The quiet after a storm is never truly peaceful; it’s merely heavy with the weight of everything that was destroyed.
By 3:00 PM, the marble steps outside the Westbridge Administration Building are empty, but the campus remains gripped in an eerie, watchful shock. News of Vicente Tavares being escorted off grounds by the Municipal Fraud Division has spread like wildfire through the gothic halls. Group chats are exploding, wealthy students whisper in huddled circles under the stone cloisters, and the Board of Trustees has called a mandatory closed-door session to handle the PR fallout.
My mother’s name is clean. The falsified affidavit was permanently expunged from court servers before it could ever be filed, and the ethics committee issued an official, formal letter confirming my Trustee
