Ren set down her tea. “I need the three previous complaint files in their original form,” she said. “Not the summaries in the current system, the originals before they were closed. If those files exist anywhere outside the managed record.” Marsh was very still for a moment. Then she stood up. She went to the bookshelf on the far left wall, the one that held not books, but a series of labeled binders organized by year. She ran her finger along them. She pulled out one from six years ago and one from seven years ago. She set them on the desk in front of Ren.
“I was on the faculty conduct review committee for twelve years,” she said. “When a complaint is filed, committee members receive copies of the supporting documents for review. I kept mine. I keep everything.” She paused. “When the digital records were migrated to the new system four years ago, certain documents were not transferred. I noticed this at the time. I made additional copies.” Ren looked at the binders. “That is one thing,” Marsh said. “What is the second?”
Ren looked up at her. “Deanna Marsh,” she said. “No relation. Columbus civil engineering.” Something moved across the professor’s face. Not surprise exactly. The expression of someone who has just discovered that two separate things they have been carrying alone have found each other. “You know her,” Ren said. “She was one of my students,” Marsh said quietly. “She was one of the best students I have taught in thirty-one years. She withdrew her complaint in her second year. I have thought about her frequently since.”
“Coach Tusk has been in contact with her,” Ren said. “She may be willing to provide a formal statement about the circumstances under which she withdrew.” Marsh sat back down. She was quiet for a moment. The office was very still. Outside the window, the Stole Athletic Center caught the last of the late afternoon light and held it in its glass facade. “What do you need me to do?” Marsh said. Ren told her.
That evening, Ren walked home through the campus as the last of the day’s light left the sky. The oak trees were dark shapes against the early dark. The lamp posts came on one by one as she passed them. A few other students moved along the paths in pairs, talking, not looking at her.
She was thinking about Deanna Marsh in Columbus, and the decision she was weighing overnight. She was thinking about what it costs to come back to something you have tried to put down. The weight of reopening something that you have spent two years learning to carry without it pulling at you every day. She knew that cost personally, not in the same way. But she knew what it was to close a door on something that mattered and to build a whole new life in the space on the other side of that door. She knew what it asked of a person to walk back toward it.
She could not make that decision for Deanna. She could not make it easier or lighter or less costly than it was. What she could do was make sure that if Deanna came back, she did not come back alone.
She let herself into her apartment. She put the kettle on. She took the velvet pouch out of her backpack and set it on the desk. She sat down and opened the evidence folder on her laptop and went through everything in it methodically. The way she would approach a technical problem, looking for gaps, looking for assumptions she had made that needed to be verified, looking for the places where the structure she was building could be made stronger.
She worked for two hours. She found three things that needed to be checked and added them to the second column. She found that the first column was now longer than the second. She closed the laptop. She looked at the velvet pouch. She thought about her father’s gym, about the Saturday mornings she had spent on those mats at ages eight and nine and ten, learning the beginning of a language that had taken her years to become fluent in. Learning that the strongest position was not the one that used the most force. It was the one with the most information, the most patience, the most honest reading of what was actually in front of you.