Caleb’s POV
The locker room used to be the one place where nobody asked me to be anything other than fast and angry.
I push through the double doors after morning drills, and the conversation dies so fast I can almost hear the air rushing in to fill the silence.
Twelve guys in various states of undress, all suddenly fascinated by their cleats, their tape, the ceiling tiles.
All except Brody Walsh, who locks eyes with me from the bench with the kind of look you give roadkill—half pity, half disgust.
"There he is." Brody leans back against his locker, arms crossed. "Campus celebrity."
I drop my bag and pull my shirt over my head, keeping my movements deliberate. "Morning to you too, Walsh."
"Saw some interesting footage going around last night. Real eye-opening stuff."
His voice carries the forced casualness of a guy who's been rehearsing this. "Didn't realize our starting attackman had such a colorful personal life."
Every instinct I've spent twenty years feeding screams at me to cross the room and make his jaw match the rest of his personality—crooked and cheap.
"Drop it, Brody." That's Haynes, our goalkeeper, standing two lockers down with a roll of tape in his hand and a warning in his tone. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know what I saw. The whole campus knows." Brody straightens, and two others are nodding beside him. "I'm just the only one with the balls to say it to his face."
"Then say it." I turn fully toward him, and the calm in my voice surprises even me. "Get specific, Walsh. Use your words like a big boy."
His jaw works. He wants to say stepsister. I can see the word sitting right behind his teeth, itching to detonate.
"I just think it's messed up, man." He falters under my stare, settling for vague when he wanted vicious. "That's all."
Haynes drops a hand on my shoulder as I turn back to my locker. "Ignore him. Half the team's got your back."
Half the team. Which means the other half is texting screenshots in group chats, running their mouths at parties, making sure the Thornton-Lakin circus stays trending.
I'm lacing my cleats when Coach Dunham fills the doorway to his office. He tilts his head—a small gesture that carries the weight of a summons.
"Thornton. A minute."
His office smells like old coffee and whiteboard marker. He shuts the door and leans against his desk instead of sitting behind it—the posture he uses when he wants to be a person, not a title.
"I'll be straight with you." Coach folds his arms. "The university is reviewing the situation. All of it—the party footage, the allegations, the personal stuff circulating. Depending on the Title IX investigation, depending on what the board decides about conduct standards, there may be consequences. Suspension from games. Possible scholarship review."
The air in the room shrinks. "I didn't do anything wrong, Coach."
"I know that." His voice drops. "But the university doesn't run on what I know. It runs on optics and liability. I'm telling you so you're not blindsided."
"So what do I do?"
"Keep your head down. Play clean. And Thornton—don't throw any punches. Not on campus, not off it. Right now, your temper is the easiest weapon they have against you."
I nod once and leave his office with my fists buried in my pockets.
The quad is worse. Every sideways glance carries a footnote I can read without trying. Two girls near the fountain whisper behind their phones.
A guy from my econ class stares with the morbid fascination people reserve for car wrecks.
‘Stepsibling. Stepbrother. Did you see the video?’
My mother's voice rises through the noise, quiet and steady the way it always is when she needs me to hear her over my own rage.
Words she said years ago, sitting at the kitchen table after I put my fist through my bedroom wall.
Simon had just told me every bruise he gave me was practice for the real world.
‘There's a fine line between protection and control, Caleb. Your father never learned the difference. You have to.’
I unclench my jaw. I unclench my fists. I keep walking.
Rachel is waiting at our usual bench near the library—far enough from the main paths that we can talk without an audience. She's got a coffee in each hand and a manila folder tucked under her arm.
"You look like you've had a morning." She hands me the cup without ceremony.
"Walsh decided to audition for campus moral authority. Coach told me to keep my head down." I sit beside her, wrapping both hands around the warmth. "Where are we with the case?"
Rachel straightens, shifting into the focused precision I've come to recognize as her operating mode. "Three more women agreed to testify. Formally, on the record, statements filed through the legal team. That brings us to seven total."
"Seven." The number settles heavy in my chest. "That's enough to bury him."
"More than enough. The pattern is undeniable—similar tactics, similar targeting, a timeline spanning five years."
She takes a slow breath. "But the Bennetts aren't going quietly. Richard's firm is filing motions left and right. Objections to evidence, challenges to witness credibility, requests for continuances. They're not trying to win on merits. They're trying to drown us in paperwork until we can't afford to keep fighting."
"Proxy wars."
"Exactly. They're fighting on every front they can open—Lucas's criminal case, Simon's marital dispute, the campus investigation. Each one bleeds time and money, and that's the point. They want to exhaust us into retreat."
I stare at the lid of my coffee, turning it between my palms. "We don't retreat."
"No." Her green eyes carry a fierceness that needs no translation. "We don't."
We sit in the kind of silence that holds steady between people who've already said the worst things out loud and survived.
Then Rachel reaches for the manila folder and sets it on her lap with a deliberateness that shifts the temperature between us.
"There's something else." Her voice changes—careful now, measured in a way that puts every nerve in my body on alert.
"I've been digging into the Bennett connection to Simon's legal representation, pulling financial records, tracing the chain of contact."
"And?"
She opens the folder but doesn't hand it to me. Instead, she holds it against her chest, studying my face with an expression caught between resolve and reluctance.
"During the search, I found something that has nothing to do with the Bennetts." She pulls a single document from the folder and extends it toward me. "I found something about your father, Caleb."
My hand stops midair.
"You're going to want to sit down."
I am sitting down. The fact that she says it anyway makes the ground feel like it's dissolving beneath the bench.