By the time I reached the carved oak doors of Hawthorne Hall, my palms were already slick.
Blackthorn’s main building looked exactly like the glossy brochure I used to hide under my pillow in high school—neo-Gothic arches, leaded glass, stone that had seen more secrets than any of us ever would. It was also the place where my mother’s name had been quietly scrubbed from a brass plaque outside the lab wing.
Today, I was walking back into the crime scene.
I wiped my hand on my jeans and adjusted the strap of my backpack, fingers brushing the worn leather folder tucked inside. Mei Chen’s file. The official report of how she ruined everything.
I forced my shoulders back. I hadn’t clawed my way into Blackthorn’s doctoral program just to flinch at a door.
Inside, the hall hummed with first-day noise. Footsteps, overlapping voices, the metallic click of someone’s coffee mug against a rail. It smelled like old paper and new ambition. Students clustered in nervous knots, laughter pitched a bit too high. A pair of undergrads leaned against a column, whispering and side-eyeing me.
I caught the word "Chen" and the quick flick of their gazes away when I looked over.
So. The campus gossip pipeline was efficient. Good. Let them talk. Better that than the sticky silence that had followed us around our old neighborhood after the scandal broke.
I checked my phone for the room number again even though I’d memorized it: 204. Advanced Methodologies in Cognitive Modeling. Instructor: Professor Elias Rowan.
The man whose grant had been sacrificed to plug the hole my mother supposedly tore in the department’s reputation.
Mentor assignment: Professor Elias Rowan, the email had said, as if it were just another line item. As if those three words hadn’t landed like a punch to the sternum.
I found Room 204 at the end of a stone corridor, the door already propped open. Rows of tiered seating fanned out toward a blackboard and a sleek dual-screen projection setup. Half the seats were full, laptops and tablets glowing like a scatter of constellations.
And there he was, at the front.
Elias Rowan looked nothing like the stiff faculty page photo I’d spent too much time dissecting this summer. In person, he was sharper. The dark suit jacket fit a little too well, like it had been tailored around the angles of his shoulders. His shirt sleeves were rolled neatly to his forearms, exposing precise wrists and an expensive-looking watch. Brown hair pushed back in an almost careless way that I suspected was calculated.
He was writing something on the board in clean, ruthless lines of chalk, every stroke efficient. The room buzzed with the low murmur of students pretending not to stare at him.
I took the first empty seat in the second row, dead center. If I was going to sit in his class for a semester, there was no point in hiding in the back.
My chest tightened as I set my notebook down. I could feel eyes on me, the slight shift in conversation around my name traveling like pressure through the air.
Rowan capped the marker, turned toward us, and the conversation snapped off like someone had cut power.
He surveyed the room once, unreadable. When his gaze passed over me, it didn’t stop. No flare of recognition, no visible reaction.
Relief pricked, then annoyance. Of course he knew who I was. The department would have told him. They’d probably held a whole meeting about how to handle the daughter of the scandal.
"Welcome to Advanced Methodologies," he said. His voice was smooth, clipped but not cold, with just enough resonance to reach the back row without strain. "If you’re here because you heard this is an easy A, you’re in the wrong place. If you’re here because you like the sound of your own voice, you’re also in the wrong place."
A ripple of cautious laughter.
"If you’re here because you’re interested in thinking clearly," he continued, "rigorously, and with a minimal amount of self-delusion, then you may stay."
The corner of his mouth twitched like that was his idea of a joke.
I wrote down "minimal self-delusion" even though I hated myself for it. The phrase was too good.
He clicked the projector on, a slide flickering to life—no title, just a dense, unfamiliar diagram.
"This," he said, "is the full structure of an experimental design submitted last year to a top-tier journal. It passed peer review. It was cited. Extensively." He paused. "It is also garbage."
The word landed harder than it should have. A faint, excited prickle moved through the room. He knew how to perform.
My pen hovered.
"You have five minutes," Rowan said. "In pairs or alone. I want every flaw you can find. Operationalization errors, confounds, statistical sins, untested assumptions—anything that would make this collapse if you so much as breathed on it wrong."
Chairs scraped as people shifted. A girl two seats down leaned toward me.
"Partner?" she whispered.
"I’m fine on my own," I said, without looking up.
Silence fell on my immediate left. Okay, that sounded harsher than I’d meant. Whatever. I didn’t come here to make friends.
My pulse clicked up as I scanned the diagram. Two conditions, poorly matched baselines, suspiciously neat effect sizes. The operationalization of "cognitive fatigue" was paper-thin, half confound, half wishful thinking.
I forgot about the eyes and the whispers for exactly four minutes and thirty-five seconds.
"Time," Rowan said. "Let’s hear it."
Hands went up. He pointed at a guy in the back, who immediately launched into a competent, textbook critique about sample size and power calculations.
"Fine," Rowan said when he finished. "You’ve identified that they are statistically illiterate. That’s the starter course. Who can do better?"
A few more answers. He nodded occasionally, never effusive, picking apart shallow observations with a surgical question here, an arched brow there.
My irritation grew with every partial answer he tolerated. It wasn’t that the others were wrong. They were just stopping short of the point.
I pressed my pen into the paper until my knuckles ached.
He scanned the room again. His gaze brushed over me and kept moving. Something in my chest flared.
If he was going to punish me by pretending I was invisible, he’d learn it was a bad strategy.
I raised my hand.
A pause. Then, "Yes."
No name. No hint he knew who I was. The tiniest sliver of satisfaction slid in under my skin.
"The entire construct is junk," I said. "They treat 'cognitive fatigue' like it’s a unidimensional, stable state, but they’re conflating it with boredom, task disengagement, and even novelty decay. Their manipulation check doesn't distinguish any of that. So all their measures are smeared across at least three different latent variables."
A couple of people turned toward me. I kept my eyes on the diagram.
"Their so-called control condition isn’t clean," I went on. "They assume baseline attention is constant across participants, which is laughable given their recruitment pool. There's no pre-test, no calibration, nothing. They also ignore demand characteristics—participants know exactly what’s being measured, so you’ve got expectancy effects contaminating everything."
The words came faster than I could entirely censor them.
"And," I said, because apparently I was committed now, "their missing data handling is criminal. Listwise deletion with that attrition rate? The people who dropped out are almost certainly the ones whose performance would undercut their nice, tidy hypothesis. They didn’t just get a biased estimate—they built their conclusion on a selection artifact. If this passed peer review, it’s not only on the authors. It’s on the field."
The room was very quiet when I finished.
I finally looked at Rowan.
He was watching me with a stillness that made the hairs at the back of my neck lift. No obvious approval. No dismissal either. Just that steady, evaluating gaze, like he was turning my words over one by one in his head.
"Name," he said.
My stomach dropped, but my voice came out steady. "Ivy Chen."
A murmur flickered through the lecture hall. It was almost physical—the way the sound shifted, sharpened, then smoothed into an uneasy silence.
Rowan’s jaw ticked once. It was subtle; if I hadn’t been staring at him, I might have missed it.
Heartbeat moment, my brain whispered, unhelpfully. The first time the man whose career my family supposedly wrecked looked at me and knew exactly who I was.
His eyes, a cool, not-quite-blue, held mine for a second that stretched too long.
"Ms. Chen," he said at last, every syllable precise. "You’re correct about the construct confusion and the attrition bias." His tone remained clipped, professional. "You are, however, overstating your case about the field as a whole. One poor paper does not indict an entire discipline."
"It wasn’t one paper," I said, before my common sense could tackle my tongue. "It was a flagship publication in a flagship journal that everyone pretended was fine because it told a story they liked. That’s not an isolated incident. That’s structural."
I heard a sharp intake of breath to my right. The girl I’d refused to partner with was staring at me openly now.
Rowan’s fingers flexed against the desk. "You’re making an empirical claim without data," he said. "Ironically, in a critique of empirical sloppiness."
Heat flared in my chest. "I’m making an inference based on patterns that are visible to anyone who bothers to look past the citation count."
"Citation counts," he said, "are not epistemology."
"No," I shot back. "But they’re how careers live and die in this building. Pretending that isn’t true is its own form of self-delusion."
The word hung between us. I knew I’d thrown his phrase back at him, and from the muscle that tightened briefly at the corner of his mouth, so did he.
We stared at each other for a fraction too long.
Then, calmly, he said, "Point taken." He turned back to the board, clicking the remote. "We will revisit that question when we talk about institutional incentives in Week Four. For now, assume we are all, regrettably, embedded in the system we’re critiquing. It makes the work more urgent, not futile."
He moved on. The room exhaled.
My pulse was a small, hard drum in my throat. I hadn’t meant to… well. I had meant to challenge him. I hadn’t meant to light the fuse in front of thirty witnesses on the first day.
No, a traitorous part of me whispered. That’s exactly what you meant.
For the rest of the lecture, I took notes with the rigid focus of someone pretending their hands weren’t shaking. Rowan didn’t call on me again, but I could feel his awareness of me like a change in air pressure whenever my pen scratched too fast.
When class ended, laptops snapped shut and students surged toward the exits. A few glances slid my way, most of them a mix of curiosity and caution.
"That was… brave," the girl from earlier murmured as she passed me. Her voice held the careful tone of someone complimenting a stranger’s tattoo while wondering if it hurt.
"It was accurate," I said.
She gave me a small, quick smile and escaped.
I packed up slowly, waiting for the crowd to thin. Rowan was erasing the board with the same efficient brutality he used on the sample paper.
I could leave. I should leave. Step one of my grand plan had not included picking a fight in his first lecture.
But another step, less clearly labeled, had always said: make him see you as more than a last name.
I slipped my backpack onto one shoulder and walked down to the front.
"Professor Rowan," I said.
He didn’t look surprised. Of course he didn’t. He finished wiping the last line of chalk, set the eraser down with surgical precision, and finally faced me.
Up close, he looked a little older than in the faculty photo—small lines at the corners of his eyes, the kind you get from not sleeping enough, not from laughing too much.
"Ms. Chen," he said, polite as a drawn blade. "Enjoying your first day?"
"Thrilling," I said. "Nothing like being a walking cautionary tale to really warm up the social circuits." I folded my fingers around my notebook to stop fidgeting. "I wanted to… get something out of the way."
"That was fast." His gaze flicked to my folder, as if he could see through the leather. "Most students wait until Week Two before they decide they need a personal audience."
"I’m not most students."
"I gathered." His tone didn’t change, but something like amusement edged the word. "What do you want to ‘get out of the way,’ exactly?"
Every instinct in me screamed not to look away. "I know who you are," I said. "And I assume you know who I am, beyond what you heard in the roll call."
"The department assigned me your file," he said. "I read it." A beat. "Twice."
Humiliation prickled—knowing he’d seen my full academic record, the little scholarships that felt big to me, the single blip of a B+ from sophomore year I still blamed on mono.
"Then you know," I said, "that I’m not here to repeat my mother’s mistakes."
"Alleged mistakes," he said mildly.
The word stopped me for a second. "That’s not how the official report phrases it."
His gaze sharpened, just a fraction. "The official report is not required reading in this course."
"It was required reading in my life," I said, before I could censor the raw edge. "I’ve practically memorized it. Which is why I’m here. I want—" My throat tightened, but I made myself push through. "I want to be judged on my work. Not on rumors. Not on what people think they know about my family."
"And you assume," he said, "that I’m incapable of separating you from those rumors?"
"I assume," I said, matching his even tone, "that you’re human, and that five years ago someone took your research funding and lit it on fire in public while saying my mother’s name."
He said nothing.
The silence pressed in around the edges.
"I didn’t come here to ask for forgiveness," I added. "Or sympathy. I came here because this is the best place to do the work I want to do. You are—" I hated how the admission stuck in my throat "—one of the best people in the field. And I’m not going to request a reassignment because it makes things uncomfortable. If you want me out of your mentorship, you’ll have to put it in writing."
His eyes searched my face like he was checking for cracks.
"Is that a challenge, Ms. Chen?" he asked quietly.
"It’s a boundary," I said. "I don’t want any favors. I want high standards. I just don’t want…" I exhaled. "I don’t want you to pre-write my failure."
He watched me for another long moment. A student drifted in at the back, realized he was interrupting something, and retreated silently.
"High standards," Rowan said at last, "you will certainly have." His voice softened by a micrometer. "I do not do favors. For anyone. That includes punishing students for their relatives’ alleged sins."
The word again. Alleged.
"Then we’re clear," I said. "I’ll meet your standards."
"You’ll meet them," he said, "or you’ll discover that you’re not as exceptional as you believe. Both outcomes are useful data."
A flare of anger. "You don’t know what I believe."
"I know," he said, "that you walked into my classroom on Day One and attempted to indict an entire field while implying you see its flaws more clearly than your peers." His gaze dipped briefly to my hands, then back up. "Confidence is an asset, Ms. Chen. Hubris is not. You may want to calibrate."
"Or," I said, pulse spiking, "you may want to consider that not everyone who questions the system is arrogant. Some of us are just paying closer attention because we’ve already watched what happens when it decides it needs a scapegoat."
The word hung between us, heavy and too honest.
For a heartbeat, something like understanding flickered across his face. It was gone as quickly as it came, shuttered behind professionalism.
"Our mentorship meeting is tomorrow," he said abruptly. "Four p.m. My office. Bring a writing sample. Something substantial." His tone made the word sound like a threat. "We’ll discuss expectations then."
"I read the syllabus," I said.
"Good," he replied. "Then you know that I do not accept late work, incomplete arguments, or self-pity."
"Lucky for both of us," I said, "I don’t have time for self-pity."
His mouth tilted, the closest I’d seen to a real smile. "We’ll see."
I turned to go, adrenaline fizzing under my skin. Halfway up the aisle, I heard him say my name again.
"Ms. Chen."
I looked back.
"For what it’s worth," he said, expression unreadable, "your critique of the paper was the most precise in the room."
My throat tightened around a dozen responses I didn’t trust myself to give.
"For what it’s worth," I said, "you’re wrong about me believing I’m exceptional. I just know I can’t afford to be average."
His eyes held mine, steady and cool, but something warmer flickered underneath, like heat behind frosted glass.
"Then," he said quietly, "don’t be."
I left the room with my pulse pounding and a new, unwelcome thought lodged under my ribs:
If this was what Day One with Elias Rowan felt like, I had no idea how I was supposed to survive a semester—much less a mentorship meeting alone in his office, with nowhere to hide.
