I wait until Thursday afternoon to show him.
I've been carrying my phone around for two days like it's evidence at a crime scene. Which, I'm starting to think, it is.
Eiden's between meetings when I catch him in the hallway outside the student union. He's got his jacket on, keys in his hand. He looks like a person who is always on his way somewhere more important.
"Hey." I step in front of him. "I need two minutes."
He slows. Checks his watch. "I have a budget meeting at four."
"Two minutes."
He stops.
I pull up the forum app and hand him my phone. "Seventeen threads," I say. "In three days. All anonymous. All about me."
He takes the phone. Scrolls. His face doesn't change. That's the thing about Eiden — he has a public face and a private face, and lately I can't tell which one I'm getting.
He hands it back.
"People talk, Marley." His voice is even. Almost gentle. The way you talk to someone who is overreacting. "If you didn't give them material, they wouldn't have anything to say."
I stand there.
I wait for the next sentence. The one where he says he'll look into it. The one where he says this isn't okay. The one where he is, even slightly, on my side.
He adjusts his jacket collar.
"I have to go," he says.
"Right." I pocket my phone. "I have a library shift anyway."
I turn before he can say anything else. Not that he was going to.
The stairwell is empty. I sit on the third step from the bottom and open my notebook. My pen moves without shaking.
Date. Time. His exact words, in quotes.
*If you didn't give them material, they wouldn't have anything to say.*
I close the notebook. Stand up. Go to work.
***
The library is quiet at nine p.m. Just the hum of the HVAC and the occasional click of a keyboard. I finish shelving the returns on the fourth floor and settle into my corner at the research terminal.
I have forty minutes before I need to start closing duties. I open my scholarship application folder out of habit, then close it. I submitted Friday. It's done.
I open a new browser tab instead.
Cadence Hawkins's Chancellor's Merit Scholarship thesis is publicly archived in the university repository. Forty-six pages. *Structural Inequity and Institutional Memory: A Framework for Understanding Wealth Disparity in American Higher Education.*
I almost laugh at the title.
I start reading.
The first chapter hits me immediately. The theoretical framework. It's dense and precise — the kind of writing that knows exactly which scholars to cite and why, that builds an argument with the confidence of someone who has lived inside academic literature for years. The sentences are long and controlled. The vocabulary is specific without being showy.
I read it twice.
Then I skip to the introduction.
And I stop.
The introduction reads like a different person wrote it. The sentences are shorter. The transitions are clunky. There's a phrase in the second paragraph — *it is important to note* — that no one who wrote chapter one would ever use. The conclusion has the same problem. Vague where chapter one was precise. Warm where chapter one was clinical. Like someone summarized a paper they didn't fully understand.
I go back to chapter one. Read a paragraph. Go to the conclusion. Read a paragraph.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
It's not subtle, once you see it. Two voices. Two writers. One of them knew what they were doing. The other one was filling in the edges.
I open my notebook.
I write down the page numbers. Chapter one, pages seven through nineteen. Introduction, pages one through three. Conclusion, pages forty-two through forty-six. I write down the specific phrases that don't match. I note the citation style shift in the footnotes — chapter one uses a consistent format, the introduction drops two citations entirely.
I write: *Two distinct writing voices. Framework chapters: graduate-level fluency. Intro/conclusion: undergraduate approximation. Possible ghostwriter for core chapters — or reverse.*
I underline *reverse* and sit back.
If Cadence wrote the introduction and conclusion herself — the easy parts, the parts that frame the argument without having to make it — and paid someone else to write the hard middle, that's not sloppy. That's strategic. That's someone who knows exactly how much she can fake and exactly where she needs to buy the rest.
I look at the thesis title again.
*Structural Inequity and Institutional Memory.*
She submitted a paper about wealth disparity in higher education that she didn't write. Using money her father gave her. For a scholarship meant to reward academic merit.
I close the browser. Stack my notes. Cap my pen.
I have fifteen minutes before closing duties. I use them to write down three more things: what a Venmo transaction record looks like, how long university repositories keep submission metadata, and the name of the graduate writing center where advanced thesis consultations are logged.
Then I get up and start turning off the lights.
