Six years into my secret crush on my adoptive brother, I slipped a sedative into his drink on the night of his birthday. Ever since our parents died in a car crash, he had micromanaged every single corner of my existence. He controlled what I ate, the clothes I wore, the brand of socks in my drawer, the people I spoke to, and the entire trajectory of my future. If he did not love me, why would he go to such suffocating lengths? Yet every time I tried to confess my feelings, he retreated into dead silence and looked the other way. The drug hit his system fast. His eyes flushed a violent, bloodshot red, and the veins throbbed against his temples. Still, he summoned his remaining strength to shove me away and locked himself inside the bathroom. Through the thick wood, I listened to his ragged, suppressed breathing mixed with the roar of freezing water from the shower head. My fingernails dug hard into the narrow gap of the door frame. “Jason, open the door… please.” My pleading was so quiet it practically scraped against the dust on the floorboards. The only answer I got was the muffled, agonizing groan of a man gritting his teeth to bear the torment. I spent that entire night slumped against the freezing bathroom door, finally understanding the bitter truth. When your heart truly dies, it makes no sound at all. 1 The sharp click of the deadbolt sliding into place felt like a physical blade plunging straight into my eardrum. “Jason!” Refusing to give up, I hammered my palms against the solid wood until my skin burned bright red. “Jason, come out! We need to talk about this!” Only the heavy, ragged sound of his breathing answered me, drowned out by the relentless cascade of running water. Cold water. He was standing under a freezing shower. He would rather stand under bone-chilling ice water than let me touch him. Why? My mind spun in exhausting circles, desperately searching for a logical reason. Had I completely misread every single sign over the years, or was I just hopelessly delusional? I slid down the flat surface of the door until I hit the floor, the biting chill of the ceramic tiles seeping straight through the thin fabric of my skirt. You are pathetic, Winter. You threw every ounce of your self-respect away, and he still refuses to want you. Around four in the morning, the rushing water finally stopped. His voice bled through the heavy wooden door, raw and abrasive, like coarse sandpaper grinding against rusted iron. “Go back to your bedroom.” “No, I won’t.” “Go back right now!” I curled into a tight ball on the living room sofa and waited for the morning sun to spill through the blinds. At some point, exhaustion dragged me under. In my dream, I was standing back at our parents’ funeral. Jason was ten years old when our parents adopted him, long before I was even born. When I turned eight, he left for boarding school on the East Coast and stayed away for seven long years. By the time I turned fifteen, our parents were killed in a sudden pile-up on the interstate. Twenty-four-year-old Jason, already making a prestigious name for himself in academic circles, dropped everything and rushed home to pull my trembling body into his chest. Standing beside the fresh graves, he held me tight and swore an oath. He promised that from that moment forward, he would take our parents’ place and shelter me from the world. He swore he would stay by my side forever, that my happiness was his only mission, and that unless I gave him permission, he would never marry. He promised to stay with me until his dying breath. He was the one who made that promise. And for years, he executed it with terrifying perfection. He gave me everything I could ever ask for, except the one thing I actually wanted. When I woke up, the apartment was empty. A bowl of warm oatmeal sat on the dining table next to a sticky note written in his signature, immaculate script: “Eat breakfast before you head to class.” It was as if the humiliating disaster of last night had been nothing more than a fever dream. I swallowed the oatmeal mechanically, grabbed my bag, and stumbled out of the building in a numb daze. Passing the campus quad at Crestwood University, my foot caught on the raised concrete ledge of a flower bed, sending me sprawling across the dirt. My palms scraped hard against the rough concrete, and dark beads of blood welled up instantly. I hissed at the sharp sting, about to curse my miserable luck, when a glint of dark glass caught my eye inside the bushes. It was a sleek black smartphone. The model looked at least three or four years out of date, but the casing was surprisingly pristine. I debated handing it over to campus security, but before I could pick it up, the screen illuminated the shaded grass. An incoming call. Thinking it might be the frantic owner or a close friend trying to track it down, I hesitated for a split second before pressing answer. A bright, energetic male voice immediately echoed through the speaker. “Oh, thank god! It actually rang!” The guy sounded breathless and deeply relieved. “That is my brand-new phone! I accidentally dropped it yesterday and panicked when I realized it was missing. Could you tell me where you are right now? Just drop me a location and I will sprint right over. Seriously, I will make it worth your while!” I glanced down at my bleeding hand, then checked the time on the phone’s lock screen. I gave him the nearest landmark. “South gate flower bed, Crestwood University.” The line went dead silent for a heartbeat at the mention of Crestwood, followed by a sudden burst of excitement. “Crestwood? No way, I go to Crestwood too! Hang tight, please! Give me twenty minutes tops!” Before I could get another word in, the line disconnected. I crouched on the concrete curb by the flower bed and waited. The morning minutes ticked away mercilessly. The digital clock rolled past eight and slowly crept toward nine. Still, there was no sign of anyone rushing down the sidewalk. Realizing I was about to miss my organic chemistry lecture entirely, I shoved the phone into my tote bag and sprinted toward the science building. By the time I slipped through the heavy lecture hall doors, I was over thirty minutes late. The professor gave me a sharp, disapproving stare from the podium but simply gestured for me to find a seat. When the agonizing class finally wrapped up, the lost phone remained totally silent. I tapped the side power button, only to discover the battery had completely died. I packed my notebook and got ready to head back to the apartment, but a tall guy from my class stepped into the aisle, blocking my exit. “Hey, let’s trade numbers or drop your Insta handle?” 2 He opened his phone, ready to take my digits with an expectant, confident grin. I stared at the glowing screen, froze for a second, and instinctively took a nervous step backward. My throat tightened as familiar restrictions flashed through my mind, and I murmured timidly, “Sorry, I don’t use social media.” Without waiting to see the stunned look on his face, I clutched my strap and hurried toward the exit. As I reached the doorway, his voice carried across the emptying room, dripping with loud sarcasm. “It is 2026! Who on earth doesn’t have an account anywhere? If you want to blow someone off, at least come up with a realistic excuse! Stop acting so superior!” My steps faltered slightly, but I kept my eyes fixed ahead and kept walking. What would be the point of secretly adding anyone? Jason would just find it and delete them anyway. He conducted a thorough, methodical audit of my phone and laptop every single weekend, inspecting my digital life like a federal warden auditing a high-risk inmate. Before college, he had restricted me to a basic flip phone, which made me the ultimate laughingstock among my high school peers. No matter how many times I cried or complained about the isolation, he refused to budge. He insisted it was for my own protection, claiming smart devices would ruin my focus during crucial academic years. In those dark, suffocating years immediately following our parents’ funeral, he had sealed me inside an airtight glass jar. Jason treated me like a fragile porcelain doll on the verge of shattering, and in my grief-stricken state, I clung to him as my sole surviving anchor. By the time the fog of mourning finally lifted, my psychological dependency had solidified. I had fully adapted to a solitary existence where he was my entire universe. Having friends outside our apartment didn’t even feel necessary anymore. When exactly did I become completely alone, without a single person I could confide in? After my morning classes concluded, I walked back to the apartment and immediately plugged the dead phone into a charging cable. Once the screen lit up, I tried to dial the owner back, only to hit a passcode lock screen. I couldn’t get past the four-digit PIN. My only option was to leave the device on the nightstand and wait for him to call again. I tossed my bag onto the desk and stared up at the blank ceiling tiles. A few minutes later, the distinct click of the front door echoing from the hallway told me Jason was home. I hopped off the mattress, my body automatically preparing to run out and greet him the way I always did. Then the humiliating memory of last night crashed over me, and I sank right back onto the edge of the bed. I hadn’t turned on the overhead lamp. I toyed with the idea of pretending I wasn’t home at all, but the bedroom door swung inward before I could hide. “Why are you sitting in the dark?” Bright light from the hallway flooded the dim room. Jason stood in the doorway wearing a tailored light gray dress shirt, looking completely composed, as if the midnight disaster had never happened. “Come eat dinner. I picked up your favorite sweet and sour takeout from the dining hall.” Always like this. A wave of crushing exhaustion washed through my bones. Every single time I tried to tear down the invisible barrier between us, he simply plastered over the wreckage with suffocating kindness the very next morning. The man I was deeply in love with stood right in front of me. I knew in my soul that he felt something profound for me too, yet he dodged the truth with relentless precision. Part of me wished he would just turn cruel and banish me from his life completely, rather than keeping me suspended in this endless, torturous loop of gentle indulgence. Sometimes the urge to scream at him, to grab his shirt and demand to know why he was torturing us both, felt almost impossible to contain. But the words never made it past my throat. I was caught in a miserable contradiction. Half of me prayed he would finally reject me with enough brutality to shatter my obsession, while the other half lived in mortal terror that he might actually walk away for good. We sat at the dining table eating the food he had brought back from campus. Jason taught advanced courses in the humanities department at Crestwood University. Or rather, after accepting a prestigious tenure-track offer from the university, he had gently steered my college applications until I enrolled at the exact same school. “Your art appreciation professor mentioned you walked in late today.” “I checked the security feeds at the front gate and saw you left the building on schedule. Did something happen on your way across campus?” He placed a tender piece of glazed pork into my bowl. The words were phrased like a casual observation, but the underlying interrogation was unmistakably clear. “I found a lost phone by the flower beds and waited around to return it to whoever dropped it.” “Did you give it back?” “Yes.” My hand tightened around my fork for a fraction of a second. I forced my posture to remain relaxed, hiding the sudden surge of panic sparked by the lie, and kept my eyes glued to my plate. He offered a soft, approving smile and dropped the interrogation, shifting smoothly to academic planning. “By the way, there is a major symposium for your department next Thursday. I already registered your name on the attendee list, and I will be accompanying you.” “After the keynote concludes, I will introduce you directly to Professor Vance. Try to make a solid impression so you can secure a research assistant spot in his new laboratory. You are heading into your junior year, and strengthening your academic portfolio now will guarantee your graduate school fellowship.” I gave a vague, noncommittal nod, keeping my mouth shut. I hurried through the rest of my meal in silence, cleared my plate, and retreated to my bedroom. The lost phone on the nightstand had charged past the fifty percent mark. I stretched out across my duvet, scrolling absentmindedly through my desolate contact list, assuming the owner wouldn’t bother reaching out again until the morning. Right as I was drifting into a light doze, the device began to buzz violently against the wood. 3 I hit the green icon, and that same energetic voice filled my ear. “Hey, I ran over to the south gate right after my lab, but you were already gone.” “Yeah,” I replied plainly. “I waited as long as I could, but class was starting, so I had to leave.” He offered a quick apology and asked to confirm if I was actually enrolled at Crestwood. When I said yes, his tone instantly elevated with genuine relief. “Oh, awesome!” “Look, here is the deal. I have a massive, mandatory dress rehearsal tomorrow morning that I cannot miss for anything.” “I literally saved up three months of my part-time tutoring cash to buy this phone, and I am tied up at the performing arts center all day. Could you do me a massive favor and drop it off at the conservatory building tomorrow?” Excuse me? My brow furrowed in immediate irritation. “Why is it my job to play courier for you?” “Can’t you just find a free block in your schedule and swing by my building to grab it yourself?” His pushiness was starting to grate on my nerves, and I found myself regretting my decision not to drop the device with campus security the second I picked it up. He didn’t back down, immediately launching into a charming offensive. “Please, seriously, I am begging you! My name is Cole Shen, acoustic guitar performance major!” “Just bring it over to the practice halls, please. Once I get it back in my hands, I will take you out for the best lunch on campus, my treat.” I had always been terrible at turning down persistent requests. Realizing my Friday course load was light, and knowing the chemistry complex sat just a short walk from the music conservatory, I sighed heavily and agreed to the detour. The second the call ended, two sharp raps sounded on my bedroom door. I scrambled to shove the black smartphone deep beneath my pillows just as the door swung open. Jason walked in carrying a warm mug of milk. “Were you just on the phone with someone?” Admitting the truth was out of the question. I forced my expression into blank innocence and shook my head firmly. “No, you must have heard the television from next door.” Jason stood by the edge of my desk, studying my face with unblinking intensity. After a long, agonizing pause, a faint smile touched his lips, and he extended an open palm toward me. “It has been a few days since our last digital check. Hand your phone over, please.” I let out a controlled, quiet breath and gestured toward the nightstand with my chin. He picked up my smartphone and sat down on the edge of my mattress, beginning his routine inspection while I took slow, deliberate sips from the warm mug. True to form, his audit was meticulously thorough. He scrolled through my text logs, checked my email outbox, inspected my browser history, and even checked the recently deleted folder in my photo gallery. Once he satisfied himself that my digital footprint remained entirely sterile, he set the device back down, took the empty ceramic mug from my hands, gently smoothed my hair, and told me to get a good night’s sleep before stepping out into the hall. Later that night, I tossed and turned beneath my blankets, entirely unable to drift off. Realizing I had looked Jason straight in the eye and lied twice in a single afternoon sent an unexpected, thrilling jolt of defiance racing through my veins. Lying turned out to be remarkably simple. Why had I spent so many years terrified to speak anything less than absolute truth around him? I couldn’t fully explain the shift. All I knew was that once you drop the first lie, you have to build a labyrinth of new ones to keep the walls from caving in. As the semester raced toward finals week, scholarship evaluation periods opened up across the university. My name had sat comfortably at the top of the dean’s list for consecutive years, and this semester was no exception. My academic advisor called me into her office to sign the official grant documentation. While I was scribbling my signature across the bottom line, she leaned back and chatted casually. “So, I hear your brother is seeing the humanities dean’s daughter now?” The tip of my pen caught sharply against the paper, nearly tearing a hole right through the document. “Apparently, the dean set them up during the faculty mixer last weekend, and they hit it off immediately.” “Honestly, you should see them together. They look like a picture-perfect power couple. A couple of professors spotted them walking together across the botanical gardens just yesterday afternoon.” I couldn’t recall walking out of the administration building. My body moved on autopilot until I reached the stairwell of the humanities wing, where a brutal scene played out right in front of my eyes. Jason was descending the staircase side by side with a stunning woman with long, chestnut hair. He tilted his head slightly to catch her words, his lips curving into a genuine, relaxed smile that reached his eyes. It was an expression of effortless equality that he had never once directed at me. My chest felt as if an iron vise had slammed shut around my ribs. Terrified he might look down and spot me standing there, I shrank back into the deep shadow of the concrete pillar as tears spilled over my eyelashes without warning. Right at that exact second, the stolen device in my pocket vibrated against my hip. The screen flashed with the stranger’s number. I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand, cleared my throat, and answered. “Hello?” “Hey! Did you make it over to the conservatory building yet? I am up on the seventh floor, room 713!” “I am heading over right now.” That interruption dragged me out of my downward emotional spiral just in time. Desperate to hand the device off and escape my own head, I practically sprinted across campus toward the performing arts complex. The conservatory required keycard access at the security turnstiles. Blocked at the glass doors, I flagged down a male student walking out with a cello case, giving him Cole Shen’s name and room number in hopes he could run the phone up to the seventh floor. The moment the name left my mouth, the guy’s casual smile vanished, replaced by sheer shock. “Cole Shen? Are you messing with me right now?” I stared at him, entirely bewildered by his intense reaction. Before I could explain, he stepped closer, his brow furrowed deeply. “Are you sure you have the right name?” “Cole Shen passed away over three years ago.” My boots felt glued to the concrete steps. The warmth drained out of my extremities in an instant. “That is impossible… I literally just spoke to him on—” “He was a absolute legend in our department,” the cellist interrupted, shaking his head with a grim, somber expression. “Incredible talent, top of his class, super popular guy.” “It was a massive tragedy. He was lined up for a direct doctoral fellowship, and then suddenly he was just gone.” “Half the conservatory was in absolute mourning for months.” My fingers clamped around the metal phone casing so tightly my joints locked up. “How did he… die?” 4 “No idea.” The student shrugged helplessly. “The university administration clamped down on the details immediately. Everyone who knew what happened had to sign strict non-disclosure agreements.” “If you really want the backstory, your best bet would be tracking down the guys who lived in his dorm suite back then.” “Good luck finding them, though. None of those three are on campus anymore. One moved to Europe for grad school, one took a tech job out of state, and the third guy went off to teach in some remote mountain village.” He gave me an apologetic nod and walked off down the concrete steps. I stood completely paralyzed outside the glass entrance of the conservatory. The afternoon sun was blazing overhead, yet violent shivers raced up and down my spine. I had no memory of navigating the bus ride back to our apartment. I skipped my afternoon lab entirely. My personal phone sat on the desk surface, buzzing in a continuous, frantic rhythm as Jason’s contact photo illuminated the screen repeatedly. I lay flat on my mattress staring up at the white ceiling tiles, trapped in a recurring loop of Jason smiling at the dean’s daughter on the staircase, feeling completely hollow inside. By the time the deadbolt turned in the front door, darkness had swallowed the living room. Jason hurried inside, letting out an audible sigh of relief the second he saw my boots by the hallway mat. “Why did you skip your afternoon classes?” His voice was soft and careful, using the soothing inflection reserved for calming a frightened child. “Exhausted.” “That is fine. If you are exhausted, you rest.” He walked over to the edge of the sofa, kneeling on the rug to reach out and brush the bangs from my forehead. “I will email your lab instructor and handle the absence—” “Stop micromanaging my existence!” Watching his practiced, condescending gentleness snapped something deep inside my psyche. I swung my arm and slapped his wrist away with jarring force. He froze completely, his comforting smile hardening into disbelief. “What is wrong with you? Why are you speaking to me like this all of a sudden?” “You are the only family I have left in this world, Winter. I stood over our parents’ graves and made a sacred vow that I would protect you—” “I am twenty-one years old!” My voice cracked as I yelled over his monologue. “You are not my father! We do not even share a single drop of blood!” “You are going to build your own career, marry your own wife, and raise your own children! I cannot spend the rest of my life acting as your helpless dependent!” “Why can’t you?!” he shouted back, his voice booming through the small living room. The sheer ferocity of his outburst shocked me into temporary silence. Catching himself, he immediately dropped his gaze, grasping both of my wrists tightly as his voice dropped into an urgent, desperate rasp. “Did someone say something to upset you today?” “Whatever rumors are floating around campus, listen to me. There is nothing romantic going on between me and the dean’s daughter. We were simply discussing departmental funding.” “Winter, I gave you my word. I will never marry anyone. I am going to stay right here with you forever.” “I don’t want your promise anymore.” “What?” Jason stared at me, genuinely bewildered. “I said I don’t want your suffocating promises anymore!” For the first time in my entire life, I felt a desperate, burning need to banish him from my sight completely. The atmosphere in the apartment felt poisonous. I needed fresh air. I needed distance. I needed to escape his orbit! I couldn’t survive another day trapped inside this psychological greenhouse! Realizing that this wasn’t a temporary temper tantrum, the color drained steadily out of Jason’s face until his skin looked like parchment. “You don’t want my promise?” he whispered, his dark eyes turning a terrifying shade of crimson. “Then tell me what you actually want! What are you asking for?” “Do you want me to stop supervising your schedule, or do you want me out of your life entirely? Or…” His voice trembled visibly. “Are you trying to abandon me?” Years of suppressed bitterness detonated all at once. “I want out!” I screamed through hot tears. “I want to be left alone!” Those four words hit him like a physical blow. His eyes flashed blood red as a violent shudder wracked his tall frame. Before I could react, his hands clamped onto my shoulders with terrifying strength, driving my upper back into the sofa cushions as his face lunged downward until our noses were practically touching. His dark pupils dilated wildly, reflecting my terrified, tear-streaked face. His breath burned against my skin, his mouth hovering barely an inch above my lips. Just as his mouth lowered toward mine, he aborted the movement violently, recoiling backward as if he had brushed against red-hot iron. “You are overstressed from your academic workload.” He turned his back to me immediately, his voice hoarse and unstable. “I will submit medical leave paperwork for your classes tomorrow. You are staying inside the apartment to rest.” Without turning around, he grabbed his keys and strode out the front door, slamming it behind him. Once the deadbolt clicked shut, I curled up into a ball on the couch and wept until the decorative pillows were soaked through. A sharp buzz interrupted the silence. The lost phone was vibrating on the coffee table. Same unknown number. “I have been standing outside the rehearsal halls for an hour! Where are you?” Cole’s voice crackled through the speaker, sounding deeply annoyed. Hearing his voice acted as the ultimate trigger for my fractured emotional state. I screamed directly into the microphone. “Do you get a sick thrill out of playing twisted pranks on strangers?!” “I walked all the way to the music conservatory today! People in your own department told me the truth! Cole Shen died in an accident three years ago!” “Using a dead student’s identity to run some elaborate psychological game makes you a complete psychopath! I am throwing this phone in the nearest dumpster! Call this number again and I am contacting the police!” I jabbed the end button with shaking fingers and raised my arm to hurl the device against the hardwood floor. Before the phone left my hand, the screen illuminated again. Once. Twice. Three times. You really want to push my buttons right now? Fine! I needed a target for my rage, and whoever was on the other end had picked the wrong night to test my patience! I swiped the green icon and screamed at the top of my lungs. “Are you completely out of your mind?!” “You—” “Who told you I was dead?!” “What kind of twisted, jealous psycho goes around spreading rumors that I died?!” Before I could launch my next string of insults, he shouted over me with equal fury. “You just want to steal my brand-new phone! Coming up with a morbid lie like that just to keep a piece of electronics makes you a terrible person!” “Me? Terrible?!” I fired back. “You are impersonating a dead kid to mess with my head!” Neither of us backed down an inch. He sounded genuinely outraged, his voice escalating into frustrated disbelief. “I am standing right outside the conservatory practice rooms right this second, entirely alive! Go ahead and call campus security! I will call the real cops on you for theft first!”

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By the ninety-ninth time a meal made me want to vomit, translucent text suddenly floated across my vision. [The heiress is so pathetic. She wants to throw up every time she eats.] [She still doesn’t know her sense of taste was stolen by the scholarship student, Hazel, using a System.] [All those Michelin star meals she eats? The System transfers them right into Hazel’s mouth.] I dropped my silver fork. My stomach cramped, hollow and burning with acid. Across the dining hall, Hazel sat by the window. Her cracked plastic bowl held stale dinner rolls and cheap canned beans from days ago. She tore off a piece of the dry bread, put it in her mouth, and chewed with a blissful smile. She looked like she was savoring world-class caviar. Another line of text drifted past. [It is not just the taste. All the nutritional value is transferred too. The heiress is going to keep wasting away until she literally starves to death…] I pinched my own hollow, sunken cheek. The sharp sting of pain made me inhale sharply. The floating text was real. Well, if Hazel wanted my sense of taste so desperately, I was going to put my mouth to very good use. 1 My stomach churned with acidic hunger. I rested my head on the mahogany table, staring at Hazel across the room. My mind drifted back to the first time I met her three years ago. It was early September. Hazel stood at the front of the classroom wearing a faded, hand-me-down t-shirt. “Hi, I am Hazel. I come from a really bad neighborhood on the south side. I have to take three different buses and walk two miles just to get to school…” The classroom fell completely silent. Then someone whispered. “Three buses? What time does she even wake up?” Another muttered, looking at her clothes. “They are practically falling apart.” The voices were low but painfully loud in the quiet room. The girl sitting in front of me turned to her desk mate. “She is amazing. Coming from that kind of poverty and still ranking first in the entrance exams.” Hearing those words pull at my heartstrings, I genuinely wanted to help her. The very next day, I went to our homeroom teacher and offered to fully sponsor Hazel’s tuition and living expenses. But Hazel stood up in front of the entire class and flat-out rejected me. “I appreciate Sloane’s charity, but my parents taught me to rely on my own two hands. I refuse to live off someone else’s pity just because I am poor.” “I might not know what a five-star meal tastes like. I do not even know what a proper braised short rib tastes like. But I love my stale bread and cheap beans because I bought them with my own hard-earned money.” She bowed. The class sat in stunned silence for two seconds before erupting into thunderous applause. From that day on, I became the villain. Everyone whispered behind my back. They said the spoiled capitalist heiress tried to humiliate the poor girl with her dirty money. Even my own desk mate moved her things away, sneering at me. “Do not think you can do whatever you want just because you are rich.” That was the day the entire senior class isolated me. And it was the exact same day I lost my sense of taste. Steak tasted like rubber. Fresh greens tasted like bitter ash. Swallowing premium rice felt like chewing sand. I saw countless specialists. They all agreed my tongue was perfectly fine. They diagnosed it as psychosomatic. For three years, I forced down food that tasted like literal dirt. In those three years, my weight plummeted from one hundred and ten pounds to barely eighty. My cheekbones jutted out. My wrists were so thin you could count the bones. Nobody felt sorry for me. Whenever people looked at me, they just muttered the word “Karma.” Looking at the floating text above my head, the horrifying truth finally clicked into place. But I had never done anything to Hazel. Why would she do this to me? [If everything goes according to the plot, Sloane will drop dead in the middle of her final exams. Hazel will score perfectly and get a full ride to Harvard.] [The school board will even recommend that Sloane’s billionaire parents adopt the brilliant, hardworking Hazel to cope with their grief.] I stared at the word “adopt.” My nails dug so hard into my palms they almost drew blood. She had been plotting to steal my entire life from the very beginning. But I could not just confront her. I needed hard evidence. I skipped my afternoon classes, called my driver, and headed straight to the hospital. 2 Our elite academy did all its annual physical exams at this specific private hospital. Conveniently, my family happened to be the hospital’s largest shareholder. It took exactly three minutes for the chief of medicine to hand over my class’s medical records. The director reviewed my charts and sighed. “Miss Sloane, your vitals are dangerously low. Your body is showing signs of severe, prolonged malnutrition. But…” I knew exactly what confused him. I was the daughter of a billionaire. My three daily meals were prepared by private chefs and delivered straight to the academy. How could I possibly be malnourished? He shook his head. “We have run every scan available. We simply cannot find the medical cause.” I did not reply. Instead, I pulled Hazel’s medical file from the stack. Her vitals were absolutely perfect. Under the physical fitness assessment, the doctor had actually written “Excellent.” I pulled up her intake records from freshman year to compare. The difference was staggering. After three years of supposedly eating nothing but stale bread and cheap canned food, she had grown two inches and gained a very healthy thirty pounds. Unless she was tapping into some supernatural force, that was biologically impossible. Armed with the files, I took a sleek black car straight back to the academy. I walked into the classroom and stopped right in front of Hazel’s desk. “Did you do this to me? Did you steal my sense of taste?” The classroom went dead silent. Hazel looked up, her eyes wide and innocent. “What do you mean?” I slammed my hand on her desk. “You stole my taste. Every single thing I eat gets transferred straight into your mouth.” Hazel’s expression faltered for a fraction of a second before her eyes welled up with tears. Her voice trembled. “Sloane… I really do not know what you are talking about. I eat dry bread and cheap beans every single day. I buy them from the discount rack…” The rest of the class immediately stood up to defend her. “Are you psychotic, Sloane? Hazel literally eats scraps. She has it hard enough without you making up crazy conspiracy theories!” “You cannot blame other people just because your own body is failing!” Hazel wiped her eyes, reaching into her worn-out backpack to pull out a crinkled plastic bag. Inside was half a dry roll and some unappetizing pickled vegetables. “Look. I really do not eat anything good…” Her voice trailed off, making her sound like a heavily wronged martyr. “Really?” I let out a cold, sharp laugh and threw both medical reports onto her desk. “Then explain to me how a girl who survives on dry bread and pickles managed to get perfectly healthy, grow taller, and gain thirty pounds?” Hazel froze. She stared at the papers, completely lost for words. Right on cue, a familiar voice rang out from the back of the room. “Sloane, leave her alone! Just because Hazel refused your charity does not mean she cannot accept help from someone else.” Preston walked down the aisle, acting like a knight in shining armor. He placed a carton of premium organic milk gently onto Hazel’s desk. “Here is your daily milk, Hazel.” He looked so incredibly smug, as if Hazel’s perfect health was entirely his doing. Looking at the carton of milk, a wave of disgust washed over me. “Preston, did you forget who you actually grew up with?” The moment those words left my mouth, Hazel frantically shoved the milk carton back toward him. “Sloane, I am so sorry. I should not have accepted Preston’s kindness. I did not mean to make you jealous.” She looked down, her voice trembling. “I promise I will never accept anything from him ever again. Just please stop bullying me.” In one breath, she completely twisted my legitimate accusation into a petty, jealous catfight over a boy. Preston instantly stepped in front of her. “Are you serious right now, Sloane? I literally scoured the city for rare delicacies to help cure your taste loss. Are you seriously going to throw a tantrum over a single carton of plain milk?” My blood boiled. I pointed directly at Hazel. “I cannot taste anything because of her! She has some sort of system. No matter what I eat, the taste and the nutrients get transferred directly to her. She did this to me!” He did not even hesitate. He looked at me like I belonged in an asylum. “Do you even hear yourself right now, Sloane? A scholarship student from the slums used a ‘system’ to magically steal your taste?” “You are absolutely insane.” “You are malnourished because you refuse to eat your food! Stop projecting your eating disorder onto her!” I stared at him. I had looked at that face for over a decade, but right now, all I felt was profound disappointment. 3 I did not wait for Preston after school. I went straight back to my family’s estate alone. Staring at the massive, floor-to-ceiling wine cellar, an overwhelming wave of grief hit me. I popped the cork on a bottle of premium whiskey and poured glass after glass. I cried while I drank. Growing up in a strict, aristocratic household, I was never allowed to touch alcohol. I had absolutely zero alcohol tolerance. But with my taste gone, the whiskey did not burn. It did not sting my throat. I drank it like it was tap water, desperately trying to drown out the suffocating sadness. I drank until I felt physically full. Then my phone lit up with a video call from Preston. The second I answered, he started screaming at me. “Sloane, what the hell did you do to Hazel?!” “Why is she acting like this?!” I stared at the screen. Hazel’s face was flushed bright red. She was slumped over a trash can, violently throwing up. It was the most hilarious thing I had seen all day. “How would I know what is wrong with her?” I asked coldly. “And why is it automatically my fault?” “Who else would sabotage her?!” Preston yelled, his face contorted in anger. “Did you poison her? We were sitting here eating a perfectly normal dinner, and suddenly she started complaining about being dizzy and nauseous. Now she is completely delirious!” Hearing his blind accusations, my rage hit its absolute peak. “When my body started failing, I told you Hazel was behind it, and you called me crazy!” “Now Hazel has a stomachache, and without a single shred of evidence, you immediately accuse me of poisoning her?!” “We grew up together. Does a decade of trust mean absolutely nothing compared to her?” He held Hazel tightly against his chest, glaring at the camera with total disgust. “Hazel is not capable of something like that. You, on the other hand, are a spoiled, vindictive brat. I would not put it past you to try and ruin her.” Hearing those words, the very last trace of affection I held for Preston evaporated into thin air. “Believe whatever you want.” I hung up the phone. I was so furious I reached for another glass, but halfway there, reality crashed into me. I was drinking straight whiskey. Because I had no sense of taste, I was not getting drunk. But the physiological effects of the alcohol were being transferred to Hazel through her precious system! That was why she was dizzy and vomiting. She was experiencing severe alcohol poisoning. This meant that whatever I consumed, good or bad, healthy or toxic, went straight to her. I was a billionaire’s daughter. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. The formula I drank as a baby was the most expensive in the world. The water I drank was flown in from private mineral springs in Europe. My sprawling mansion housed a team of elite private chefs. In eighteen years, I had never consumed a single piece of garbage. Even my cold medicine was custom-flavored to taste like candy. That was exactly why Hazel chose to bind her system to me. For three years, she reaped the benefits of my luxurious diet. She never realized her system had a fatal flaw because I never ate anything remotely bad. Tonight was the very first time she suffered the consequences of stealing from my mouth. But it was definitely not going to be the last. A thrill of pure excitement rushed through me. I pulled out her medical report. Right under the allergy section, it was written in bold black ink. Allergic to Mangoes. I opened a premium grocery delivery app and immediately ordered fifty pounds of fresh mangoes. The very next day, fifty pounds of mangoes were delivered straight to the lobby of my private academy dorm. I hauled the massive boxes into my room and ripped them open. Dozens of bright yellow mangoes were neatly packed inside. I picked one up. It was smooth and cold against my palm. I hated mangoes. I had not touched one in three years. I locked my dorm room door and set up my phone on a tripod. I typed out a livestream title. “Eating One Hundred Mangoes Challenge.” I hit the go-live button. The viewer count started trickling in. I peeled the first mango and took a massive bite. I could not taste the sweetness. I could only feel the mushy, fibrous texture mashing against my tongue. I chewed twice and swallowed. Then came the second. Then the third. By the time I finished the tenth mango, the chat was blowing up, praising me for being a competitive eating god. Since the system was transferring the actual fullness and digestion to Hazel, I did not feel bloated at all. Quantity was completely irrelevant to me. Honestly, I was just dying to know what the physical limit was for someone with a severe mango allergy. The answer was fifteen. Right as I swallowed the last bite of the fifteenth mango, someone started violently pounding on my door. “Sloane! Open the damn door! What did you do?!”

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On the day I was reincarnated, it was the exact day of my adoption at the orphanage. I stood there and watched as Mason dragged his adoptive mother by the hand, pointing frantically toward the girl singing on the swing set, Harah. “Mom! Can we adopt this sister, please?!” In my past life, the adoptive parents had taken me home instead. Mason had resented me for being quiet, for not knowing how to act cute, and for never being as charming as the girl who loved the swings. I organized his study notes, took care of his aging parents, and when the family went bankrupt, I dropped out of school to work and keep the family afloat. His attitude toward me softened, just a tiny bit. But every single time I was in competition with Harah, he still demanded that I step aside. The university recommendation, the scholarship, the overseas training program—every single time. The final time was when the plane went down. As the flames engulfed the cabin, he looked at me and murmured: “If there is a next life… I wish Harah could be my sister.” I heard him. When I opened my eyes again. I was back on Adoption Day. This time, I smiled before Mason could even open his mouth: “Mr. and Mrs. Evans, I think Harah is a much better fit for your family.” Then I turned around and walked straight toward the Miller couple, the people who had adopted Harah in my past life. “I want to go home with you.” 1 Mr. Miller froze for a second. He crouched down to meet me at eye level. His hands were rough, covered in thick calluses, and he held his palm out toward me. “What is your name, little girl?” “…Hazel. Like the tree.” “Hazel,” he repeated. His voice was incredibly gentle, like he was afraid of startling a wild bird. “We want a daughter. Do not worry about being quiet. Our house is very peaceful, and you do not need to perform or entertain anyone to stay with us.” Behind him, Mrs. Miller’s eyes grew slightly red, though she didn’t speak. Instead, she pulled a carefully folded handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it into my hand. “Wipe your hands,” she whispered. “Why are they so cold?” I looked down at my hands. I had been pinching my palms so hard out of anxiety that a row of pale, crescent-shaped indentations marked my skin. A sudden, sharp ache hit the back of my nose. In my twenty-two years with the Evans family in my past life, not a single person had ever asked me why my hands were cold. Laughter drifted over from the swing set. It was Harah. Mason gave me a complicated look but said nothing more. He pulled Mrs. Evans toward the swings, turning back to yell: “Mom! Hurry up! Look how high she is swinging!” Mrs. Evans cast one final glance at me. There was a fleeting flash of regret in her eyes, but it vanished instantly. She turned and walked toward the swing set. Mr. Miller was still crouched in front of me, his hand outstretched. His palm was rough, warm, and waiting quietly. I placed my hand in his. “Okay,” I said. “I will go home with you.” When we walked out of the orphanage gates, the sunlight was so bright it made me squint. Mrs. Miller walked on my left, Mr. Miller on my right. I was wedged in the middle, each of my hands held securely in theirs. I turned my head and looked back one last time. Mason was lifting Harah off the swing, smiling so widely his eyes turned into crescent moons. That was the absolute last time in this life I ever turned around to look at them. 2 The Millers lived in a cramped, two-bedroom apartment tucked away in an old, working-class neighborhood on the east side of the city. The living room held a faded, aggressively patterned fabric sofa. Mrs. Miller dug through the shoe cabinet for a solid minute before pulling out a pair of brand-new, fluffy pink slippers. The tags were still on them. “Bought these ages ago,” she murmured, crouching down to snip the plastic tag. Her ears were flushed. “Just never knew when we would actually get a daughter. They have been sitting there for two years.” Mr. Miller leaned out from the tiny kitchen. “Hazel! I am making fried fish. Do you eat fish?” “I do.” “Great!” He popped back into the kitchen, the loud clang of a spatula hitting a wok echoing through the apartment. I stood in the living room wearing those fuzzy pink slippers, the soles so soft it felt like I was stepping on clouds. That first night, I slept in the spare bedroom. The sheets were freshly changed, smelling deeply of clean cotton baked in the sun. A small nightlight glowed on the nightstand, casting a warm, amber light across the room. Mrs. Miller hovered in the doorway for a long time. She opened her mouth, closed it, and finally just said: “I will leave the door open. Call me if you need anything.” After she left, I buried my face in the pillow. The pillow had been sun-dried too. It was plush, crisp, and radiated an indescribable warmth. For the first time in two lifetimes, I fell asleep in a strange place without curling myself into a tight, defensive ball. Things over at the Evans household, however, were loud. Mr. Miller ran a phone repair stall at the night market. He dealt with every kind of person imaginable, which meant he heard the neighborhood gossip faster than anyone. On the third day, he came home, dropped his toolbox by the door, stripped off his jacket, and turned to Mrs. Miller. “Guess what. The Evans family threw a massive party. Booked seven or eight tables. Said it was a welcome banquet for their new daughter.” Mrs. Miller, who was scooping rice into bowls, paused. “They threw a banquet?” “Yup. Booked a private hall at the Grand Plaza.” Mr. Miller took off his apron, hung it behind the door, and glanced over at me, deliberately lowering his voice. “Word on the street is the son demanded it. Said he wanted to officially and grandly welcome his new sister to the family.” “Do you think we should…” Mrs. Miller trailed off, checking my expression. She didn’t finish the thought, merely placing a bowl of rice in front of me and adding a generous portion of greens to the top. “Hazel, time to eat.” “Okay,” I replied. In my past life, on my third day in the Evans house, Mason locked himself in his room and refused to come out. Mrs. Evans cooked an entire feast, but he wouldn’t even crack the door open. Later, I stood outside his room for thirty minutes holding a plate of food. A piece of paper was shoved out from under the door gap. It read: “Leave me alone.” There was no banquet. There was no Grand Plaza. There was no “grandly welcoming his new sister.” He didn’t even call me “sister” a single time. I had no idea what was going through Mason’s head when he demanded a banquet for Harah. But that was his problem. It had absolutely nothing to do with me. Bits and pieces of the Grand Plaza banquet still trickled down to me. Mrs. Miller ran into the Evans’ housekeeper at the vegetable market. The two stood by a produce stand and chatted. The housekeeper loved to gossip and spilled everything. She said Mason wore a crisp new dress shirt, his hair styled perfectly. He held Harah’s hand the entire night, walking her from table to table to introduce her to the extended family. She said Harah was incredibly sweet, addressing everyone perfectly—”Uncle,” “Auntie,” “Cousin”—making the whole room laugh in delight. She said Mason even tapped his glass with a fork, stood up, and gave a speech. “Thank you all for coming. This is my sister. From now on, anyone who messes with her is messing with me.” The entire hall erupted in applause. Mrs. Miller sighed, quietly snapping the ends off green beans at the kitchen table. Only after the housekeeper had walked away did Mrs. Miller look at me, her voice hesitant. “Hazel… do you regret it? Choosing our family that day?” “Of course not. I cannot thank you enough. Truly.” I meant every word. In my past life, I waited twenty-two years in the Evans house. I waited for him to call me his sister. I waited for him to treat me like actual family. I waited until the plane caught fire and he said, “I wish Harah was my sister.” I had done enough waiting for one lifetime. 3 A few days later, Mrs. Miller came back from the market holding a large bag of premium apples. She explained that the Evans’ housekeeper had forced them onto her and refused to take them back. “She said Mason asked her to pass them along. He said to say… thank you.” Mrs. Miller placed the apples on the table and watched me carefully. I picked one up, rubbed it on my sleeve, and took a bite. It was crisp, sweet, and incredibly juicy. “Then tell him you are welcome.” I said. Mrs. Miller gave me a long look, said nothing, and turned back to the kitchen. I tossed the apple core into the trash and walked out to the balcony to check on the jasmine plant. The leaves looked a bit more lively than a few days ago, and a tiny, pale green bud was sprouting from one of the branches. I had no desire to decode what Mason’s “thank you” meant. Maybe he was thanking me for stepping aside so he could have Harah. Maybe he was thanking me for leaving quietly without making a scene. Or maybe he was thanking me for not exposing his desperate maneuvering on Adoption Day. He chose Harah, and then comfortably accepted my quiet exit. Fine by me. He got the sister he wanted. And whatever debt he felt he owed me, I wasn’t going to collect. On the first day of middle school, I ran into Harah in the hallway. She was wearing a brand-new designer backpack, her hair tied up with a silk bow. She froze when she saw me, then broke into a bright smile. “Hazel! You go to school here too?” “Yeah.” “I am in Class Three! What about you?” “Class Seven.” “What a coincidence!” She beamed. “We are schoolmates now!” I just gave a curt nod and walked away. So, Harah and I attended the same school. She was in Class Three, I was in Class Seven. Every single day after school, I saw Mason waiting at the gates to pick her up. Even from across a crowded hallway, I could feel his gaze burning into the side of my head. I ignored it entirely. A month later, the midterm rankings were posted. I ranked seventh in the entire grade. Harah ranked ninety-third. The massive red bulletin board was plastered right outside the cafeteria, impossible to miss. That afternoon, Mason was standing in the corridor between the classrooms, his hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets. As I walked out, he called my name. His tone was different from before. It was flatter, slower, like he had rehearsed a speech but swallowed half the words at the last second. “Hazel… Miller.” I stopped and looked at him. He rubbed his hands together nervously, shoved them back into his pockets, and shifted his gaze from my face, to the bulletin board, and back again. “My parents brought you up at dinner a few days ago. They heard your grades are excellent.” I said nothing. “They said… back at the orphanage, you were always so well-behaved.” “Yeah.” He paused again. A yellow ginkgo leaf drifted down and landed on his shoulder. He didn’t brush it off. “They said you are doing really well.” “Thank you,” I replied. “Tell your parents I said thanks.” Then I walked away. That night at dinner, Mrs. Miller asked how I did on the midterms. I told her I ranked seventh in the grade. She was so ecstatic she dropped her spatula, ran out of the kitchen, and hugged me tight. The grease from her apron smeared right onto my sleeve. Mr. Miller rushed out of the living room in a panic. “What happened? What happened?!” “Your daughter got seventh! Seventh in the whole grade!” Mr. Miller blinked, then a massive grin split his face. “Well, does that mean we need a celebratory dish?” “Yes! What does Hazel want to eat?” “Fried fish, please.” “Fish again? We just had that two days ago!” “Then I will make extra crispy fried fish!” Mrs. Miller shot me a playful glare, marching back into the kitchen, muttering under her breath, though the oil was already sizzling in the pan. Mr. Miller sat back down on the sofa, picking up his screwdriver to tinker with an old radio, humming a song horribly off-key. I sat at the dining table, looking at my adoptive mother bustling in the kitchen and my adoptive father humming in the living room. I suddenly realized I didn’t care at all about that ginkgo leaf on Mason’s shoulder. 4 The second semester of eighth grade, Mason approached me voluntarily for the second time. I was waiting at the bus stop after school. He spotted me from the shadow of a billboard three meters away. I pretended not to see him. He walked over and stopped beside me, leaving a half-step of distance between us. Close, but not too close. “Hazel.” “Yeah.” “You are in eighth grade now?” “Yeah.” “How were the midterms?” “Fine.” He ran out of things to say. I didn’t offer anything else. The bus arrived. I swiped my card, walked to the back, and took a window seat. As the bus pulled away, I glanced out the window. He was still standing beneath the billboard, his gray silhouette dissolving into the evening dusk. That night, while I was doing homework, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Mason. “Harah bombed her midterms. My dad completely lost it and screamed at her. Could you lend her your study notes so she can copy them?” I stared at the message for a long time. A second text popped up. “Just this once. She will return them the second she is done.” Then a third. “Just consider it a favor.” I put my phone face down on the desk. I finished my math homework. Then my English homework. Then physics. When I was completely done, it was past eleven at night. I picked up the phone and typed a single word: “Sure.” I hit send and turned the phone off. The next day at noon, Harah came to find me. She stood outside Class Seven holding a bubble tea, smiling her trademark sugary smile. “Hazel, thank you so much! I finished copying everything. Here are your notes back!” She handed the notebook over. Stuck to the cover was a sticky note with a crooked, hand-drawn heart. I flipped the notebook open. In the margins of one of the pages, written in tiny, deliberate handwriting, was a sentence. “Your brother told you to let me win, and you did. You are such a good person.” I dog-eared that page and closed the notebook. Harah skipped away, her ponytail bouncing behind her. I stood in the hallway, watching her back. In my past life, she had said almost the exact same thing to me. Right after I gave up the university recommendation, withdrew my scholarship application, and declined the overseas training. She had smiled and said, “Hazel, you are so nice.” Back then, I thought it was a genuine compliment. Now, I finally understood what she really meant. Her translation was: “You handed what was yours over to me, which makes you a pushover. And I am going to keep taking.” A month later, the school announced they were hosting a New Year’s Gala. Each class had to nominate one candidate to host the event, and the faculty would select one boy and one girl from the entire grade. Class Three nominated Harah. She was outgoing, sweet-talking, and loved being on stage. Her homeroom teacher picked her instantly. The homeroom teacher for Class Seven hesitated for days before finally calling my name. I had ranked in the top five on the midterms, and the teacher claimed, “Top students have a stable stage presence.” I didn’t decline. I just nodded. The day the candidate list was posted on the bulletin board, Harah walked past Class Seven and peeked through the window. I was doing homework. Feeling eyes on me, I looked up. She flashed me a sweet smile, spun on her heel, and walked away, her ponytail swishing behind her. After school, Mason was waiting at the gates. As I walked out, he stood up straight. “Hazel.” “Yeah.” “That gala host audition,” he said, his voice tight. “Can you drop out?”

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On the first day of high school, Chloe sprang from behind and threw her arms around my neck, hugging me tight. Suddenly, a flood of red text exploded across my vision— [Oh my god, this is the 387th time. She still doesn’t realize her best friend is the problem!] [Duck! Get away from her! Just one hug and her beauty stat drops another three points. She was such a pretty, fair-skinned girl in middle school, and now she is being drained dry.] [Exactly. She had straight A’s in middle school and then her grades just vanished. I could literally cry for her.] The text crowded my vision, line after dense line. My entire body went rigid. How did they know? In middle school, I was consistently at the top of my class. Over the last two years of high school, I plummeted straight to the bottom. My skin had become rough and dull, my brain felt sluggish, and I hated even looking in the mirror. Everyone whispered the same thing: Maya peaked in middle school. High school ruined her. She just stopped trying. But I was trying. I never stopped trying. Chloe rested her chin on my shoulder, pulling me from my thoughts. “Maya, you have to promise to be my best friend this semester too, okay?” The floating text said it was because I hugged her. So… what if I got everyone else to touch her instead? 1 I instinctively bent down, pretending to tie my shoelace, forcing her to let go. “Whoa.” She stumbled slightly. “Why did you randomly crouch down?” “Shoelace came undone,” I muttered, keeping my head down. The text was still scrolling furiously above me. [Wait, did she dodge that? Did she figure it out?] [No way. She has been clueless for two years. She is not going to suddenly have an epiphany.] My nails dug into my palms. In that single instant, it felt like a bomb went off in my head. Everything that hadn’t made sense over the last two years suddenly snapped into place. If what this text was saying was true… I didn’t just ‘lose my touch’. I was being robbed. When I stood back up, Chloe grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward the cafeteria kiosk. Walking beside her, I stared at her profile. Her skin was practically glowing, porcelain white, and her eyes were huge and brilliant. In middle school, I used to look exactly like that. More text drifted past. [Look at her. Half of Chloe’s face was literally stolen from Maya.] [Right?! Chloe used to have yellowish, uneven skin. Suddenly she is Snow White? Who actually buys that?] We reached the kiosk. Chloe bought a strawberry yogurt, pierced the foil with a straw, and pushed it right to my lips. “Take a sip. It’s your favorite.” The text went absolutely ballistic. [Do not drink it! Sharing a straw counts as intimate contact!] [Indirect mouth-to-mouth transfers stats just the same! Dodge it, quick!] I took a half-step back and waved my hand. “I am not thirsty.” Chloe froze. A flash of something unrecognizable darted through her bright, pretty eyes. “What is wrong with you today?” She pushed the straw closer. “Just one sip.” “My throat is sore. The doctor said no cold drinks.” She stared at me for two solid seconds before her bright smile returned. “Okay, fine. Next time I will get you a hot cocoa.” I nodded. Right now, the only thing I could do was play dumb. I had to act like I was still the slow, ugly, clueless Maya. I mentally etched every single phrase the text had revealed into a draft paper tucked in my mind. 387th time. Beauty dropped by three. Intimate contact. Indirect counts too. I stared at the words I wrote on the corner of my notebook during class. If this was how my life had been slowly siphoned away over the past two years— Then what I lost wasn’t just good grades and clear skin. It was two entire years of my life. I folded the paper tight and shoved it into the deepest zipper of my pencil case. Watching Chloe’s back from a few desks away, a crystal-clear thought formed in my mind. I had to figure out exactly how the mechanics of this theft worked. The text seemed to hear my thoughts. A final line floated past. [Ooh, look at those eyes. That is a dangerous look.] [Is Maya… finally going to do something about this?] I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do yet. But I knew one thing for certain: starting today, everything changes. 2 To play my part convincingly, I had to sift through the last two years of my life, frame by frame. I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Who was I in middle school? A regular in the top ten of the entire grade. I had skin so pale and flawless the kids nicknamed me ‘Vanilla Bean’. I could run the 800-meter dash and place in the top three. I could memorize vocabulary lists just by glancing at them. Back then, my mom bragged to anyone who would listen that I was a natural-born scholar. But then came the first midterms of freshman year in high school. I dropped from the elite tier straight to dead average. My mom’s first reaction was to scream at me. “Are you dating someone?! Are you playing on your phone all night?!” I told her I wasn’t. She didn’t believe me. By sophomore year, my grades had stabilized at the absolute bottom of the class. The girl in the mirror became a stranger. My skin turned sallow and broke out in cystic acne. My eyes lost their spark, and my face bloated. During P.E., I couldn’t even run half a lap without gasping for air. My homeroom teacher pulled me aside for a serious talk. “Maya, you had such a phenomenal foundation in middle school. Why are you regressing? Have you gotten lazy?” The school nurse prescribed me multivitamins, claiming it was just normal teenage hormonal imbalance. Everyone found a convenient excuse for my downfall. Lazy. Gluttonous. Undisciplined. Puberty. Not a single person considered that my life was being stolen. Chloe transferred to our school on the first day of freshman year. When she arrived, she was utterly average. Middle-of-the-pack grades, plain features. We sat next to each other, and she clung to me. She was constantly holding my hand, throwing her arm around my shoulders, pressing her cheek against mine for selfies. Back then, I was thrilled. I thought I had made a best friend for life. But somewhere along the line, she transformed. Her skin turned luminous. Her eyes widened. Her grades skyrocketed with every exam. By the second semester of sophomore year, she was ranked number one in the grade. The teachers worshipped her. The students idolized her. That was when the title of ‘Genius Beauty Queen’ started circulating. And I? I became the ugly, slow sidekick who hovered in her shadow. As I lay there remembering, the text popped back up to join the pity party. [All that light she shines with? It is yours.] [The most toxic part is, the harder she leeches off you, the nicer she pretends to be.] No wonder every time I bombed a test, she was the first to comfort me. “It is okay, Maya. Just study harder next time.” Then, right in front of the whole class, she would generously lend me her perfect study notes. The teachers would praise her: “Chloe is such a supportive classmate.” The other students would say: “Maya, you must have saved a nation in your past life to get a best friend like her.” I would take her notes, feeling a mix of warmth and deep, crushing guilt. Looking back, it was a sick, twisted joke. The memory that hurt the most was from last month. My mom found a photo of me from middle school and let out a long, heavy sigh. “Maya, look at how beautiful you used to be.” She tapped the photo angrily. “Look at yourself now. Are you not embarrassed?” I stood in front of the mirror, completely unable to speak. I cried until the sun came up that night. I genuinely believed I had ruined my own life. I believed I wasn’t trying hard enough, that I lacked discipline, that I deserved to fail. Now I understood why the text appeared exactly when I was at my lowest. Because I was at rock bottom. If someone hadn’t told me the truth, I would have fully accepted the identity of the ‘ruined, worthless Maya’. Since the truth was finally out, I wasn’t going to hold back. I rolled out of bed and pulled the folded paper from my backpack. Under the desk lamp, I re-read the rules I had noted down. 387th time. Beauty -3. Intimate contact. Indirect counts. I grabbed a pen and added a new line: She transferred here freshman year. My downfall started exactly then. To steal it all back, I need to find the fatal flaw in her system. I folded the paper into an even tinier square and shoved it back into the secret lining of my pencil case. For the first time, I felt a deep, unwavering certainty. The ugly, slow Maya wasn’t the real me. The real me was just waiting to come back. 3 To find the system’s fatal flaw, I had to rely on the floating text. It leaked info, complained, and insulted people on my behalf. If I watched it closely and recorded every anomaly, I could piece the puzzle together. For the next few weeks, I became extremely ‘cooperative’ with Chloe. If she wanted to hold my hand, I gave it to her—but I pulled my sleeve down so the fabric separated our skin. If she wanted a cheek-to-cheek selfie, I tilted my head so my hair created a barrier between our faces. If she threw her arm around me, I conveniently shifted my backpack to act as a shield. Every single time, the text tallied the score. [Ooh, skin-to-fabric contact. She only lost a fraction of a point. Interesting.] [Smart! She is secretly minimizing her own damage.] Now I knew for sure. The more direct the physical contact, the harsher the theft. If there was a barrier, the transfer was drastically reduced. That was the first thread I untangled. The second clue arrived purely by accident. During the school sports festival, Chloe signed up for multiple events. After finishing the 100-meter dash, she was swarmed by a massive crowd of students. Someone threw an arm around her shoulder, another patted her back, and half a dozen others pushed in to high-five her. In that exact moment, the text hovering in my vision glitched aggressively. The words overlapped, flashed violently, and spat out a string of garbled code. [L… Lagging?] [Too many people touching her at once! Is the system bottlenecking?] [Holy crap, the screen is tearing! It is going to crash!] I stood up straight, my heart hammering in my chest. When the crowd finally dispersed and Chloe walked out alone, the text slowly stabilized. I stared at the smooth red letters, my pulse racing. It couldn’t handle crowds. I immediately wrote it down in my notes. Multiple simultaneous contacts → System lag. I drew a heavy, dark circle around it. From that day on, I started testing the theory. When the photography club took a group picture, twenty or thirty people squished together around Chloe. The text stuttered, but recovered quickly. [Not too many people this time. It held up.] During a surprise birthday party the class threw for her, over twenty people took turns giving her a hug. The text merely shivered. It didn’t break. This proved that simultaneous contact and rapid consecutive contact had the exact same effect on the system’s bandwidth. A number slowly began to take shape in my head. Twenty or thirty people? It could handle that. But what if there were more? What was the absolute limit? Did it crash the second it hit the ceiling, or did it need a massive overflow to completely break? The text seemed to read my mind, drifting by at a leisurely pace. [This girl’s observation skills are getting terrifying.] [Is she… counting the crowd?] [Shh—do not spoil it. Let her figure it out.] I ignored them. I just added one more line to my notes. It has a hard cap. If the crowd exceeds a specific number, it will crash. To find that exact number, I had to bide my time. The perfect opportunity arose during the midterm awards assembly. Chloe was called to the stage as the top student in the grade. The crowd went wild, and students rushed the stage, demanding group selfies with her. A massive mob of about forty students swarmed her at once. The text began vibrating violently, the words blurring into an illegible, pixelated mess. I stared at it intensely. At peak density, I counted roughly forty-five or forty-six people touching her in some capacity. The text was so distorted it was practically unreadable, but the screen never went completely white. When the crowd cleared, it slowly stitched itself back together. I let out a long breath. Forty-five or forty-six. It could barely endure it. The breaking point had to be hovering right around fifty. I scribbled the number down. As I wrote it, my hand was shaking. I had finally found the door. All I had to do was get more than fifty people to physically touch Chloe at the exact same time— And the system that had leeched off my life for two years would gorge itself until it exploded. A final line of text drifted quietly by. [Maya, you are not stupid at all, are you?] I smiled. Now that I knew the fatal flaw, I just needed a completely justifiable, public event where everyone would willingly swarm her. 4 And most importantly, I could not be anywhere near her when it happened. If the stolen talents snapped back to me, I needed to be in proximity, but far enough away that she wouldn’t immediately suspect me. I flipped through the school calendar. The Annual Arts Gala. It was the most prestigious event of the year. Awards, performances, bouquets of flowers, absolute chaos on and off the stage. And Chloe was essentially guaranteed to win this year’s ‘Campus Star’ award. It was a title voted on by the entire female student body. Beauty, academics, popularity—she ranked first in all three. I stared at the date on the calendar, a slow smile spreading across my face. Over the next two months, I executed three specific tasks. First, I kept playing the fool. I was clingier with Chloe than ever before. If she wanted to hold hands, I held them. If she wanted a hug, I gave it to her. Except every single time, I sneakily ensured there was a layer of clothing between us, keeping the stolen stats to an absolute minimum. The text scrolled by, laughing at my sabotage. Second, I built her hype. I actively pushed Chloe’s campaign for ‘Campus Star’. I praised her in the class group chats and canvassed for votes on the school forums. “Chloe is beautiful inside and out. She deserves this.” “She is the pride of our class! Everyone vote for her!” My classmates constantly talked about how fiercely loyal I was to my best friend. Chloe was so moved she teared up, pulling me into a tight hug. “You understand me better than anyone, Maya.” I hugged her back, making sure my thick winter coat was wedged between us. The text drifted by: [The higher you build the pedestal, the harder the fall. Fatten the pig before the slaughter.] Third, and most importantly, I executed the final move. I tracked down the student council member in charge of the Gala’s itinerary. I pitched an idea. “For the Campus Star award this year, why don’t we add an interactive segment?” “Let the winner stand center stage, and have the entire grade line up to hand her flowers, give her a hug, or shake her hand.” “We can film it as one massive, continuous panoramic shot. It would be an unforgettable memory for the yearbook.” The council member’s eyes lit up. “That is brilliant! It is engaging and super wholesome.” And just like that, the segment was officially added to the schedule. I stared at the printed itinerary, my heartbeat slow and steady. Campus Star Interactive Congratulatory Segment — Entire Grade Participation. The entire grade. That was a hell of a lot more than fifty people. The night before the Gala, Chloe came to my room. She was holding a bouquet she had prepared, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Maya, if I actually win tomorrow, you are the very first person I am going to hug.” I smiled warmly. “I will be waiting.” She leaned in, arms open to embrace me. I twisted sideways, letting my backpack take the brunt of the impact, allowing her to graze only the fabric of my sleeve. The text cheerfully reported a microscopic decimal of a stat loss. [No biggie, just a drop in the ocean.] Chloe didn’t notice a thing and skipped away happily. I stood there, watching her bounce down the hallway. Tomorrow was going to be the absolute peak of her life. I went back to my desk and opened my notebook. Hard cap is highly likely 50 people. Exceeding the cap guarantees a crash. I took my pen and pressed hard into the paper, writing the final line. Tomorrow, the entire grade will line up to hug her. We will see exactly which number blows the system to pieces. I closed the notebook. The text drifted slowly across my vision. [Is tomorrow the season finale?] [I am literally rubbing my hands together in excitement.] [Good luck, Maya.] 5 The auditorium was packed on the day of the Gala. Chloe had applied a flawless, light layer of makeup. Under the stage lights, her skin looked translucent and radiant. The text mocked her: [Tsk, that entire foundation was robbed straight from the girl sitting in the back row.] I kept my expression perfectly blank. The performances cycled through, one after another. I only cared about one thing: when the award ceremony was going to start. Finally, the host stepped up to the mic and called her name. The auditorium erupted in thunderous applause. Chloe covered her mouth, acting utterly shocked, and gracefully walked up the stairs to the stage. The spotlight hit her, and she smiled like a blooming flower. The girls cheered, the boys whistled. She took the trophy and leaned into the microphone, delivering a perfectly humble, rehearsed speech. “Thank you all so much… I am just lucky to be surrounded by people who constantly help and support me…” The text fired up again. [People who help you? You mean the host you drained dry?] [Keep acting, sweetheart. The curtains are about to close.] I smiled gently at her from the crowd. The host took the mic back. “And now, for a very special segment this year—” “We invite the entire grade to come up to the stage, present a flower, give our Campus Star a hug, and capture the most beautiful group photo in school history!” The crowd roared in approval. The hospitality team, already prepped, took their places on both sides of the stage holding baskets of individual roses. The student council began directing the traffic, forming a massive, winding line. The crowd surged forward. Chloe stood center stage, slightly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it, but her radiant smile quickly returned. She probably thought this was her absolute coronation. The first student walked up, handed her a flower, and hugged her. A number popped up on my screen. [1.] The second, the third. [2, 3…] The line stretched longer and longer. Some handed her flowers, some hugged her, some shook her hand, others slung an arm around her shoulder for a quick selfie. The text started ticking upward, digit by digit. [15, 16, 17…] [Ooh, we are cooking now.] When it hit the twenties, the font on the text began to vibrate slightly. I stared unblinking at Chloe on the stage. She was still smiling, hugging person after person, completely oblivious. No one in that auditorium knew that every single embrace was dragging my stolen life back to me. The numbers ticked faster and faster. [35! Incoming visual glitches!] [Look at the text! It is getting pixelated!] The crowd kept pushing forward. The student council members were shouting into megaphones, “Do not push! Single file! One at a time!” But the excitement was completely out of control. Everyone wanted to touch the ‘Campus Star’ and get some of her good luck. [42! 43!] [It is gonna blow! It is actually gonna blow!] Chloe’s smile began to stiffen. She probably felt something was wrong—a heavy, suffocating weight, like something anchored deep inside her was violently rattling loose. She instinctively took a half-step back. But the center of the stage was mobbed. She was trapped. [48! 49!] I shot up from my seat. The fiftieth student handed her a flower and stepped away. The entire wall of text in my vision began flashing blinding white, like a television losing its signal. [50! Max capacity reached!] [One more and it—] The fifty-first student, grinning ear to ear, threw her arms wide open and tackled Chloe in a massive bear hug. In that exact fraction of a second. The entire wall of text shattered with a deafening, silent SNAP and went completely, blindingly white.

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1 After Dad vanished into the parallel dimension, Mom dumped every single penny we had into quantum portal research. To keep me alive and out of her hair, she bought a nanny bot to handle my daily routine. But Mom’s so-called best buddy, Uncle Felix, hacked the robot’s system and locked it into pet mode. Every day, it dispensed exactly ten pieces of dry cat kibble for me to eat. I was so starved I could barely whisper when I finally called Mom begging for help. Her voice over the phone was sharp and cold. “Can you just grow up for once? You are absolutely useless. You couldn’t even keep your own father from leaving!” “I asked Felix to drop by and check on you every single day! Who is teaching you to tell these disgusting lies?” Terrified, I hung up the phone and crawled deep into my bedroom closet. I hid there because the shadows still smelled like Dad. Just as the last bit of warmth was leaving my body, a strange, echoing voice whispered right into my ear. [Would you be willing to give up your life in exchange for your father’s return?] I gave a weak, tiny nod. I would do it. I would do anything as long as Mom and Dad could be happy again. … I curled up on the hardwood floor of the closet, desperately burying my face in the flannel shirts Dad left behind, breathing in the scent of cedarwood and old spice. His clothes were still neatly hanging there, and just looking at them made me feel safe. I kept my head wrapped in his jacket, quietly feeling my life slip away. The closet was pitch black, exactly like the night Dad disappeared. Only this time, I wasn’t scared at all. That strange voice promised me. It said that as long as I let go of my life, Dad would come back. And if Dad came back, Mom wouldn’t have to hurt so much anymore. I closed my eyes, and my mind slowly drifted away into a heavy fog. By the time I realized what was happening, I was floating in the middle of the living room. The nanny bot was humming in standby mode. I drifted through the air and curiously patted its metal head. It had a perfectly round dome and spoke with a voice that sounded just like mine, so Mom had named it Orbit. Mom used to tell me she was going to bring Dad back, so Orbit would be in charge of watching me eat, sleep, and do my homework. I had been so happy. With Orbit around, Mom wouldn’t have to work herself to the bone anymore. But the very next day, Orbit changed. It stopped cooking my favorite meals. Instead, a little hatch on its metallic belly popped open, dropping a few brown pebbles onto a plastic plate. Orbit’s voice was still sickeningly sweet. [Here is your food for today.] “Orbit, I don’t want this. I want Dad’s scrambled eggs with the secret sprinkle of sugar.” [Ben, as a little kitty cat, you must only eat your kibble.] I figured Orbit was just glitching, so I tried pressing the reset button on its back. But Orbit merely tilted its round head and played a pre-recorded message on a loop. [Pet mode engaged. Please contact the administrator to adjust settings.] I called Mom’s cell phone. It rang forever before she finally picked up. The background noise was deafening. I could hear adults shouting over the roar of massive generators. Mom’s voice was hoarse and dripping with impatience. “Ben, didn’t I tell you not to call me unless it’s an emergency?” “Mom, Orbit is broken. It’s only giving me…” Before I could even finish my sentence, she cut me off. “Didn’t I ask Felix to go see you every day? Why are you making up stories, Ben?” I opened my mouth but the words died in my throat when I heard the sudden crack of a sob in Mom’s voice. Everything went wrong when Dad decided to cross over to the other world. He couldn’t stand how close Mom and Uncle Felix were getting. After that, Mom turned into a completely different person. She cut ties with Uncle Felix and practically locked herself inside the underground lab. She lost her mind trying to find a way to drag Dad back to our reality. Uncle Felix didn’t take it well. Whenever he came over to check on me, the look in his eyes was pure poison. And then… My tiny brain was spinning, trying to piece everything together, when a loud click echoed from the front door. The heavy deadbolt turned. Footsteps echoed in the hallway, and my eyes instantly lit up. Mom was home! I floated eagerly through the living room, watching her kick off her heels. “Ben?” “Mom! You’re finally back!” I threw my arms open and lunged at her, only to pass right through her chest. I stared blankly at my own transparent hands. Right. I forgot I was already dead. “Ben? I am not in the mood for hide and seek today. Come out right now!” I pouted, instinctively wanting to argue that I wasn’t playing games. But no matter how loud I screamed, not a single sound reached her ears. All I could do was watch helplessly as Mom walked over to Orbit to check its system logs. “Orbit, where is Ben?” The robot’s oversized digital eyes flashed blue, and its mechanical voice chimed through the quiet room. [Administrator voice recognized. The kitty cat is currently napping in the bedroom closet.] [Breathing is steady. Sleep mode engaged.] Mom paused, letting out a heavy sigh before turning toward the bedroom hallway. My heart felt like it was going to beat right out of my invisible chest. I wanted her to find me, but I didn’t want her to know I was dead just yet. Dad wasn’t back yet. I couldn’t let Mom’s heart break all over again. Just as her fingers brushed the bedroom doorknob, her cell phone suddenly started screaming in her pocket. “Professor Sarah! We are getting massive energy spikes from the multiverse grid! The experiment is stabilizing!” Mom yanked her hand back from the door, spun around, and practically ran out of the house. Watching the door slam shut behind her, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Mom and Dad were going to be together soon. That was a good thing. I looked down at my pale, shriveled body lying in the closet and realized how ugly I looked. If Dad saw me looking like a pile of bones, he would be so upset. I swallowed the lump in my throat and floated back to the living room. A massive portrait of our family of three hung right in the center of the wall. Mom had specifically framed it after Dad left. I had asked her why she put it up. She just looked at me with those hollow, haunted eyes and kept whispering that it was all her fault. Mom thought I was too young to understand. But I remembered everything. I remembered how Mom took down all our family photos just because Uncle Felix casually mentioned he didn’t like looking at them. Dad and Mom had a screaming match over it, throwing things until I burst into tears. When Dad heard me crying, all the fight drained out of him. He looked utterly defeated. “If it weren’t for you, Ben, I would have walked out on your mother a long time ago.” “But nobody should be caged like this.” I didn’t really understand what being caged meant, but being buried in Dad’s warm chest always made the scary things go away. I floated up to the gallery wall, looking at the smiles frozen in time. We looked so happy back then. Mom’s eyes were bright, and she looked like she was glowing from the inside out. Dad was grinning like a teenager, wrapping his big arms around both of us as if we were his entire world. I remembered that specific day so clearly. Dad made me his famous scrambled eggs with that secret sprinkle of sugar. Mom sat on the couch with me, binge-watching The Powerpuff Girls until midnight, and then she helped Dad wash the dishes while humming a silly pop song. I reached out, wanting to touch Dad’s smiling face one last time. My phantom fingertips slipped right through the glass. I couldn’t feel a thing. Right at that moment, Orbit whirred to life. Its blue eyes blinked, and Mom’s voice suddenly crackled from its built-in speakers. [Ben.] [Mommy didn’t see you when she came home. If you hear this message, please call me back, okay?] [I know it gets lonely being in that big house all by yourself. I know you’re such a good boy and you never want to cause trouble.] [I’m going to bring Dad home to see you. We’ll all go out and get those giant strawberry milkshakes you love, okay? Mommy promises. I won’t flake on you this time.] [Ben, Mom and Dad love you so much.] The living room fell dead silent. I just floated there, staring blankly at Orbit’s shiny shell, my mind completely empty. Mom must have noticed that the message had been played, and when I didn’t immediately call her back, her voice echoed from the robot again. [Ben? Are you still mad at me?] The house was completely still. No echoes. No footsteps. Mom’s voice grew frantic. I could hear her typing furiously, trying to manually override Orbit’s camera. [Orbit, locate Ben.] Seeing the robot pivot its wheels toward the bedroom hallway, I panicked and threw myself in front of it. But I was already a ghost. If Mom saw my dead body now, Dad would never come back! Orbit rolled right through my transparent chest, its mechanical voice chanting like a metronome. [Locating kitty cat. Locating kitty cat.] I focused every ounce of energy I had, desperately mashing my ghostly fingers against the callback button on Orbit’s interface. Come on, Ben! Just push it! You can’t let it go into the bedroom! Maybe the universe took pity on me, because for a split second, I felt the cold, hard plastic against my fingertips. Without wasting a breath, I slammed the call button. Instantly, Orbit froze in place. [Kitty cat located. Override sequence cancelled.] On the other end of the line, I heard Mom let out a shaky exhale. [Ben, you scared me half to death.] She let out a long, exhausted sigh and cut the connection. I drifted over to the living room window, staring up at the night sky. The stars were popping out one by one, twinkling brightly. They looked exactly like Dad’s eyes when he smiled. Dad used to tell me that when people pass away, they turn into stars so they can watch over the people they love. Was I going to turn into a star now? Would Mom and Dad look up, recognize me, and wave hello? I looked down at my fading, see-through hands and managed a small smile. As long as Dad came back, Mom wouldn’t have to lock herself in that freezing lab anymore, staring at Dad’s photos until her eyes bled. She would smile exactly like she did in the pictures. She would take me and Dad to the diner for those strawberry milkshakes. She would sit on the rug and watch The Powerpuff Girls with me over and over again. She would… I stopped my own thoughts. Right. I was dead. There was no more Ben. I let out a soft giggle. It was totally fine. As long as Mom and Dad were happy, everything was perfectly fine. I lost track of how long I drifted around the empty house. Orbit dispensed my rations two more times. I hovered over the brown kibble, sniffing at it, but I couldn’t smell a thing. Finally, the heavy thud of boots echoed from the stairwell. My heart leaped into my throat. It had to be Mom bringing Dad home! I zoomed toward the entryway, staring intensely at the heavy security door. Dad, are you really back? But as the voice outside grew louder, a wave of crushing disappointment washed over me. It was Uncle Felix. “Sarah acts like I’m a freaking burglar. Changing the passcode every damn day. What a joke!” “Spending all her time on that bullshit research. Does she really think playing mad scientist is going to bring a dead guy back to life?” That’s a lie! Dad isn’t dead! He’s coming back! Uncle Felix is the bad guy! Every time he showed up, Mom and Dad would end up screaming at each other. He always wore these stiff white dress shirts, practically bathing in cheap, overpowering cologne. Whenever Mom was around, he would flash this perfect smile and say, “You must be Ben. You’re just as cute as your mom said.” But the second Mom turned her back, Uncle Felix would secretly pinch my arms until they bruised. When I finally burst into tears and screamed that I hated him, he would look at Mom with these big, victimized eyes. That was the first time Mom ever yelled at me. “Why are you acting exactly like your father? So jealous and petty! I’ve told you a million times, Felix and I are just friends!” “If you can’t behave around adults, you can just stay in your room!” Mom dragged me to the lab that night, and I didn’t see Dad for an entire month. When I finally saw Dad again, something inside him had broken. The light in his eyes was completely gone. Uncle Felix finished scrolling through Orbit’s app data on his phone. He scooped up the uneaten cat kibble from the plate and dumped it straight into the trash. Then he flopped onto our living room couch, pulled a black marker from his pocket, and started scribbling over Dad’s face on the framed family photo. He wiped it off, then did it again. “A big worthless loser raises a little worthless loser. Once the little brat is out of the picture, this whole house, and Sarah, will be mine.” He was humming a cheerful tune when his phone started buzzing. His whole demeanor instantly shifted. “Felix, is Ben okay?” It was Mom! Uncle Felix’s voice melted into a pool of sickening sweetness. “Ben is doing fantastic, Sarah. I just cooked him a big plate of scrambled eggs. He even told me it tasted exactly like the way Arthur used to make it.” Liar! Uncle Felix is a dirty liar! I put my hands on my hips, glaring daggers at his smug face. Ever since Mom locked me in the lab that time, the whole vibe in our house had rotted away. Dad stopped smiling altogether. Mom started coming home later and later. Meanwhile, Uncle Felix basically made himself at home. He would bring me cheap plastic toys, smiling that greasy smile while squeezing my cheeks way too hard. Dad just watched it all happen from the kitchen counter, his eyes filled with an emotion I was too young to understand. It wasn’t until much later that I realized what I had seen. It was the absolute, crushing despair of a man watching his family tear itself apart from the inside. And then came the day Dad triggered the portal and vanished from our world. Nobody knew where he ended up. Mom absolutely lost her mind, harassing everyone we knew, tearing the city apart looking for clues. Uncle Felix was the first one at our door. He pulled Mom into a tight hug as she sobbed, whispering, “Don’t do this to yourself, Sarah. Arthur is probably fine.” Back then, I thought Uncle Felix was genuinely sad. I thought he actually cared about Dad. Now, just thinking about it made me want to throw up. Uncle Felix opened his mouth to say something else to Mom, but she abruptly hung up the phone. “If that bastard hadn’t shown up, Sarah would have been mine years ago.” He muttered under his breath, his face twisting into an ugly scowl. He yanked his phone out, spitefully adjusted Orbit’s pet mode down to just five pieces of kibble, and stormed out the door. “Let’s see how long it takes for you to starve!” I watched the door click shut and scoffed. Mom and Dad love each other! A slimeball like you could never break them apart! The living room slowly faded into pitch darkness, leaving only Orbit’s glowing blue eyes illuminating the dust in the air. Eventually, even the robot powered down, its eyes fading to black. I drifted aimlessly through the shadows of the house. Whenever I got tired, I would curl up inside the closet, trying to breathe in Dad’s scent. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t smell a thing anymore. … As my consciousness started to blur, I hallucinated Mom running around the lab. She and a dozen other scientists were glued to a massive bank of monitors, sweating, waiting for something big. I stared greedily at her face. I couldn’t remember the last time she actually slept. The dark circles under her eyes looked like something out of a comic book. “Professor Sarah! We finally locked onto Arthur’s energy signature! It’s him!” Mom’s lips trembled, but no sound came out. The wavelengths on the giant screen hitched for a second before spiking violently into the red zone. Suddenly, the glass containment pod hissed open, and the man lying inside gasped for air. His eyes snapped open. Dad! It was really Dad! I practically did backflips in the air, zooming around his pod in circles. “Dad, you’re finally back!” “Dad, are you going to make me scrambled eggs? Don’t forget the sugar, please!” “Dad, you and Mom have to stop fighting now, okay? You have to take care of each other. Don’t miss me too much!” Maybe my endless rambling actually reached him. Dad blinked against the harsh fluorescent lights, his chest heaving, and spoke his very first words since crossing back over. “Where’s Ben?” Mom froze. She stared at Dad’s pale face as he repeated himself, louder this time. “Where is my son?” She instinctively blurted out, “Ben is waiting for you at home.” “At home?” Dad chewed on those two words, a deep crease forming between his brows. “You left a little boy in that house all by himself?” “He’s not by himself.” Mom rushed to explain, her words stumbling over each other. “He has the nanny bot. And Felix is checking on him… Ben literally just called me a little while ago. He said he misses you so much.” Dad took a slow, agonizingly deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, the warmth I remembered was completely gone. The look in his eyes was like freezing rain. “Take me home.” I tagged along right behind Dad, completely oblivious to the suffocating tension radiating between them. My head was spinning with nothing but pure joy. Dad was back. Neither of them said a single word during the entire drive. The cramped interior of the car was filled with nothing but my ghostly chatter. “Mom, Dad is back now! You better not bring up Uncle Felix ever again.” “Dad, Mom knows she messed up. You guys have to be good to each other now!” “But hey, Dad, if Mom breaks your heart again, I totally support you doing whatever makes you happy! I won’t hold you back anymore!” Mom kept stealing nervous glances at Dad in the rearview mirror. She opened her mouth to speak a dozen times but always swallowed the words. She kept telling herself that once they walked through the front door and saw Ben, everything would fix itself. The house would go back to being a home. They would be a happy family again. Yes, everything will be fine once Arthur sees Ben. Mom slammed her foot on the gas pedal, the SUV speeding through the empty streets toward our apartment complex. Out of nowhere, Dad broke the silence. “Did Ben grow any taller?” Mom’s knuckles turned stark white as she gripped the steering wheel. “Yeah. He grew a little.” Liar! Ever since Dad left, she hadn’t bothered to measure my height against the kitchen doorframe once. “Did he cry a lot while I was gone?” Mom choked on the air. She didn’t answer. The car lurched to a halt in front of our building. Mom and Dad both stared up at the familiar brick facade. It was eight o’clock at night. Every single window in the building was glowing with warm, yellow light. Except ours. Our windows were dead black. They walked up the stairs, Dad a few paces behind Mom. Mom reached out, her hands shaking slightly as she punched the code into the electronic lock. Feeling Dad’s heavy gaze burning into her back, she rushed to justify herself. “I change the passcode every single day. Felix only comes over when I specifically give him permission.” “Ever since you left, I never let him—” “Just open the door,” Dad cut her off sharply, pushing past her into the suffocating darkness of the hallway. The apartment was terrifyingly quiet. There was no soft, excited voice screaming “Daddy!” from the living room. Dad furrowed his brows. He opened his mouth to call my name. But then, he froze. A faint, sickeningly sweet stench of rotting meat was wafting through the stale air…

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1 I was famous in the corporate world for being the gentle, approachable executive. I always had a warm smile for everyone. I was especially kind to our newest intern, Finn. When he messed up a report, I took the fall for him. When he caught a bad fever, I personally cooked a hot meal and delivered it to his rundown apartment. He would blush and call me Victoria, his eyes completely unable to hide his youthful infatuation and deep gratitude. I shielded him from office politics, fast-tracked his promotion, and even brought takeout directly to his desk when he worked late nights. He thought he had met a fairy godmother in the ruthless corporate jungle. He had no idea that I was the one who paid his roommate to move out. He did not know I made the phone call that revoked his mother’s hospital bed. And he certainly did not know I was the invisible hand that forced his girlfriend of three years to leave him. When he was completely backed into a corner, crying and begging me for a loan, I gently wiped the tears from his face and slid a lifestyle contract across my desk. Sign it, and everything I have is yours. Refuse? You will be sleeping on the streets tomorrow. … “Ms. Sinclair, the new intern is here.” I put down my fountain pen. A young man stood outside the glass door of my office. His cheap white button-down shirt was frayed at the collar, and the right cuff was missing a button. The HR director pushed the door open, and he followed her inside. “Good morning, Ms. Sinclair. My name is Finn.” Twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, and so dangerously thin that his shirt hung off his frame. He flashed a quick smile at me, then immediately pulled it back, probably afraid he looked too foolish. I had seen that exact smile three months ago. It was one in the morning on Interstate 95, and my Mercedes had blown a tire. A rusted Chevy van pulled over onto the shoulder. Finn jumped out, jogged over to my window, and handed me a bottle of water. “Are you alright? Do you need some help?” He helped my driver change the tire. He got a streak of black grease across his knuckles, wiped it off on his jeans, flashed me that exact same smile, and drove away. I memorized the license plate of that Chevy. Three days later, a comprehensive background check was sitting on my desk. Finn Gallagher. Graduated from a no-name state college. His father passed away when he was young, and his mother was chronically ill in their rural hometown. He survived on academic scholarships and grueling minimum-wage gigs. I ordered HR to fish his resume out of the rejection pile and slot him directly into my project team. During his interview, he was so nervous he could barely string a sentence together. His technical answers were full of holes. The HR director later pulled me aside. “Victoria, are you sure we want to hire this kid?” I offered a soft smile. “He looks grounded. Let’s give him a shot.” Surviving in this firm had absolutely nothing to do with being grounded. By his first week, he predictably made a massive mistake. Marcus, the project manager, slammed a stack of financial reports onto Finn’s desk. The sharp crack echoed, making the entire sales floor turn around. “Finn, these data metrics are completely wrong! Are you just here to collect a paycheck?” Finn stood up, his hands visibly shaking. “I am so sorry, Marcus. I will redo it right now.” “Redo it? The client needs this tomorrow morning!” Marcus’s voice echoed louder, and Finn dropped his head lower and lower, staring at his shoes. I stepped out of my office and picked up the scattered papers, flipping through the first two pages. “Marcus, I adjusted the data metrics at the last minute and forgot to CC Finn on the email. This one is on me.” Marcus opened his mouth but swallowed his words, not daring to argue with an executive director. Finn stood frozen. His ears were burning red, and his lips parted several times before he found his voice. “Ms. Sinclair, it was actually my fault.” “Call me Victoria.” I placed the report gently back onto his desk. “Fix the numbers and email it to me. Take your time.” At midnight, my inbox pinged with the revised file. He had left meticulous notes in the margins and even reformatted the headers twice to ensure it was perfect. The truth was, he really had made the mistake. Marcus was entirely justified in yelling at him. I shielded him because I wanted him to owe me a favor. Favors are a dangerous currency. The more you owe, the harder it is to pay back. And when you finally realize you cannot afford the debt, you have no choice but to pay with yourself. Finn was a fast learner. In less than two months, he was independently handling client requests. Marcus never praised him out loud, but he began piling more and more critical tasks onto Finn’s plate. I intentionally encouraged Marcus to bury him in paperwork. It was not to groom his talent. An exhausted person’s social circle shrinks drastically. He was too tired to attend after-work drinks. He could not keep up with office gossip. While other interns scrolled through social media during their lunch breaks, he was desperately typing up proposals. Out of the hundreds of people in that building, I was the only person he actually talked to. One night, we were the only two left in the office. I placed a warm takeout container on his desk. “Victoria, you are still here?” “Just finished a conference call. I picked this up for you on the way in.” He took the container with both hands, opening it as if it were a fragile artifact. He practically inhaled the food, his cheeks puffing out as he ate. He hesitated when he reached the last piece of glazed short rib at the bottom of the bowl, but ultimately picked it up with his fork. “Victoria, this is incredible. Thank you.” He had no idea I had spent hours researching the exact culinary profile of his rural hometown to find that specific flavor. When the autumn chill hit the city, Finn got caught in a torrential downpour and developed a severe fever. He called in sick but did not tell a single soul. I only knew because I checked the attendance logs. At four in the afternoon, I arrived at his building carrying a thermal thermos. It was a decaying tenement building in a sketchy part of town. The hallway lights were completely shattered. When he opened the door, his face was terrifyingly pale, slick with cold sweat. “Victoria? What are you doing here?” “Marcus mentioned you didn’t show up. You weren’t answering your phone.” He panicked, frantically trying to tidy up the cramped studio. The tiny space barely fit a futon and a folding table, with textbooks and cheap clothes piled everywhere. There was a small potted ivy on the windowsill, and right next to it sat a pair of fuzzy pink women’s slippers. He followed my gaze and his feverish flush deepened. “My… my girlfriend. She had to go to work today.” “I know.” I unscrewed the thermos, letting the rich scent of hot chicken soup fill the stale air. He rummaged through his desk drawers looking for medicine, only managing to find a blister pack of ibuprofen that had expired six months ago. I did not say a word. I walked back down six flights of stairs, bought a thermometer and fresh medication from the corner pharmacy, and climbed all the way back up. By the time I returned, he had finished half the soup. “Victoria.” He said my name very softly. His voice was completely wrecked. “You are too good to me.” I pulled the thin blanket up to his chest and pressed the back of my hand against his burning forehead. “Just go to sleep.” He closed his eyes, his breathing growing shallow and even. I sat on the edge of his futon, my eyes drifting toward a beautiful charcoal sketch taped to the wall next to the ivy plant. It was a portrait of him. The strokes were careful and full of life. She really did love him. After Finn recovered, he became incredibly attentive to me. He would pour my coffee before morning meetings. He carried my luggage during business trips. When he noticed the bottled water in my car was running low, he restocked it without being asked. The office rumor mill started churning. “Does Finn have a thing for Victoria?” “Give it a rest. The kid has a girlfriend. Stop making things up.” Finn overheard them. He rushed into my office and spent an entire afternoon stammering through an apology. “Victoria, I swear I don’t mean it like that.” The more he tried to explain, the redder his face became. I interrupted him with a gentle smile. “People will talk no matter what we do. I don’t care about the gossip.” But he cared. For the next week, he intentionally kept his distance. He stopped dropping by my office, and he went back to calling me Ms. Sinclair. I did not panic. A week later, Marcus tore into him over a minor client complaint. I stayed in my office and let it happen. Finn stood alone in the breakroom for ten minutes. When he finally walked out, he flashed a strained smile and told his coworkers he was fine. At nine o’clock that night, he finished his shift and walked past my office. My door was wide open. He stood in the hallway for a very long time. “Victoria, that proposal Marcus was yelling about. Could you take a look at it for me?” I waved him inside. After we fixed the formatting, he stood up to leave, keeping his head bowed. “Victoria, I am really sorry for avoiding you lately.” “Are you hungry? A new late-night diner just opened down the street.” The October wind was biting. We sat on plastic stools outside the food truck, eating hot bowls of ramen. He talked about growing up on a farm, chasing stray dogs through the mud. He talked about how loud his mother used to laugh. He talked about eating three massive bowls of chili because he was so nervous the night before his SATs. He rambled for twenty minutes before suddenly looking embarrassed. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You must think I’m so boring.” “I don’t find you boring at all.” He stared at me for a few seconds, his face flushing, then quickly lowered his head and shoved a massive bite of noodles into his mouth. On the walk back, he stayed on the side of the sidewalk closest to the traffic. Out of nowhere, he blurted out a question. “Victoria, do you… have a boyfriend?” “Why? Are you trying to set me up with someone?” “No, I just…” Under the amber glow of the streetlights, his ears were practically glowing red. I knew he was falling for me. He was a boy who grew up with nothing, navigating a freezing, unforgiving city, and he had stumbled into a woman who was gentle, beautiful, wealthy, and cared for his every need. But I could not let him confess his feelings just yet. He had to lose absolutely everything first. In early November, Finn’s roommate suddenly moved out. When he told me about it, he looked completely lost. “The landlord doubled the rent out of nowhere. My roommate couldn’t afford it, so he packed up and left.” He stared at the calculator app on his phone. His rent spiked from twelve hundred to twenty-four hundred dollars. Factor in his mother’s monthly medical bills and basic groceries, and he literally did not have the margins to breathe in this city. “Victoria, do you happen to know anyone renting out a cheap room?” “Let me ask around for you.” I had my assistant systematically track down every affordable apartment listing in his district. We signed holding deposits and locked them all down, artificially inflating the prices to a bracket he could never reach. Three days later, I looked at him with sympathetic eyes. “The housing market is a nightmare right now. Do you think you can just tough it out for another month or two?” He offered a bitter, exhausted smile and nodded. He did not ask to borrow money. He worked his corporate job during the day and took night shifts stocking shelves at a convenience store. He got off work at 1 AM and woke up at 6 AM. He was surviving on less than five hours of sleep a night. On the security cameras, I watched him doze off at his desk more and more frequently. The dark circles under his eyes deepened into a bruised purple. Finally, he fell asleep in the middle of a client meeting. Marcus marched into my office right after. “Victoria, Finn is completely dropping the ball. His performance is a liability right now.” “Transfer him to my direct supervision.” I took him under my wing. I slashed his workload in half, but mandated that he report to my office for one-on-one reviews every single day. “Victoria, you are always saving my life,” he whispered, his voice raspy from exhaustion. “Just focus on doing good work.” That same week, I paid a local kid to leave a dead rat in the hallway of his apartment building. I had already bribed the property management company to ignore the maintenance calls. Sophie shrieked in terror, running all the way down six flights of stairs, nearly breaking her ankle in the process. Finn apologized to her over the phone. “Just bear with it a little longer, Soph. I will move us out as soon as I save up enough.” Before he could save a dime, the landlord came knocking. He claimed the building was undergoing emergency renovations and ordered them to vacate by the end of the month. Finn spent an entire Sunday calling real estate agents. Every single lead was a dead end. My assistant had already sanitized the neighborhood of anything he could afford. That night, he stayed at the office very late. He hovered outside my door, agonizing over his pride, before finally knocking. “Victoria. Is there any way I could get an advance? Or a loan? I swear I will pay you back on my next paycheck.” I opened my desk drawer, pulled out a thick envelope I had prepared days ago, and pushed it across the mahogany wood. Five thousand dollars in crisp cash. “You don’t need to pay it back.” He gripped the envelope, his fingertips trembling violently. When he turned to leave, he bowed so deeply his back was almost parallel to the floor. It was only five thousand dollars. He had no idea how much money I had burned just to monopolize the rental market in his zip code. December hit, and his mother was hospitalized. Her chronic kidney condition flared up. The doctors in his rural town claimed they lacked the equipment to treat her, demanding she be transferred to a major hospital in the city. Finn took three days of unpaid leave to arrange the transfer. When he returned to the office, he looked like a walking skeleton. “The city hospital said they can secure a bed, but they need a fifty-thousand dollar deposit upfront.” His entire life savings amounted to less than eight thousand dollars. He did not know I was the reason she was transferred to that specific hospital. The Chief of Surgery, Dr. Harrison, had partnered with my firm on a lucrative medical device contract for three years. I made a single phone call. “Secure a bed for her in your ward.” “Ms. Sinclair, her condition is actually manageable at the local level. A transfer might be excessive.” “I said secure the bed.” Finn spent an entire day bouncing between banks, managing to scrape together an extra eight thousand in high-interest personal loans. Sophie sold her expensive drawing tablet and all her premium art supplies, handing him three thousand dollars. He called every single person in his contact list. Some ignored his calls. Some apologized and said times were tight. One old college buddy transferred him five hundred bucks, adding a text that read, This is literally all I have man, I’m sorry. Thirty-seven phone calls. He raised four thousand dollars. He was still short thirty-five thousand. That night, my phone rang. His voice was completely shattered. “Victoria.” “Yes?” “My mom’s surgery deposit…” The rest of the sentence splintered in his throat. I could hear him gasping for air, desperately trying to swallow his sobs so I wouldn’t hear him cry. “Send me your location. I am on my way.” When I walked into the glaring fluorescent lights of the hospital lobby, he was slumped in a plastic waiting chair, crushing a crumpled admission slip in his fist. He stood up, his lips moving frantically, but absolutely no sound came out. I grabbed his wrist, pulled him to the billing counter, and swiped my black card. “Let’s get her scheduled for the operation first. We can worry about the money later.” The lobby was bustling with nurses and patients. He stood in front of the glass partition, biting his lower lip so hard it looked like it was going to bleed. “Thank you, Victoria.” His mother never needed to be in this hospital to begin with. She could have been treated in their hometown for less than ten grand. I was the one who instructed the doctors to exaggerate her prognosis and push for the expensive transfer. And he certainly did not know that the bed could be revoked at any given second. It would only take one phone call from me. The surgery was a success, and his mother began a steady recovery. Every evening after work, he would call her to check on her progress. The crushing weight on his shoulders seemed to lighten, and his voice regained a hint of its old warmth. I did not give him much time to breathe. In mid-December, Sophie lost her job. She did not quit voluntarily. She worked as a graphic designer for a mid-sized marketing firm. The owner just happened to be a former business partner of mine. I paid someone to embed a highly incriminating email in her work inbox. It was sent from a direct competitor, thanking her for leaking confidential design mockups. Her creative director conveniently discovered the email during a routine audit. Sophie tried desperately to explain herself, but the evidence was fabricated perfectly. In the end, she was given the option to “resign” to avoid legal action. That was only phase one. Phase two was fracturing the trust between her and Finn. I instructed a beautiful temp from our marketing department to add Finn on social media. Her messages were strictly about work, but I had my team splice the screenshots together in a way that made the conversation look undeniably flirtatious. Sophie found the messages while scrolling through his phone. She confronted him immediately. “She is just a coworker asking about an ad campaign. You are overthinking this,” Finn explained. Sophie backed down. The next day, a candid photo of Finn and me on a business trip mysteriously found its way to Sophie’s inbox. In the photo, I was wearing a sleek trench coat, walking purposefully ahead, while he trailed closely behind me, carrying my leather briefcase like a devoted shadow. My assistant chose the camera angle perfectly. We looked incredibly intimate. Sophie held on for one more week. On Christmas Eve, she opened his closet and found a brand new cashmere scarf. It retailed for eight hundred dollars. Tucked inside the luxurious box was a handwritten note. It’s getting cold. Make sure to stay warm. It was a “holiday bonus” I had handed out to my entire project team. But Sophie didn’t know that. All she saw was an obscenely expensive gift she could never afford to buy him, given by a mysterious older woman named Victoria. They had an explosive screaming match that night. At 1 AM, my phone buzzed. It was Finn. “Victoria, Sophie broke up with me.” “Why?” “She said I’ve changed.” The line went dead silent for a long time. “Victoria, have I really become a bad person?” I leaned back against my plush headboard, keeping my voice soft and nurturing. “You haven’t changed. She just doesn’t understand the pressure you are under.” He didn’t say another word, but I could hear his muffled crying through the speaker. Three years of history, wiped clean. He genuinely believed he was the toxic one in the relationship. He had no idea that every single job application Sophie submitted after getting fired was instantly met with an anonymous, defamatory tip from my assistant. She had zero income, her boyfriend was spending all his waking hours with a glamorous female executive, and the rent was due. Nobody could survive that kind of pressure. The day Sophie packed her bags and moved out, Finn sent me a text. Victoria, I’m okay. Just a little stressed out today. He added a smiley face emoji at the end. Of course you are okay. Because outside of me, you literally have nowhere else to go. Right after New Year’s Day, three separate disasters crushed Finn on the exact same afternoon. The landlord issued a final eviction notice. He had to be out by the end of the week. Dr. Harrison called him directly. His mother required a secondary, specialized procedure to prevent organ rejection. The deposit was thirty thousand dollars. And finally, the credit cards he had maxed out to pay his previous rent went into severe default. The bank officially froze his checking account. He locked himself inside a bathroom stall at the office for half an hour. When he finally came out, he splashed water on his face, forced a smile, and told his cubicle mates he ate a bad burrito. At three in the afternoon, he knocked on my door. The door was already open. He stood on the threshold, trapped in a purgatory of hesitation. He couldn’t step forward, but he had nowhere to retreat. I beckoned him inside. “Come in.” He closed the heavy wooden door, glued to the spot. His lips trembled violently, opening and closing over and over, but his vocal cords completely failed him. And then, he collapsed. The twenty-two-year-old boy sank to his knees on my Persian rug, burying his face into his hands, his shoulders convulsing with violent, silent sobs. I stood up, walked around my desk, and knelt on the floor right in front of him. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and gently wiped the wet streaks from his cheeks. “What’s wrong? Tell Victoria everything.” Stuttering and gasping for air, he laid out his entire nightmare. Every single piece of it was orchestrated by me. I dried the last tear from his chin. “Finn, if there was a way to permanently fix every single one of these problems right now, would you take it?” He snapped his head up. “What kind of way?” I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out a manila folder. Twelve pages of dense legal jargon, drafted and refined by my corporate lawyers over the last two weeks. An exclusive companionship agreement. He stared at the bold letters on the cover page. His entire body turned to stone. “Sign this, and I will cover your mother’s surgery in full. I will put you in a luxury apartment. I will wipe your debt clean.” “A companionship agreement?” “Yes.” “Victoria, you’re joking…” “When have I ever joked with you about your life?” He scrambled backward, his hands hitting the carpet. “I thought you were…” “You thought what? You thought I was a saint?” I leaned casually against the edge of my mahogany desk, staring down at him. “Finn, I paid your landlord to double the rent so your roommate would leave.” His jaw dropped. “I arranged the transfer with Dr. Harrison. Your mother never actually needed to leave your hometown.” The blood drained from his face, leaving him looking like a ghost. “I had my contacts get Sophie fired. The text messages, the photo, the cashmere scarf. Every single detail was executed by my hand.” His back slammed hard against the closed wooden door. “Everything I did, I did to make sure you ended up right here.” I offered him my warmest, gentlest smile. “Sign the paper, and everything I own is at your disposal. But if you refuse…” I picked up my cell phone and tapped the screen playfully. “Your mother’s surgery gets cancelled tomorrow morning. You will be sleeping on the streets tonight. And your credit score will be ruined for the next seven years.” He pressed his spine against the door, shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. “I will give you exactly one hour to think about it.” I sat back down in my leather executive chair and started reviewing a marketing brief. He stood frozen in the corner of my office for exactly forty-three minutes. Then, he slowly walked over to my desk and picked up the expensive fountain pen. His hand was shaking so violently that the final stroke of his signature dragged into a jagged, broken line across the paper. I picked up the contract, blew gently on the wet ink, and locked it inside my wall safe. “Good boy.” I reached out and ran my fingers affectionately through his soft hair. He didn’t pull away.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “513561”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

I used to be the life of our family. Until my sister, Lily, was born. Suddenly, every creative, hyperactive thing I did became a “threat” to her safety. For Lily’s first birthday, I spent a whole month building a mechanical musical castle for her. It had over a thousand tiny custom gears and parts. But when I turned it on, the flashing LED lights and the whirring of the gears terrified her. She burst into tears. That night, my dad smashed my castle to pieces. And my mom slapped me across the face for the first time in my life. The very next day, I was shipped off to “New Life Academy,” a notorious, high-security reform school. I still remember the freezing coldness in my dad’s eyes when he looked at the director. “Dr. Vance, my son is out of control. Make him normal. Whatever it takes.” “As for your compensation, I’ll donate three million dollars to your academy today. And I’ll personally cover all your son’s future tuition and research funds.” Three years later, they came to the academy to bring me home. They looked at me—dressed in a stiff, pressed white button-down and black slacks, hands folded perfectly over my stomach, walking with strides so precise they could have been measured with a ruler. They looked absolutely thrilled. My dad smiled and opened his arms wide. “Tyler, buddy. Dad’s here to take you home.” I took a sharp step back, bowed at a perfect thirty-degree angle, and spoke in a flat, monotone voice. “Protocol Three of the New Life Academy: Unnecessary physical contact within three meters of strangers is strictly prohibited.”

My dad’s arms froze in mid-air. The smile on his face slowly melted away, leaving nothing but sheer shock. My mom quickly stepped forward, pulling his arms down, trying to force a bright, cheerful smile onto her face. “Oh, look at Tyler! He’s so polite now. That’s a good thing, right?” She reached out, trying to take my hand. I stepped back again, keeping exactly three meters of distance between us. My mom’s smile completely froze. My dad’s face darkened, but he tried to keep his patience. “Tyler, stop playing games. Let’s go home with Mom and Dad.” I didn’t move. I just stared at them with empty, hollow eyes. Exactly sixty seconds later, I nodded once. “Command confirmed: Go home.” I turned on my heel and marched forward. Every single step I took was of the exact same length. They followed silently behind me, the air heavy with tension. The car pulled up to our familiar suburban house, but I felt absolutely nothing. They led me to my room. Plain white walls. Plain white sheets. A bare white desk. Aside from the bare essentials, there wasn’t a single decoration. It looked exactly like a high-end hospital ward. My dad spoke, his voice carrying a desperate, pleading tone. “Tyler, look! We made a brand new room just for you. You always used to complain about how messy your room was. You’re going to love this one, right?” I scanned the room and nodded. “This complies with Appendix Two of the New Life Protocol: Standard Environmental Cleanliness.” The muscles in my dad’s jaw twitched. Dinner time. I sat at the dining table, my spine perfectly straight, my hands resting flat on my thighs. Once dinner started, I picked up my fork and only ate the steamed broccoli directly in front of me. The number of times I chewed, the exact intervals at which I drank water—everything followed an invisible, rigid schedule. My mom watched me, her eyes filled with an overwhelming, painful ache. She picked up a piece of juicy pot roast and put it on my plate. “Tyler, sweetheart, this was your absolute favorite. Come on, try some.” I put down my fork. Then, right in front of her, I used my fork to pick up the meat and placed it onto an empty side plate. I raised my head, looked at her suddenly pale face, and recited calmly: “Protocol Seven of the New Life Protocol: Reject unsolicited gifts to eliminate greed.” “You don’t have to follow those stupid rules at home!” My dad finally snapped. He slammed his hand on the table and roared. I turned my eyes to him, devoid of any emotion. “The Protocol is life. It cannot be violated.” The silence in the dining room became suffocating. Right then, a little girl in pink pajamas came waddling into the room. She was holding a plush doll, holding it up toward me. “Tyler, play with me!” It was Lily. I instantly stood up from my chair and took two rapid steps back, putting distance between us. “Protocol Nineteen of the New Life Protocol: Contact with highly addictive entertainment materials is strictly prohibited.” My response was instant, robotic, and cold. Four-year-old Lily was terrified. She stood frozen on the spot, her lips trembling, and then she let out a loud, piercing sob. Her crying shattered the silence of the room. Three years ago, a cry just like this had made my dad smash my castle. History was repeating itself. My mom’s face twisted in anger. Without even thinking, she screamed at me. “Not again! Why do you always—” But the moment her eyes met mine—completely blank, empty, lifeless—the fire in her voice was instantly snuffed out by a wave of pure dread. Her mouth hung open, but she couldn’t utter another word. A chilling shiver ran down her spine. My dad, visibly frustrated, scooped up the crying Lily and waved his hand dismissively. “Fine! Just go back to your room!” I didn’t argue. “Command received.” I turned, took my ruler-straight strides, and left the dining room. Behind me, Lily’s crying continued, accompanied by the increasingly heavy, panicked breathing of my parents. They had finally gotten their “perfect” son. An absolutely obedient, rule-following machine.

The next day, my dad tried to use material things to win me back. He bought a massive, brand-new LEGO Star Wars UCS Millennium Falcon set with over seven thousand pieces. It was the dream toy I used to beg for every single night. He pushed the giant box in front of me, a hopeful look in his eyes. “Tyler, look at this. Dad bought it for you.” I walked over, my eyes resting on the box for exactly three seconds. Then, I picked it up calmly, walked over to the storage closet, and placed it on the very top, hardest-to-reach shelf. I turned around to face his bewildered expression. “Protocol Fifteen of the New Life Protocol: Engagement in unnecessary, complex creative activities is prohibited to prevent mind-wandering.” My dad’s face went completely pale. The gift he had spent hours tracking down and buying was treated by his own son as a contraband item that needed to be locked away. My mom tried to appeal to my emotions. She pulled out a thick family photo album, gesturing for me to sit next to her on the couch. I didn’t move. Seeing this, she had no choice but to hold the album up to me, pointing at one of the pictures. “Tyler, look. This is you. You were so cute.” In the photo, a nine-year-old boy wearing a paint-stained T-shirt was laughing hysterically at the camera, a bit of frosting smeared on his cheek. I stared at the photo, completely expressionless. After thirty seconds, I nodded. “Data verified. Subject: Tyler Miller. Time: Ninth birthday.” I paused, then added, “Emotional response module: Not activated.” My mom’s hands began to shake violently. She looked at my dad, pleading for help. My dad’s throat tightened, but he couldn’t say a word. In the afternoon, Lily was chasing a ball around the living room. She slipped, fell forward, and her knee hit the sharp corner of the coffee table hard. “Ouch! Mommy! Daddy!” She screamed in pain as blood started to ooze from her knee. “Lily!” My parents gasped, rushing toward her. But I was faster. My body reacted like an automated emergency response unit. I rushed to the medical cabinet, opened it, and grabbed the antiseptic wipes, cotton swabs, and bandages. There was not a single second of hesitation. I marched over to Lily and knelt down. Lily was sobbing hysterically, looking at me with pure terror in her eyes. In a flat, even voice, I said, “Initiating emergency medical procedure. Step One: Clean the wound.” My fingers were as steady as surgical clamps. I precisely wiped the bleeding cut with the antiseptic swab. I wiped it exactly ten times. Every five wipes, I switched to a new swab. The sting of the medicine made Lily cry harder, and she started thrashing around. “Command: Remain still.” I said coldly. Lily seemed shocked by the absolute lack of warmth in my voice. Her crying stopped for a second, and she actually froze. I quickly cleaned, disinfected, and applied the bandage. Once done, I stood up and reported to my stunned parents. “Procedure complete. Wound depth: approximately two millimeters. Length: three centimeters.” “Recommendation: Monitor for twenty-four hours to prevent infection.” With that, I turned to wash the used medical tools. The living room was dead quiet, save for Lily’s quiet whimpering. My mom stared at my rigid back, her lips trembling before she finally managed to speak. “Before… when she just got a tiny scratch, you would cry even harder than she did…” I stopped what I was doing and turned to look at her. My eyes were hollow, as if I were analyzing a word I couldn’t comprehend. “Cry?” I tilted my head, searching through my internal database for the command. A few seconds later, I gave my answer. “No such command exists in database.” In that moment, I saw it clearly. For the first time, pure terror crept onto their faces. They were finally starting to realize something. What they had erased wasn’t just my “behavioral issues.” It was my humanity.

Late at night. I lay on my plain white bed, but my body felt like it was trapped in an invisible cage. The nightmares hit me like a tidal wave. *“Subject 734. Violation of solitary containment protocol. Thinking unauthorized thoughts.”* *“Punishment: Waterboarding…”* *“No… please…”* *“Alert! Alert! Emotional fluctuation exceeds limit! Initiating electroshock therapy…”* I began to thrash violently on the bed. Cold sweat poured down my forehead, and my teeth gritted so hard they made a grinding sound. “It hurts… I’m sorry… I’ll be good…” I muttered incoherently. My parents were startled awake in the next room. They rushed into my bedroom, flipped on the lights, and were horrified by the sight of me in agony. “Tyler!” My mom let out a sob, tears instantly streaming down her face. She threw herself onto the bed, reaching out to hold me and wipe the sweat from my forehead. “Tyler, don’t be scared. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here…” But the moment her hand touched my skin, my eyes snapped open. Those eyes weren’t empty anymore. They were filled with an absolute, terrifying panic and pain. Like a wild animal cornered in a trap. “Alert! Alert! Violation of Protocol Three! Unnecessary contact with strangers!” I used every ounce of my strength to shove her away. “Initiating Level Two Punishment!” A shrill siren seemed to blast inside my brain. I bolted upright, gripping my head with both hands, and my body began to convulse violently. My jaw clenched so hard it clicked, and animalistic groans forced their way out of my throat. It was a pure, physiological reaction to extreme pain. My parents were completely paralyzed with horror. They stood frozen, watching me convulse and twitch on the bed, not daring to take a single step forward. After what felt like an eternity, the convulsions suddenly stopped. I released my head, sat up perfectly straight like a soldier, and the agonizing panic in my eyes instantly vanished back into a dead, hollow void. It was as if the brutal struggle from a moment ago had been nothing but a hallucination. I looked up at their terrified faces and said in a chillingly calm voice: “System glitch resolved.” “Please leave. It is currently designated rest hours.” My dad’s lips trembled, but he couldn’t form a single word. My mom collapsed onto the floor, staring at the empty shell of her son. A deep, bone-chilling coldness crept from her toes straight to her chest. This was the hell they had built for me, all in the name of “discipline.” My dad sat in the living room and called Dr. Vance all night, but nobody picked up. It wasn’t until 9:00 AM the next morning that the call finally went through. “Vance! What the hell did you do to my son?!” my dad screamed into the phone. “What is this punishment mechanism?!” On the other end of the line, Dr. Vance’s voice sounded incredibly polite, almost amused. “Mr. Miller, please calm down. That is just our latest ‘Deep Sleep Therapy.’ It uses subconscious conditioning to correct unwanted behaviors. A few minor rejection side effects are perfectly normal.” “Normal?! He was convulsing like a lunatic! He was screaming about electroshocks and waterboarding!” My dad’s voice shook with pure rage. The laughter on the phone vanished. Dr. Vance’s tone turned ice-cold. “Mr. Miller, let me remind you that *you* were the one who demanded we use the most efficient, absolute methods to make him ‘normal.’ You signed the papers.” My dad’s breath hitched. Dr. Vance continued slowly, his voice like a slithering snake. “Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention. My son just got a full ride to MIT. He’s heading to Boston next month.” “We really have to thank you for that generous three-million-dollar donation. Our family will always remember your kindness.” It was a blatant, naked threat. Using his own son’s future and that three-million-dollar “donation” to shut my dad up. My dad slammed the phone down. I heard the dull thud of his fist hitting the wooden desk, followed by his ragged, heavy breathing. He was trapped, completely helpless against the monster he had personally funded. Meanwhile, my mom was losing her mind. She searched frantically on Google and Twitter for any information on “New Life Academy.” But other than the glowing, heavily moderated reviews on their official website, she found absolutely nothing. Just as she was about to give up, she stumbled upon an encrypted underground forum for parents. She paid a hacker to bypass the password. Inside, she found a hell completely different from the polished website. Row after row, post after post, of pure agony and blood.

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As a senior partner at a top Manhattan law firm, I’ve handled countless messy divorces. I’ve seen bitter exes having catfights, and trashy husbands hiding assets in offshore accounts. But I never expected that one day, this cheap soap opera would dump its garbage right on my head. And it was iced, too. Absolutely chilling. A sobbing, fragile-looking girl was blocking the entrance of my law firm. She wore a simple, faded white sundress that made her pale face look incredibly pathetic and helpless. Her belly was slightly swollen. She looked about four or five months pregnant. “Serena, please, I beg you. Let him go. This baby needs a father.” It was the morning rush hour. The lobby was packed with gossiping colleagues and clients, all staring and whispering. The receptionist tried to stop her, but the girl’s dramatic wailing kept everyone frozen in place. “I know I’m in the wrong! But I love him, and he loves me! Please, just sign the papers!” I stood at the top of the marble steps, my heart completely numb. Honestly, I wanted to laugh. I see this kind of drama at least eight times a month. “Miss,” I said, walking down the steps. My high heels clicked sharply against the marble floor. “If you want to pull a scam, at least do your homework. I’m… a widow.”

The murmurs around us died down instantly. Everyone in the firm knew that Serena, the ice queen partner, had lost her husband three years ago. It was a tragedy no one dared to bring up. But the girl didn’t back down. She quickly reached into her designer bag, pulled out a stack of photos, and threw them at my feet. The pictures scattered across the floor. I looked down, and my pupils dilated instantly. The photos showed a man and a woman in very intimate poses. I knew that man’s face all too well. Julian. My husband, who had been dead for three years. In the photos, his skin was darker than I remembered, and there were more wrinkles around his eyes. But that smirk, and the way he held her—I would recognize him even if he were burned to ashes. What the girl said next made my blood run cold. “He has a birthmark on his lower back. It’s shaped like a ragged line. It turns a dark crimson when he gets flushed, right?” My hand trembled, almost spilling my iced Americano. The stares from the crowd felt like needles piercing my skin. “Wait, Serena’s husband… isn’t dead?” “Faking his death? Insurance fraud? Or…” Whispers flooded my ears. I took a deep breath, pushed up my gold-rimmed glasses, and forced down the raging storm in my chest. I bent over and picked up one of the photos. I dug my fingernail hard into Julian’s face in the photo, almost tearing the paper. Then, I looked up and gave her a chilling smile. “Are you sure this baby is my husband’s?” The girl puffed out her chest, looking stubborn. “Julian told me that as soon as you sign the divorce papers, he’ll marry me!” “Julian?” I repeated the name slowly. “Julian Miller?” “Yes! Julian Miller!” I nodded, took out my phone, and dialed a number right in front of everyone. “911? I’d like to report a disturbance.” “There is a woman harassing people at my office entrance, and I suspect she’s trying to extort me.” “Yes, she claims she’s pregnant with the child of my husband, who died three years ago. I suspect she’s either a grave robber or an escaped mental patient.” I hung up and looked at the girl, whose face had gone completely pale. “Since you say he’s the father, that works out perfectly,” I said calmly. “My husband’s cremains are in the columbarium Uptown. Do you want to go there now for a DNA test, or should I hire someone to exhume his body to confront you?” The girl took two steps back in terror. But the look in her eyes wasn’t guilt. Instead, it was… pity? “Serena, stop lying to yourself. Julian is alive.” “He said if you agree to sign the divorce agreement, he’ll meet you.” She showed me an address on her phone. At that moment, I felt like all the blood in my body was rushing backward. Alive? Then what was that funeral where I cried my eyes out? What was my three years of mourning? I didn’t even realize how I got into the elevator. Security was holding the girl back outside, and she was still screaming. I pressed the button for the basement level. It was a shortcut to the quiet coffee shop next door. I am a lawyer. I rely on evidence and logic. The dead do not rise. Unless… he never died in the first place. Three years ago, Julian went on a business trip to upstate New York. He was reportedly caught in a massive landslide, and his car went over a cliff. The police only found a crushed car, fire damage, and some unidentifiable remains. DNA testing was difficult back then, but his personal belongings and the license plate all matched. I received a box of cremains and a massive life insurance payout. Five million dollars. At that time, I had just been made partner. I was incredibly busy, and his death was a devastating blow. I even took a six-month leave of absence. And now, she was telling me he was alive? The elevator doors opened with a ding. The coffee shop was tucked in a quiet corner, dimly lit. I saw that familiar back immediately. He was sitting by the window, wearing a dusty gray jacket. His hair was longer than before, messy and unstyled. He held a cigarette, looking down at his phone. The way he smoked, the slight slouch in his shoulders… My heart felt like it was being squeezed by a giant fist. It hurt so bad I could barely breathe. I softened my steps and walked over, inch by inch. As I got closer, his silhouette became clearer. When I stood right behind him, I smelled that cheap, harsh tobacco. I used to tell him to buy better cigarettes, but he always said he preferred this throat-burning stuff. “Julian.” I called out. He slowly turned his head. Our eyes met. It was indeed Julian. But he was darker and thinner than three years ago. The gentle, warm smile in his eyes was gone, replaced by a sneaky, greasy look. Seeing me, he showed no joy, no guilt. He just frowned and crushed his cigarette butt into his half-finished black coffee. “You’re here?” His tone was as casual as if he were asking me what we should have for dinner. *SLAP!* I raised my hand and slapped him with everything I had. The crisp sound echoed through the quiet coffee shop. Julian’s head snapped to the side, and a trickle of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. He was stunned for a second, then his face turned red with anger. He stood up abruptly. “Serena! Are you out of your mind?!” “Am I out of my mind?” I laughed coldly, though tears were desperately welling up in my eyes. “Julian, you’ve been dead for three years. I spent three years grieving you, and I took care of your parents. I even buried your father last year!” “And now you show up alive?” “If you were alive, why didn’t you come back? Why did you send a pregnant girl to make a scene at my law firm?” “Are you trying to ruin my reputation, or are you trying to kill me?” Julian rubbed his cheek, his eyes darkening. “Serena, I didn’t come back because I was in deep debt. I didn’t want the loan sharks to come after you.” “I’m back now because Chloe is pregnant. I need to marry her and give my child a proper name.” “Let’s make this easy. Sign the divorce papers, and… you need to return that five-million-dollar insurance payout to me.” “I exchanged my life for that money. Now that I’m alive, that money belongs to me.” I was so angry I laughed out loud. So that was it. It wasn’t a miracle. It was a scam. He faked his death to escape his debts and steal insurance money. Now that the heat was off, or maybe because he had spent all his cash, he wanted to come back and claim the payout. And he wanted to bring his mistress and his bastard child to step on my face to climb back up. Looking at the man in front of me, I felt a terrifying wave of disgust. This was the man I loved for seven years? This was the “late husband” I wept for during lonely nights? “Julian,” I wiped the tear from the corner of my eye, my gaze turning completely cold. “Did you forget what I do for a living?” “I’m a lawyer.” “Faking your death for insurance is major grand larceny and insurance fraud. With five million dollars, you’re looking at ten years minimum.” “You’re also committing bigamy, which is another crime.” “And now, you’re extorting me. That’s blackmail.” “You want that five million? Sure.” I took a step forward, staring straight into his eyes. “Go get it in federal prison.” Julian’s expression changed. He clearly didn’t expect me to be this ruthless. Suddenly, his attitude flipped. He fell to his knees with a thud, grabbing my legs. “Baby! Serena! I was wrong! I had no choice!” “I spent all my money on gambling debts! If I didn’t pay them, they were going to kill me!” “Chloe… Chloe is innocent. Please don’t sue me, I beg you!” The other customers in the coffee shop were all staring. The man who had been so arrogant a second ago was now begging like a stray dog. I looked down at him. The very last drop of affection I had for him evaporated completely.

I kicked Julian away, ignoring his pathetic groveling, and walked out of the coffee shop. When I got back to the office lobby, Chloe was still sitting there. Seeing me, her eyes lit up, but my icy glare froze her in her seat. “Serena…” “Shut up.” I walked straight into my private office and slammed the door shut, locking out the world. My hands were shaking. Not from fear. From pure, unadulterated rage. And disgust. I sat in my leather chair, forcing myself to take deep breaths. Julian was back. This meant my peaceful life was over. Faking death for insurance—once this came out, I would be dragged into the investigation. Even though I knew nothing about it at the time, as the beneficiary, the insurance company would definitely come after me. More importantly, the five million dollars. Julian said he spent his money on gambling debts? That didn’t make sense. The five million was still sitting in my high-yield investment account. I hadn’t touched a single cent because it felt like blood money. So where did he get the money to pay his gambling debts? And where did he get the money to support a pregnant mistress? Suddenly, my phone buzzed. It was Eleanor, Julian’s mother. Over the past three years, even though I resented Julian for leaving me, I had done everything to take care of his parents. I sent them monthly allowance checks, took care of them when they were sick, and handled all the arrangements for his father’s funeral last year. I picked up the call, keeping my voice steady. “Hi, Eleanor.” “Serena!” Eleanor’s voice was incredibly excited, almost shaking. “You need to come home right now! Come to the house! Something wonderful has happened!” “What is it?” “Julian! Julian is back!” Eleanor started sobbing hysterically on the other end. “My boy! He’s not dead! He’s alive! And he brought back a grandson for me! She’s still pregnant, but I had a psychic check—it’s a boy! Our family name will live on!” My knuckles turned white as I gripped the phone. So, they were in on it together. Julian had just finished his little act with me at the coffee shop, and then he immediately went to his mother so she could pressure me. And from what Eleanor was saying… “Eleanor, do you know who that woman is?” “Oh, who cares who she is! As long as she can give our family a boy, she’s a saint!” Eleanor’s tone was incredibly self-righteous. “Serena, don’t blame me for being blunt. You were married to Julian for five years, and your womb was completely dry. Now Julian survived a miracle and brought back an heir. God has answered my prayers!” “Just come over and sign the divorce papers. We can’t keep that poor girl waiting.” My heart felt like it was dropped into ice water and then smashed with a hammer. Three years of devotion. Three years of playing the perfect daughter-in-law. It was worth absolutely nothing compared to an unborn grandson. And a trashy, scammer son. I let out a soft chuckle into the phone. “Sure, Eleanor.” “I’ll be right over.” “I’d love to settle the score with Julian.” I hung up, opened my laptop, and pulled up the digital copy of the life insurance policy. Beneficiary: Serena Miller. Insured: Julian Miller. Death certificate, cremation records, official registration—everything was complete. Eleanor had handed me all these documents himself three years ago. She said she couldn’t bear to look at them and asked me to handle the paperwork. Looking back now, it was full of loopholes. If Julian was alive, whose body was in that coffin? If Julian was alive, where had he been hiding for three years? And Eleanor’s reaction just now was way too fast. I closed my laptop, grabbed a voice recorder from my desk drawer, and slid it into my purse. Then, I texted my assistant on WhatsApp: “Run a check on Julian Miller’s bank accounts for the last three years. Do the same for his mother, Eleanor Miller. Focus on any large cash transfers.” “Also, contact the legal department at the insurance company. Tell them I have major lead on a fraud case.”

I pushed open the door to the Miller family home, and the smell of a home-cooked feast hit me. In the living room, Eleanor was holding Chloe’s hand, pampering her like a princess. The coffee table was covered in expensive fruits, snacks, and a bowl of fresh bird’s nest soup. Julian was sitting on the sofa with his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette, looking incredibly relaxed. As soon as I walked in, the room fell dead silent. Chloe instinctively shrunk back behind Eleanor, looking like a frightened little lamb. Eleanor immediately stood in front of her like a mother hen protecting her chick, glaring at me. “Serena, today is a day of celebration. Don’t bring your gloomy attitude in here. You should be happy!” I didn’t even take off my high heels. I walked straight into the living room, my heels clicking loudly. “A day of celebration?” I looked around the room, my eyes finally locking onto Julian. “Indeed. A dead man coming back to life—it’s a medical miracle. We should call the news.” Julian blew out a ring of smoke, looking at me with disdain. “Serena, drop the attitude. Mom told me everything. You barely took care of them anyway; you were too busy making money. But now I’m back.” “I drafted the divorce agreement. Take a look.” He pulled a sheet of paper from under the coffee table and threw it on the glass surface. I picked it up and almost laughed. The agreement read: 1. Both parties agree to a mutual divorce. 2. All marital assets, including the house, cars, and savings, go to the husband. 3. The wife must return the $5,000,000 life insurance payout to the husband. 4. The wife leaves with nothing. “Julian, do you have shit for brains?” I ripped the agreement into shreds and threw the pieces right into his face. “You want me to leave with nothing? And return the money?” “I bought this house. I bought the cars. Even the jacket you’re wearing right now was bought with my money!” “What right do you have to negotiate with me?” Eleanor suddenly rushed forward, pointing her finger at my nose. “Serena, you barren woman! You couldn’t even give him a child! Now that Julian has an heir, why are you still clinging on?” “That five million is Julian’s life money! It belongs to him! You kept it for three years, and I didn’t even charge you interest. Are you trying to steal it?” Chloe chimed in from the side, her voice sweet but venomous. “Serena, money is just temporary. Julian said that if you let him go, we’ll treat you like our own sister.” *Sister?* Looking at these three, I felt a deep sense of absurdity. This wasn’t a family. It was a den of thieves. I took a deep breath, fighting the urge to flip the table. “Fine,” I said, suddenly softening my voice. “Since you put it that way, I’m not an unreasonable person.” “Divorce is fine. The money… we can negotiate.” “But Julian, you owe me an explanation.” I looked at Julian, my eyes showing a mix of curiosity and hurt. “Where have you been for three years? Why did you lie to me about your death?” “If you tell me the truth, I’ll sign.” Julian clearly didn’t expect me to give in so easily. He exchanged a look with Eleanor. “Serena, I knew you still loved me.” Julian stood up, trying to grab my hand, but I subtly stepped back. “The truth is, the car accident was real. But I survived and was saved by an old herbalist in the deep mountains.” “But I hit my head and got amnesia. I lived in the mountains for three years, and I only regained my memory recently.” “Chloe is the herbalist’s granddaughter. She took care of me for three years.” *Amnesia?* *An old herbalist?* Did he really think he was in a cheap soap opera? I sneered inside, but kept a touched expression on my face. “I see… you must have suffered so much.” “Since she saved your life, Chloe definitely deserves to be in this family.” I turned to look at Chloe, my eyes lingering on her stomach for a moment. “But just to be safe, and to make sure this baby is legally recognized as a Miller…” “Let’s do a paternity test.” “As soon as the DNA proves the baby is yours, Julian, I will sign the paper and leave with nothing.” Julian and Chloe’s faces turned pale at the same time. Eleanor jumped up instantly. “Why do we need a test?! I know my son’s bloodline when I see it! You just don’t want to give us the money!”

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The year my parents died in a tragic plane crash, I became the last surviving daughter of the Miller family. The man I used to call my guardian, Christian Pierce, took me into his estate. For ten years, he spoiled me into the most pampered, untouchable princess of New York high society. Whatever I wanted, I got. Until the night of my eighteenth birthday. Drunk and foolish, I stole a kiss from him while he slept, and I took his obsidian cufflinks—the ones he never parted with. The next morning, he walked into my bedroom and caught me putting a silver chain through the cufflink, keeping it close to my bare skin. Rage, dark and tempestuous, flared in his eyes. That very day, he shredded my college acceptance letter and shipped me off to Ridgeview Academy. On my first day, the headmaster whipped me ten times. He called it my welcoming ceremony. On the second day, because I refused to clean the toilets with my bare hands, they subjected me to an hour of electroshock therapy until I lost control of my bladder. From the third day onward, the instructors came to our rooms every night, forcing us to drink their “special milk.”

Three years later, he finally came to pick me up. I sat in the backseat of the car. Christian’s expression was as cold as ever. Hailey sat in the passenger seat, wearing a beige cashmere coat, her curled hair styled to perfection. I looked down at my own faded, dusty jacket. The cuffs were frayed and threadbare. “What are you staring at?” Christian’s voice cut through the silence. Hailey turned and smiled at me. “Chloe, you’re back. You’ve gotten so thin.” “All those inappropriate thoughts of yours,” Christian said, his eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. He paused. “Have they been thoroughly beaten out of you?” The first lesson Ridgeview Academy taught me was that when it hurts, you endure it. If you endure it long enough, you stop feeling it altogether. “Yes, they are gone,” I whispered. I saw his jawline tighten for a fraction of a second before it relaxed. Hailey leaned back in her seat. “I told you, Christian. Ridgeview works wonders. Look how obedient Chloe is now.” *Obedient.* The instructors at Ridgeview loved that word too. They would pinch my chin, forcing my face up, and ask, *Are you going to be obedient now?* I would scream, *Yes, yes, I’ll be good!* They would laugh, saying it wasn’t enough, before forcing more of their “medicine” down my throat. The car pulled into the Pierce estate. The roses in the garden were still there, but they were withered, their stems drooping lifelessly. Mrs. Gable, the housekeeper, was waiting at the door. “Oh, Miss Chloe…” Her lips trembled. I simply nodded at her. I stood in the hallway for a moment, hearing footsteps behind me. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Hailey walked over, her voice dripping with sweet apology. “Christian said your old room had the best natural light, so he let me convert it into my walk-in closet. Your things… I had Mrs. Gable move them to the guest room. You don’t mind, right?” I turned around. “I don’t mind.” Christian stood at the top of the stairs, watching us. He didn’t say a word. At dinner, the table was piled with exquisite dishes. Christian was peeling shrimp, meticulously placing them one by one into Hailey’s bowl. “That’s enough, Christian. I can’t eat all of this,” Hailey giggled, her voice soft and airy. “Eat more,” he murmured. When I was a child, I once ran a fever of 103 degrees. I was delirious. Christian held me in his arms, not closing his eyes for a single second all night. When I cried because the medicine was too bitter, he would coax me, saying, *Be a good girl, Chloe. Drink it, and I’ll buy you all the candy you want.* I had sobbed, clinging to his neck, *I don’t want candy. I only want you to stay with me forever.* He had smiled and whispered, *Okay, I’ll stay with you for the rest of my life.* “Chloe, try this,” Hailey said, placing a piece of fish into my bowl. My fork paused for a second. Then, I picked it up and shoved it into my mouth. Even when the boiling heat blistered my tongue, I didn’t stop chewing. “Eat slower,” Christian frowned, staring intently at my bowl. “Poor thing. The food at Ridgeview must have been dreadful,” Hailey added, putting a piece of chicken onto my plate. “Eat up. You need to gain some weight.” I chewed and swallowed mechanically, like a robot performing a task. Christian set his fork down. “There’s no need to eat like you’re starving.” After dinner, I went back to my room, opened my phone, and booked a one-way ticket to a small town in the south—a place I had never heard of. Christian stood at my doorway, holding a glass of warm milk. “Drink this,” he commanded. The instructors at Ridgeview also loved delivering “milk” at night. Once you drank it, you fell asleep. And when you woke up, your body would be covered in new wounds. Sometimes needle marks, sometimes dark purple bruises, along with a swollen lip and bleeding thighs. My knees went weak. Out of pure instinct, I dropped to the floor, my forehead pressing flat against the cold hardwood. “I’m sorry! I’ll never do it again! Please don’t make me drink it… please, I beg you, don’t make me drink it…” The room was deathly quiet, so quiet that I could hear my own frantic heartbeat. Christian stood frozen, still holding the glass. The icy mask on his face cracked for a split second, revealing something raw, before freezing over again. “You…” His throat bobbed. “Get up.” He took a step forward. I screamed and scrambled backward until my spine slammed against the bedpost. He set the glass on the nightstand. The milk sloshed over the rim, spilling onto the dark wood.

My hands instinctively reached for his belt, ready to unbuckle it to please him. At Ridgeview, if you were a second too slow, another man would join in. “Chloe Miller!” Christian’s voice vibrated with suppressed fury. “Have you no shame? Three years, and this is the trashy, cheap filth you learned?” “No… I didn’t…” My voice came out cracked and hollow. “No?” He bent down, grabbing my chin, forcing my face up. “Then what the hell are you doing right now? Huh?” My lips trembled so violently I couldn’t form words. I stared at the buttons of his pajama shirt, not daring to look into his eyes. “Let me tell you something,” he leaned in, his cold breath brushing against my skin, sending shivers of terror down my spine. “Even if you stripped naked and lay on this bed right now, I wouldn’t even spare you a glance!” He turned on his heel and slammed the door. Within seconds, I heard the door to the master bedroom next door open. First came Hailey’s sleepy, whimpering voice. “Christian? What’s wrong…” Then came his muffled, strained response. Soon, the mattress began to creak, the sound growing louder and more rhythmic. Hailey’s moans pierced through the thin walls, rising higher and higher. I covered my ears, curling into a ball. No, this was wrong. At Ridgeview, those men never made noise. There were only heavy grunts, the clinking of belt buckles, and then they left when they were done. I crawled on my hands and knees into the furthest corner of the room, pressing my forehead against the freezing wall. “Chloe will be good…” “Chloe doesn’t love Christian anymore…” “Never again… never again…” I chanted the words like a mantra until my forehead went numb, until the noises next door finally stopped. I fell asleep on the floor just as dawn was breaking. Mrs. Gable came in with a basin of water. When she saw me huddled in the corner, her eyes welled with tears. “Miss Chloe! Oh my god, your head…” She rushed over to help me up. I flinched away from her hand. “I’m fine.” The girl in the mirror was ghostly pale, the dark bruise on my forehead glaringly obvious. I pulled my bangs down to cover it. When I went downstairs for breakfast, Christian and Hailey were already seated. Hailey looked radiant, wearing a silk nightgown, a prominent red mark blooming on the side of her neck. “Chloe,” Christian spoke suddenly, his eyes still fixed on the morning paper. “What happened to your head?” My spoon paused. I kept eating. “I tripped.” “Tripped?” He lowered the paper, glaring at me. “How do you trip and get a bruise like that?” Hailey placed a peeled egg onto his plate and said softly, “Oh, she probably just bumped into a door frame. Chloe is still adjusting to being back.” Christian ignored her, keeping his gaze locked on me. “I asked you a question. Are you playing games again—” “I’m full,” I said, pushing my bowl away and standing up. I had barely touched the oatmeal, but my stomach felt like it was filled with lead. Three days. Just three more days, and I would be gone. “Stop right there,” Christian’s voice dropped, dangerous and low. “Did I say you could leave?” Hailey quickly intervened. “Christian, don’t be so harsh. We’re going bridal gown shopping today. Why don’t we bring Chloe along? She can help me choose.” My fingernails dug into my palms. “I’m not going.” Christian slammed the newspaper onto the table with a loud *thud*. “Did my words yesterday go through one ear and out the other? I told you to get along with Hailey!” I lowered my head, my stomach twisting in pain. “Okay.” The bridal boutique was blindingly bright. At Ridgeview, we lived in endless darkness. Hailey twirled in front of the mirror. “Christian, do you like it?” Christian sat on the plush sofa, his legs crossed, nodding slightly. “It looks good.” He used to bring me to places like this. He used to tell me, *Our Chloe will look like a little angel in a white gown.* Later, I had clung to him, asking, *Will you buy me the most beautiful wedding dress in the world when I grow up?* He had ruffled my hair, laughing, *I’ll buy you an entire room full of them.* “Chloe,” Hailey called out, holding a sleek mermaid-style dress. “What do you think of this one?” I looked up. “It’s nice.” “Why don’t you try one on?” She smiled, her eyes crinkling. “I mean, even though you… well, every girl deserves to wear a wedding dress at least once.” She walked over, leaning close to my ear, her voice dropping to a vicious whisper.

“Honestly, I’ve always wondered… just how shameless do you have to be to fall in love with your own guardian? Hmm? Chloe, care to tell me?” My body went entirely rigid, the blood freezing in my veins. She knew. How did she know? Watching the color drain from my face, Hailey’s smile grew sweeter. “Frightened? Did you think your filthy little secret was hard to guess?” She patted my arm, raising her voice for Christian to hear. “Go on, try it on! Let Christian and me have a look.” Christian glanced over, his brow furrowed, clearly annoyed that I was wasting time. Right then, Hailey gasped. “Ah!” In one sudden movement, her body flew backward! She clutched her stomach, her face twisting in agony as tears streamed down her cheeks. “Ah… my stomach… it hurts so much…” Christian bolted upright, rushing over in three long strides. Hailey looked up at him with tear-filled eyes, her trembling finger pointing directly at me, her breath shallow. “Christian… don’t… don’t blame Chloe… she probably… she probably didn’t mean to push me…” I was dragged down and locked in the basement. The door was kicked open with a loud bang. Christian stood in the doorway, his long shadow stretching across the damp floor. “Chloe Miller!” his voice was cold enough to kill. I scrambled to my knees. At Ridgeview, you had to kneel when being questioned. “Look at what you’ve done!” He stormed in, grabbing my chin in a iron grip. “Hailey lost the baby! How dare you!” I looked into his bloodshot eyes. “I didn’t push her.” Hailey’s soft sobbing echoed from the top of the stairs. “Christian… forget it. Chloe is still young, she didn’t mean it… It’s my fault. I wasn’t blessed enough to keep our baby…” Christian’s chest heaved as he glared down at me. “You were the only one near her! And you still dare to lie?” I stopped talking. At Ridgeview, if the instructor said you were guilty, you were guilty. Arguing only brought worse punishment. “Fine. You won’t confess.” He let go of me, turning to grab a leather crop hanging on the wall. “I’ll make you confess!” *Crack!* The lash struck my back like searing-hot iron. I bit my lip, refusing to make a sound. “Speak! Why did you do it?” *Crack!* “Are you still harbor those disgusting feelings for me? Huh?” The whip fell again and again. My shirt grew damp, the fabric clinging to the fresh, warm blood oozing from my skin. I remembered when I was a child learning the piano, and a broken string cut my finger. Christian had held my hand, his face filled with panic. *Don’t cry, Chloe. Let me blow on it, and the pain will go away. I promise you, I will never let anyone hurt you again.* The whipping stopped. Christian was panting. He grabbed my arm and dragged me up. “Speak! Are you mute?” I looked up at him, sweat and blood stinging my eyes. In his fury, he ripped the back of my shirt open. My bare back was exposed to the light—revealing a horrific tapestry of old and new wounds. Scars upon scars, deep and shallow, jagged lines and round burn marks. “What… what is this?” His voice cracked, his hand starting to tremble. Hailey crept down the stairs, catching a glimpse, and gasped, covering her mouth. “Oh my god! Chloe, your back… where did all those scars come from?” She turned to Christian, her voice trembling with crocodile tears. “Christian… could this be… a sympathy play? Did she do this to herself to make us feel guilty?” Christian’s hand froze mid-air. He looked at me, his eyes a chaotic storm of confusion and suspicion. “A sympathy play?” he whispered, as if asking himself. Finally, he let go of my arm, taking a step back. “Chloe, you are… utterly hopeless.” “No food. You stay in this room until you’ve reflected on what you’ve done!” I collapsed onto the floor, my raw back scraping against the rough ground. The pain was blinding. But it was fine. I had survived far worse than this. I could get through this. Just two more days, and I would be free.

The door opened, and Hailey walked in carrying a bowl of soup. “Chloe, eat something,” she said, sitting on the edge of the mattress, stirring the soup. “I begged Christian to forgive you. This matter is over. Tonight is the Pierce Family Gala, and you are coming with us.” She leaned in close, whispering, “Don’t ruin this for yourself. If you don’t show up, Christian will only be more convinced you’re guilty.” She paused, a smirk playing on her lips. “Or are you just afraid to see us announce our engagement?” I looked at her. Her face was soft and gentle, but her eyes were venomous. I had to go. My flight was tomorrow morning. If I could just survive tonight, I would be free forever. The gala was dazzling, the chandelier lights making my head spin. Hailey clung to Christian’s arm, greeting guests and basking in their congratulations. “Is that Chloe Miller? How did she end up looking like a ghost?” “I heard she had some… inappropriate thoughts and was sent away by Mr. Pierce for three years.” “My, look how generous Hailey is, still bringing her out.” While Christian was surrounded by investors, Hailey walked over to me. “Chloe,” she said, her voice loud enough for the nearby guests to hear. “Christian asked me to return this to you.” It was the heirloom emerald brooch—the piece traditionally passed down to the matriarch of the Pierce family. When I was a little girl, I had begged Christian for it. Unable to say no to me, he had given it to me, saying I could keep it safe for him. Christian looked over from across the room, his eyes dark and unreadable. I walked straight to him and handed the box back. “Here. I wish you and Hailey a lifetime of happiness.” Christian snatched the box, his lips parting as if he wanted to say something, but a sudden scream cut him off. Fire! The curtains in the corner had caught fire, and the flames were spreading rapidly. The panicked crowd surged forward, shoving me aside. Through the smoke, I saw a little boy huddled in the corner, crying in terror. Without thinking, I ran toward him. “Chloe!” Someone grabbed my arm—it was Christian. With his other arm, he scooped up the child and dragged me toward the exit. A piece of the burning ceiling collapsed, grazing his arm. He groaned in pain but didn’t let go of me. We finally burst out into the freezing night air. I collapsed onto the grass, coughing violently, feeling as though my lungs were turning to ash. Christian set the child down and immediately reached for me to check for injuries. His sleeve was scorched, and blood was dripping from his arm. “Are you—” he began. “Christian!” Hailey threw herself into his arms, sobbing hysterically. “Are you alright? You scared me to death!” Suddenly, she pointed a shaking finger at me. “It was her! I saw her! She started the fire! She wanted to burn us all to death!” Everyone turned to stare at me. Christian froze. Hailey wailed, “She just returned that brooch to you as a farewell! She knew she couldn’t have you, so she wanted to destroy you!” I shook my head, trying to speak, but my throat was so scorched by the smoke that no sound came out. Christian looked down at my hands. Clutching in my trembling palm was a lighter—the one Hailey had shoved into my hand during the chaos. “Chloe Miller,” his voice was barely a whisper, filled with crushing disappointment and disgust. “You really are… utterly hopeless.” Hailey clung to him, weeping. “Christian, she almost ruined our engagement… I’m so scared…” Christian wrapped his arms tightly around her. When he looked back at me, the last shred of warmth in his eyes had vanished. He turned to his security guards, his voice flat. “Take her away. Hand her over to Hailey to deal with.” Hailey buried her face in his chest, but as she did, she cast a glance back at me, a vicious, triumphant smile flashing across her face. The guards grabbed me. I didn’t struggle. I knew then that I wouldn’t be boarding my flight tomorrow. I watched Christian’s retreating back and remembered a night from my childhood when he had sat me on his shoulders to watch the New Year’s fireworks. When the loud bangs started, he had covered my ears and whispered, *My little girl will never have to face danger as long as I’m alive.* But now, he had personally thrown me into the abyss. Hailey walked over, kneeling in front of me. “Tonight, Chloe, we’re going to have some real fun.”

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The intern from the finance department thought our high-profile client was too ugly, so she slashed my $75,000 client hospitality budget down to fifty bucks. “Real business relies on capability, not drinking and sleeping with pigs,” Chloe said, her smile sweet and innocent. “Oh, I forgot. Manager Sera, you got parachuted into this position at such a young age. You must have slept with quite a few men to get here.” After our $30 million deal went up in flames, she immediately went online and blasted me on social media. [Exposing the corrupt female executive sent from HQ! A $30 million deal was ruined because she insisted on selling her body to please a client!] Too bad for her, I suffer from extreme workplace paranoia. Keeping voice recordings and a paper trail for everything is my second nature. Watching Chloe’s self-righteous, tearful accusations online, I felt nothing but amusement. It was true that I was parachuted in from headquarters. But I wasn’t here to play corporate games—I was the Senior Compliance Investigator sent to audit this entire branch!

“Manager Sera, I cannot approve this $75,000 entertainment expense.” Chloe, our finance intern, gently slid the reimbursement form back to me. Her voice was soft, but her tone was rock hard. I frowned, not understanding her problem. “This is the pre-approved budget for our onboarding project with Grandview Group. The contract is worth thirty million dollars. Pre-meeting hospitality is standard procedure.” “But,” Chloe looked up, her eyes filled with undisguised disgust, “I saw Mr. Harrison from Grandview yesterday. He is hideous. Fat, greasy, and looks like a wild boar. For our company to spend this much money hosting someone like him—isn’t that basically selling our bodies and dignity for profit?” I was temporarily speechless. Since when did multi-million dollar corporate mergers depend on the client’s looks? Around us, the other accountants stopped typing. The office fell dead silent. I looked at her. She was wearing a high ponytail, round-rimmed glasses, and carried the face of a pure, justice-seeking intern. “I believe business should be won through capability, not by sucking up to pigs over dinners,” she said. She picked up a black pen and crossed out the numbers on my form with smooth, practiced strokes. “Seventy-five thousand is too much. Fifty dollars is plenty. Let’s buy a few packs of bottled water. That’s more than enough hospitality for him.” The black pen dragged across the paper. “$75,000” was aggressively crossed out. Next to it, she wrote a bold, mocking “$50.” Then, she gracefully signed her name: *Chloe, Finance Intern.* “Chloe,” I kept my voice as calm as possible, “do you actually realize what you are doing?” “Of course I do,” she smiled, handing the paper back to me. “According to company policy, even interns have auditing rights. I find this expense unreasonable, so I have the right to adjust it.” I took the fifty-dollar request form, completely dumbfounded. As I turned to leave the finance department, I caught her whispering to the girl next to her: “Look at her. You just know she slept her way to the top. It’s disgusting. Wearing that designer skirt and heavy makeup—does she look like she’s here to actually work? No wonder HQ parachuted her straight into a manager position!” My steps paused, but I didn’t turn around. It was true that I was parachuted in. But I was a Senior Compliance Investigator from the Corporate Integrity Division! Not only do I have workplace paranoia, but I also believe in eye-for-an-eye. I have been cautious my entire life. My father used to be a mid-level manager at a state-backed firm. When he was forty, a subordinate framed him for taking kickbacks. The man forged receipts and edited voice recordings. My father had no way to prove his innocence. The investigation dragged on for six agonizing months. Although he was eventually cleared, his career was ruined, and his spirit was completely broken. During those six months, I watched my mother cry herself to sleep every night. I watched our relatives and friends abandon us. I watched my father’s hair turn white overnight. From that moment on, I learned a hard truth: rumors can kill, but hard evidence keeps you safe. I majored in corporate law and joined HQ’s Compliance Department right after graduation. In seven years, I climbed from a basic assistant to a Senior Investigator. I’ve handled dozens of internal investigations. I have seen too many people get framed by envious colleagues and end up in orange jumpsuits just because of one careless mistake. So, I developed a habit: leave a paper trail for everything, and back up every single file. Every conversation I have is legally recorded within compliance boundaries. Every email is archived chronologically. Every time I meet a client, I log my itinerary and purpose in the internal system beforehand. My phone holds three encrypted cloud drives, and my journals record every detail of my work over the years. My colleagues mock me for having “workplace paranoia.” I just smile. They have never seen how fast a person can fall from grace. I have. My father was the perfect example. So, from the very first day I landed in this coastal branch for this undercover audit, I started recording. The voice recorder in my pocket was always on. A tiny pin-camera was attached to my blazer, capturing everything. I would never give anyone the chance to ruin me.

I went to the Chief Financial Officer’s office, but the CFO wasn’t there. A colleague whispered to me, “Chloe said your expense was highly suspicious. She took the CFO directly to the General Manager’s office to report you.” I turned on my heel and walked straight to the GM’s office. The door was slightly ajar. Chloe’s whiny, victimized voice drifted out: “Mr. Sterling, I didn’t mean to go over your head, but I really couldn’t watch this happen. “That new manager, Sera, demanded seventy-five thousand dollars for a client dinner the moment she arrived. She claims it’s for Mr. Harrison from Grandview. But I’ve seen him at the expo last month—he was staring at the booth models like a total creep. Sera is so beautiful. If we approve this money and rumors start spreading, it will ruin our company’s reputation…” Mr. Sterling hesitated. “But Grandview is our long-term partner. Client entertainment is standard…” “We can partner with them in healthier ways!” Chloe’s voice rose. “Like sending them some eco-friendly company merchandise, or having a Zoom meeting. Why does it have to involve fancy dinners and drinks? I believe our corporate culture should be clean. We shouldn’t tolerate this toxic drinking culture.” “And…” she lowered her voice, “I heard Sera doesn’t even hold a real title back at HQ. She’s probably just some executive’s spoiled princess sent here to collect achievements. We don’t need to play along with her dirty games.” After Chloe left, I walked into the GM’s office. “Mr. Sterling, the dinner tonight is already booked. Grandview’s team has confirmed their attendance. If we cancel this…” I paused, “the thirty-million-dollar deal will be dead.” Mr. Sterling was silent for a few seconds. Finally, he sighed. “Fine. I will personally override the block and sign the budget.” I nodded and took the newly signed form. As I walked out, I heard him mumble, “Kids these days…” I immediately got to work—confirming the menu, the wine, the seating chart, and the gifts. Most of the $75,000 budget went to the venue and high-end catering. A portion of it was reserved for customized gifts for the Grandview executive team: samples of our brand-new smart office equipment. By 3:00 PM, everything was set. By 4:00 PM, Mr. Harrison’s assistant called to confirm the final details. By 5:00 PM, I changed into my backup dark-gray business suit and touched up my makeup. By 6:00 PM, I arrived at the hotel banquet hall. By 6:30 PM, the Grandview team was supposed to arrive. But the hall was empty, save for our own staff. At 6:45 PM, I called Mr. Harrison’s number. It went straight to voicemail. At 7:00 PM, Mr. Sterling walked in, his face absolutely livid. “I just got off the phone with Mr. Harrison. He’s not coming.” “Why?” Mr. Sterling glared at me. “He said he heard our company thinks he has ‘moral issues’ and isn’t fit to sit at a dinner table. He also said he’s apparently too ugly to breathe the same air as our beautiful female manager.” I gripped my phone tightly. “Who leaked that?” “Who do you think?” Mr. Sterling rubbed his temples. “Chloe didn’t just come to me this afternoon. She posted a massive call-to-action in the company-wide Snapchat group. She urged all female employees to ‘reject toxic workplace dinner culture’ by refusing to eat with clients. Someone screenshotted it and sent it to Grandview. Now it’s reached Mr. Harrison.” I opened Snapchat. Sure enough, there were several deleted messages in the main company group. But the screenshots had already gone viral. Right next to Chloe’s cute profile picture was a block of text: *“Girls, if we don’t respect ourselves, who will? Starting today, say NO to any dinners or drinks under the guise of work! If a client refuses to partner with us just because we won’t eat with them, then we don’t need their dirty money anyway!”* Below her post, several female colleagues had left heart emojis. Someone even tagged me in the comments: *“Agreed! Manager Sera should lead by example!”* I honestly felt like these people had mush for brains. This was a thirty-million-dollar corporate contract, not a thirty-dollar Uber Eats order.

That night, I stood at the hotel entrance for a long time. The dinner was cancelled, but the booking deposit was non-refundable. The hotel policy stated that last-minute cancellations incurred a 100% penalty. Thirty-five thousand dollars, gone down the drain. More importantly, Grandview formally blacklisted us. I didn’t get back to my apartment until nearly 10:00 PM. I opened my laptop and began filling out my daily compliance log for HQ. I uploaded the timeline, the location, the recorded audio files, and the videos into the secure folder. Once done, I backed up everything. I kept every recording, starting from Chloe calling the client a pig to the gossiping in the hallways. Then, I opened our encrypted messenger and sent a brief report to the Director of Compliance at HQ: *“An intern has overstepped her authority to interfere with a major commercial contract, leveraging gender politics to create internal hostility, resulting in massive financial loss. I am compiling the full chain of evidence. Recommend continuing observation according to the original plan. Do not intervene yet.”* A few minutes later, the Director replied: *“Received. Stay safe. Document everything.”* I shut my laptop and walked to the window. What was Chloe’s actual angle? Was she really just a naive intern with an overactive sense of justice? I highly doubted it. I shook my head, refusing to overthink. But my “workplace paranoia” was screaming at me: this was far from over. The next morning, the atmosphere in the office was suffocating. Mr. Sterling sat at the head of the conference table, his face dark. The department heads stared at their folders in silence. “A thirty-million-dollar deal, gone in one night,” Mr. Sterling finally spoke. His voice wasn’t loud, but each word hit like a brick. “Who is going to give me an explanation?” Every eye in the room immediately shot to me. Just as I was about to speak, the conference room door was pushed open. Chloe walked in. She was wearing a simple cream-colored linen dress today. Her hair flowed loosely over her shoulders, her face was completely makeup-free, and her eyes were puffy and red as if she had been crying all night. “Mr. Sterling, managers,” her voice was soft, trembling slightly. “I’m so sorry. I… I came to apologize.” She walked to the front of the table and bowed deeply. “Everything that happened yesterday was my fault. I shouldn’t have changed the budget form, and I shouldn’t have posted those things in the group chat… But I swear I had no bad intentions. I just felt that business shouldn’t rely on expensive dinners…” She looked up, a perfect tear spilling down her cheek. “My family raised me to be honest and clean. My mother is a high school teacher. She always told me that girls must maintain their dignity in the workplace and never take shortcuts… When I saw Manager Sera request such a massive entertainment budget the moment she got here, I was scared. I didn’t want our company to become one of those toxic places run on alcohol and favors…” She sobbed softly, her voice shaky but perfectly audible to everyone. “I know I was wrong. I shouldn’t have judged the client, and I shouldn’t have gone over Manager Sera’s head… But I really did it for the good of the company… Manager Sera, can you ever forgive me?” Once again, the spotlight was on me. A few young female department heads were already looking at her with deep sympathy. Someone whispered, “Chloe meant well. She just went about it the wrong way…” I pulled out my phone and pulled up the screenshots. “You stated in the group chat, and I quote: ‘If a client refuses to partner with us just because we won’t eat with them, then we don’t need their dirty money anyway.’ May I ask, what was the business basis for that statement? Did you perform a risk assessment? Did you calculate the potential financial damage? Did you consult the sales department before making that call?” Chloe froze, unable to utter a single word. She just stood there, crying silently. Mr. Sterling rubbed his temples. “Alright, that’s enough. What’s done is done. Our priority right now is to figure out how to salvage our relationship with Grandview.” Chloe covered her face and ran out of the room. The moment the door slammed shut, I heard her whisper under her breath, “What a pretentious bitch…” When I left the office, my phone buzzed. A notification from the company’s anonymous internal forum popped up. I tapped it. It was a freshly posted thread, the title pinned in bold: *[Exposing the corrupt female executive from HQ! A $30 million deal was ruined because she insisted on sleeping with a client!]*

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