The tension after the confrontation never really went away. It just settled into the background and changed shape.
On the surface, campus carried on as if nothing had happened. Students still showed up for lectures, still clustered in hallways, still laughed too loudly near the cafés and dragged themselves half-awake between buildings. Weekend energy had already started replacing the pressure of the week, and from a distance everything looked ordinary.
Up close, it felt different.
Jake noticed it in the brief pauses that appeared when he passed certain groups, in the way a few unfamiliar faces looked at him a little too long before pretending they had not. No one approached him. No one said anything directly. But the awareness was there now, circulating quietly through campus the way these things always did.
He let it pass without reacting.
There was nothing to gain from chasing whispers, and even less from caring about what people thought they knew.
