Two weeks after the article's publication, the news cycle had, predictably, begun to move on to other things — a political scandal, a natural disaster on the other side of the world, the particular churn of public attention that Ivy had learned, over the last month, moved through even the biggest stories with startling speed. Volkov Group still made headlines occasionally, updates on the investigation trickling out in careful corporate language, but the daily deluge of notifications had slowed to something almost manageable.
Kingsley, too, had begun settling into a strange new equilibrium. A handful of families had pulled their students in the immediate aftermath, citing vague concerns about the school's "direction" that everyone understood, without anyone saying it directly, meant discom
