That evening, after Linh Dan had gone home, Vy sat with her notebook again and added a new entry. She wrote down what she had heard, clearly labeled as secondhand, and she wrote down her own response, which was to keep training, to keep her record, and to wait until she had spoken to Marcus Reed through a proper process rather than through rumor. She did not write Damian's name with anger. She wrote it the way she wrote any other fact, because anger, she was discovering, was easier to carry when it was not the only thing in the sentence.
On Friday, Linh Dan came to her apartment with takeout and an expression Vy recognized immediately: the look of someone carrying news she was not sure she should share. They ate in silence for a while, chopsticks clicking softly against the containers, the television on low in the background with the sound muted. Finally Linh Dan set her food down and looked directly at Vy.
“There is something I have been thinking about since Saturday,” she said slowly. “I did not want to tell you until I was sure I was remembering it right, and not just fitting an old story to a new one. But I think you need to hear it, even if we cannot prove it yet.”
Vy put her own container aside. “Tell me.”
“A while ago, before I came to Bayview, I was training at a different gym for a short time,” Linh Dan said. “I met a woman there, a former student, not someone I knew well. We talked once after class, about why she had left. She said she had been in a seminar with Damian Cross. She said she had escaped a hold, the room had reacted, and then everything got heavier. She said she tapped, and asked to reset, and it did not stop the way it should have. She said afterward people told her she had misunderstood, that it was just grappling, and she left quietly because she did not want to be the person who caused trouble for a champion.”
The room felt very still. Vy could hear the muted television, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of traffic. She looked down at her hands, which were steady, and then back up at Linh Dan.
“Do you remember her name?” Vy asked, her voice careful.
Linh Dan nodded, but she hesitated before saying it, as if the name itself deserved respect. “I remember it. I also remember that she asked me not to repeat her story without her permission. I am telling you because you are living something similar, and because I think you should know you might not be the first. But I will not contact her behind your back, and I will not use her story to make yours sound bigger. If we do anything with this, it has to be with her consent, or not at all.”
Vy reached for her notebook, not to write immediately, but to hold it in her lap like an anchor. “Thank you for telling me honestly,” she said. “And for telling me what you will not do, too. That matters.”
Linh Dan exhaled, as if she had been holding her breath through the whole story. “What do you want to do?”
Vy thought about the video, still saved in three places and still unposted. She thought about Ethan's advice to keep a record while it was fresh. She thought about Mai Lan's quiet support, and about the choice Marcus Reed would eventually have to make. She thought about the woman she had never met, who had left a gym quietly and had carried her story alone.
“I want to be careful,” Vy said at last. “Careful does not mean silent. It means I will not turn someone else's experience into evidence without her permission, and I will not let Damian's version become the only one just because it is louder. First, I need to know if she is willing to talk, on her own terms. And I need to understand what I am actually asking for, for myself and for the academy, before I ask anyone else to take a risk.”
Linh Dan nodded, and the two of them sat together as the evening light faded outside the window, with the notebook between them and a question neither of them could yet answer: what happens when a pattern, once whispered, is finally spoken aloud by more than one voice?
Linh Dan did not say it loudly. She said it the way people say something they have carried for a while and are only now sure they should set down, quietly, in the kitchen, after the kettle had clicked off and the evening light had gone thin over Richmond. A former student, she said, had once told her a story that sounded too close to Vy's own morning to be a coincidence. The woman had tapped, she had asked to stop, and then she had been told she misunderstood. She had left quietly. Linh Dan did not claim to know every detail, and she did not offer the woman's name as if it were evidence. She offered it as a question, and Vy felt the question settle in her chest with a weight that was both clarifying and frightening.