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twenty-five

Time.

That was all Kamryn wanted.

And it was everything she couldn’t have right now.

She’d ripped apart Elia’s personnel file, and there was nothing in it. Literally nothing. At least nothing that Elia could have been referring to when she’d told Kamryn to look into it. Scratching the back of her head, Kamryn was just about to open up her computer and do an online search like Elia had suggested, but the knock on her door stopped her.

“You ready?” Heather asked, her lips curled upward.

One way or another, Kamryn was going to find out exactly what everyone was hiding. Tonight. She was tired of waiting for answers.

“Yes.” Kamryn closed out her computer and took Elia’s personnel file, shoving it into the top drawer of her desk and locking it. She grabbed her satchel with her laptop and her notebook, and she followed Heather out. There wasn’t a chance that she was going to leave Heather alone in her office. Not now.

Kamryn walked into the conference room, surprised to find Susy already there. She shouldn’t be though. These three werenever late to anything. In fact, they were always way earlier than they should be. Pursing her lips, Kamryn sat down and pulled out her things. She was ready for whatever they were going to throw at her.

She had to be.

“Let’s get started,” Yara said, eyeing Kamryn thoroughly. “I wanted to specifically talk about Elia Sharpe today. She’s gone unsupervised for too long, and in order to protect our students, we need to implement the protocols that were in place before.”

Before?

Kamryn was so out of the loop, and nothing in the personnel file had said that Elia was on restrictions. Or that she’d ever been suspended or put on leave. Absolutely nothing. It reeked of someone wiping it completely.

“What were the restrictions before?” Heather asked, leaning forward on the table, all her attention on Yara.

That had been what Kamryn wanted to ask—at least one of the millions of questions that had gone through her head. The first question that kept ringing through her brain waswhat the hell happened eighteen years ago?

“She wasn’t permitted to teach any extra curriculars. All interactions with students had to be supervised, and she had to pay for the assistant to supervise her. And someone must be present while she was teaching and on campus. And she wasn’t permitted to live on campus.” Yara put out a finger for each thing she listed off.

Those were insane restrictions.

How could anyone have survived those? It would have been better to have been fired. Or perhaps Elia would have done better to just quit. But those restrictions must have been dropped a long time ago because Elia had continued to teach Speech as far as Kamryn knew. Maybe those were just temporary restrictions during an investigation?

That would make far more sense.

Kamryn needed information. She picked up her pen and poised it over her paper. “You’re going to need to fill me in on what the charges were against Dr. Sharpe.”

“Charges?” Yara looked confused by that word choice, but she shouldn’t be. With restrictions as firm as the ones she was listing off, surely there would have been formal charges filed against Elia. And why she would have been allowed to stay at the school was lost on Kamryn.

Unless she’d been proven innocent of whatever it was.

“It’s in her personnel file,” Yara responded, wiggling her shoulders in discomfort.

“Actually, it’s not. Which is probably the more egregious error that we should be discussing at this point. But there are no reports or complaints in Dr. Sharpe’s file.” Kamryn pressed her lips together hard.

“What?” Heather’s eyes widened.

“That’s impossible,” Susy responded.

“It’s not if someone took them out, and I, for one, would like to know who might have done that. Because, again, even if a complaint was found baseless, there still needs to be a record of what happened and why it was filed.” Kamryn kept her pen on the paper, still waiting for some kind of answer to her earlier question. “So since I don’t have access to whatever information you three are discussing, you need to fill me in.”

Susy shook her head slowly in disbelief. “There was a complaint filed against Elia Sharpe, eighteen years ago, for sexual harassment against a student.”

“Afemalestudent,” Heather added with a snarl.

“Well, you can’t fire someone for being queer,” Kamryn commented, but her heart sank. To have someone make that accusation formally meant there was likely some sort of proof that it had happened. The lack of reporting was so stark, thatif only one person had formally reported there were certainly others it had happened to who had kept their mouth shut over the years. And Kamryn would be responsible for digging up all that information.