News of the board meeting moved through Kingsley Academy the way news always did at a school full of children whose parents sat on the same boards, attended the same galas, and gossiped over the same expensive dinners — fast, distorted, and entirely without Ivy's control.
By Wednesday, the version circulating hallways bore only a passing resemblance to what had actually happened. Some students had heard Ivy was suing the Volkov family. Others had heard the scholarship review had uncovered fraud on her side, not Nikolai's, and that she'd somehow manipulated the board into dropping it. A sophomore Ivy barely knew asked her, with genuine curiosity rather than malice, whether it was true her father had been a Russian spy.
"It's like watching a game of telephone conducted entirely by people w
