The leaves had fully turned by the time the formal hearing dates were set, the academy grounds shifting from the gold of early autumn into the bare-branched grey that preceded winter, and the specific texture of life that William had worried might never return to ordinary had, in fact, returned, gradually and without ceremony, the way most genuine recoveries did.
The news cycle around his father had run its course in the way such things did — intense for the first week, persistent for the second, and by the third week reduced to the specific background hum of an ongoing legal process that most of the academy had stopped actively discussing, having exhausted both their curiosity and, in most cases, their appetite for treating William's family situation as entertainment.
