By the time Elena reached the quad the next morning, the rumor had already outgrown anything resembling the truth.
She heard three different versions before she'd even made it to her first class. In one, Professor Cole was some kind of fugitive heir hiding from his own family. In another, Elena herself was secretly wealthy, slumming it as a scholarship student for reasons nobody could quite explain. In the version that stung the most, delivered by two girls who didn't notice her walking past them at the coffee cart, Elena had "known the whole time" and had been "playing the whole department" for a payout.
She kept her head down and her expression neutral, the old, practiced skill of appearing unbothered even when her chest felt like it might cave in from the pressure of being watched, di
