Rumors surface.
Not loud ones. Not the kind you can point to and shut down with a single correction. These are softer. Incomplete. Passed hand to hand like something fragile enough to deny if caught. They don’t announce themselves. They seep. They settle into the corners of conversations and wait to be noticed.
They don’t come to me directly.
They drift.
A glance that lasts a second too long. A pause where there didn’t used to be one. Someone stopping mid-sentence when I enter a room, then resuming with safer words, stripped of whatever edge they were carrying a moment earlier. The pack has always been good at this. At carrying information without claiming ownership of it. At letting implication do the work so no one has to be accountable for saying anything outright.
The first versio
