I knew what Desmond's people had found within an hour of Vivian's warning, because there was exactly one thing in my past ugly enough to be worth digging for, and the moment she said "scholarship file," my stomach dropped with the sick, specific certainty of a person watching an old mistake finally catch up to her.
"The Whitfield Fellowship," I said, before Vivian could ask. "Sophomore year. I need you both to hear this from me before you hear it from a headline."
Julian went very still across the table, the same controlled stillness I'd learned to recognize as him bracing for something he suspected would hurt. "Tell us."
"I applied for it under financial hardship criteria that were technically true but not the full picture. My mother had just been let go from the Fitzgeralds' house — t
