answer, she manages, I comply. The choreography has been in place for a while now, and if there’s one thing Elise Avery doesn’t like, it’s surprises.
“How are you?” she asks.
“I’m fine, Mom,” I say. “A professor just said she loved something I wrote, and she wants to put it forward for grant funding to build it out…”
“That’s wonderful,” she says, like she’s doing something else as she speaks to me. “What’s it about?”
I pause, because I know I’m about to set a trap, and I hope like hell she doesn’t walk into it. “It’s about what happened with Harrison.”
Silence, one beat too long. Then she steps into it. “Is that wise, Sloane? Putting all that business in writing?”
