The Westbridge campus after the first week of the Vale trial was a different place. It was as if a pebble had been dropped into the serene pond of academia, and the ripples had reached every shore. For Amelia Vale, navigating those ripples became a daily exercise in a new kind of literacy.
She saw it in the way Professor Davies now paused after her lectures, a subtle invitation for Amelia to approach with questions that weren't just about Didion or Nabokov. She felt it in the shifted dynamic in her writing workshop, where her feedback was now received with a weight it hadn't carried before, as if her personal experience with "narrative collapse" had made her an oracle of authenticity. And she heard it in the library whispers that didn't quite silence when she walked by with Adrian.
They were becoming a symbol. A damaged, modern Romeo and Juliet, if Romeo had turned his family in to the SEC and Juliet had changed her last name to his.
