“Justice.”
She nodded slowly. “Good. Now tell me whether you want justice more than you want revenge.”
I stared at her.
“They are not the same thing,” she said. “Revenge is immediate. It feels good for five minutes and complicates your life for five years. Justice requires timing.”
“If I expose him now,” I said, “my parents could stop paying tuition.”
“Yes.”
“I could lose the semester.”
“Yes.”
“And Landon might still find a way to explain it away.”
“Yes.”
Dr. Sterling waited.
I looked at the Washington brochure pinned beneath a paperweight on her desk.
“I want my future first,” I said.
For the first time since I had known her, Dr. Sterling smiled openly.
“Then we prepare.”
That night, I submitted my transfer application. Then I went to Sunday dinner five days later and listened to Landon talk about a “breakthrough” I had made two years earlier.
I smiled when I needed to. I passed the rolls. I asked Savannah about wedding planning. I let my mother fuss over Landon’s schedule and my father praise his discipline.
Nobody suspected anything.
Not yet.
Sometimes silence is not weakness.
Sometimes silence is a locked drawer.
Three months later, an email arrived before sunrise. I woke up because my phone buzzed on the crate beside my mattress. My apartment was half dark, the radiator clanking like old pipes in a cheap building always do. I opened the message and read the first word.
Congratulations.
I sat up.
I had been accepted to the university in Washington, DC. With funding. Not enough to live lavishly, but enough to live. Enough to leave. Enough that my father’s tuition threat, if it ever came, would arrive too late to matter.
For the first time in my life, I had an exit with my name on it.
I called Dr. Sterling before I called my mother.
“I got in,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
I blinked. “You know?”
“They copied me on the fellowship notice.”
“You didn’t say anything.”