“The Stole family made a substantial donation to the new athletics facility,” Tusk said. “Two years ago. The building was named after them last spring.” Ren set the folder down. “What was the donation amount?” she asked. “Publicly reported as 1.4 million.” She was quiet for a moment. “That is not a reason to protect someone from consequences,” she said. “No,” Tusk said. “It is not. But it is a reason that institutions sometimes try to.”
She nodded slowly. She was not surprised. She had understood from the newspaper archives that there was a structure here, a set of relationships and dependencies that had been allowed to calcify over time into something that looked from the inside like the natural order of things. The problem with structures like that was not that the people inside them were all bad. Most of them were not. The problem was that the structure itself rewarded certain behaviors and punished others. And over time, people learned without ever quite deciding to to behave accordingly.
That was worth understanding, not because it excused anything, but because understanding the structure was the first step to knowing where it could be challenged. “I have a meeting with Nadine Fuller this afternoon,” Ren said. Tusk nodded. “She is a good person in a difficult position.” “I know. I am not going to make her position more difficult than it needs to be.” She paused. “But I am going to ask her some specific questions.” “What do you need from me?”
She looked at him directly. “I need to know if you still have contact with any of the three previous complainants.” He was quiet for a moment. “One of them,” he said. “She graduated two years ago. She is in Columbus now. We stayed in touch.” “Would she be willing to talk?” He considered it. “I don’t know. I can ask.” “That is all I am asking.”
She stood up. “One more thing,” Tusk said. She stopped. “Derek Stole is going to find out you filed a report. It may already be happening. When he does, he is not going to leave it alone.” He looked at her steadily. “I want to make sure you understand what that means practically.” “I understand it practically,” she said. He held her gaze for a moment longer, then he nodded. She left.
The corridor smelled like rubber and cleaner and old effort. She walked back out into the gray morning and went to class.
The afternoon meeting with Nadine Fuller was in Fuller’s office on the second floor of the student affairs building, a room that smelled like printer toner and had a bowl of hard candy on the desk that Ren suspected had been there since the previous academic year. Fuller was sixty-four years old with reading glasses pushed up on her head and the expression of someone who had been doing a difficult job for a long time and had recently started questioning whether the difficulty was inherent to the job or specific to this institution.
She had short silver hair and a cardigan the color of a stormy sky and hands that moved when she talked, which they did as soon as Ren sat down. “I want to be straightforward with you,” Fuller said. “And I want you to know that what I say in this room is said with genuine concern for your well-being and not as a representative of any institutional position.” “I appreciate that,” Ren said.
“I received your formal report this morning. I also received a phone call this morning from the office of the associate provost for student athletics.” She let that sentence sit between them for a moment. “The call expressed concern that the timing of your report coming the day after an alleged incident might reflect an escalating conflict between two students rather than a straightforward conduct violation.”