Chapter 4

The post spun the whole thing out in vivid detail:

Rosemary Lawrence, a part-timer, had held a grudge over a wage dispute and deliberately ruined the house special sauce. She'd even shouted in the back kitchen that she'd "make the boss regret firing her, and make the customers pay for it."

The attached photos were a few blurry security-camera screenshots.

They only caught me bent over that basin of sauce.

The angle was cunning. It really did look like I was adding something to it.

The comments had already blown up.

[Holy hell! I ate at the Lucky Grill tonight! My stomach's churning right now.]

[This woman is pure evil. She can't get her wages sorted so she poisons the customers?]

[Dox her! Make her pay!]

[The Lucky Grill's owner really got the worst of it. An employee like that should've been fired ages ago.]

……

I gripped my phone, fingertips going cold.

He'd moved fast, so fast I hadn't even finished digesting the last bucket of filth before he'd pinned a new one on me.

And this time the evidence came out so quickly it was hard to believe it hadn't been planned in advance.

He said nothing about the day-old sauce. Instead he bit back and accused me of poisoning the food.

On top of that, from that angle, the camera really couldn't catch the original color of the sauce in that basin, or the flies circling over it.

I opened the post and checked the poster's ID.

A freshly registered account, the default gray avatar.

I screenshotted it and saved it to an encrypted album, then dug out the original back-kitchen camera footage I'd backed up to my phone ahead of time.

That clip caught it all clearly: the whitish mold rimming the sauce basin, and the whole process of the boss forcing me to stir it in.

But I didn't want to release it now.

Because if I did, they'd just insist I'd faked the video to clear my name.

I had to wait. Wait for the health department to show up, wait for this to boil over into something big enough that the truth was beyond anyone's power to bury.

At one in the morning I lay in bed, tossing and turning, unable to sleep.

My phone buzzed again. This time it was Natalie.

"Rosie, get out of there fast! The boss posted your home address in the group chat and told all those 'righteous netizens' to go settle the score with you themselves!"

I bolted upright, cold sweat soaking through my pajamas in an instant.

I ran to the window and lifted a corner of the curtain to look down.

Three figures crouched under the streetlight below. I couldn't make out their faces, but the red tips of their cigarettes glowed and faded in the dark.

I rushed into my mother's room and shook her awake. She blinked up at me, dazed, asking what was wrong.

I had no time to explain. I just said someone had come to cause trouble and we needed to leave right now.

She didn't ask twice. She threw on a jacket, and I pulled her down the fire-escape stairs at the back of the building.

We spent the whole night sitting in the 24-hour convenience store at the end of the alley.

My mother was so tired she kept nodding off, her head resting on my shoulder, her breathing light and shallow.

I draped my jacket over her and stared out at the pitch-black street, my heart pounding, each beat slow and heavy.

Just before dawn, Sidney sent another voice message.

I opened it. His voice was pressed down very low, with a chaos of shouting in the background.

"Rosie… something big happened. Last night a customer went home after eating, and in the middle of the night he was throwing up and had diarrhea. He's already in the hospital. The family's making a scene at the shop right now, saying the boss poisoned him. And the boss, he's out there yelling all over the street that it was you, saying the camera caught you putting something in the sauce… You, you'd better just turn yourself in. Don't drag us down with you."

I clutched the phone, my nails biting into my palm.

Last time it had been more than fifty people.

This time, because I'd fought back, that basin of spoiled sauce never made it into the new dishes. And still a customer had gotten sick.

Sidney hadn't given a number, but if someone had been sent to the hospital, it was no small thing.

Then it hit me.

The day-old sauce, even if it never got mixed into the new dishes, would still cause trouble as long as some other dish that day used ingredients that were even a little off.

The Lucky Grill's back kitchen had been filthy far too long. Smashing one basin of sauce wasn't going to scrub it clean.

And now the boss had aimed every accusation straight at me.

I opened my phone. The original footage from the back-kitchen camera was still safely stored.

On the screen, the surface of that sauce was mottled with gray-green mold, and near the rim you could even see the fine white threads of fungus.

I zoomed the frame all the way in, screenshotted, enlarged it, and clearly captured the grease spattered along the edge of the mold from when the basin was smashed the night before.

I had my evidence.

But my mother was still beside me, we couldn't go home, and those three figures downstairs hadn't left until first light.

Still, I knew this was far from over.

The forum post had already passed a hundred thousand views, and in the comments someone was even claiming to be a victim's family member, saying an elderly relative who'd eaten at the Lucky Grill was still in the ICU.

I stood up, walked my half-asleep mother home, then headed back to the food street alone.

The sky hadn't fully brightened, and a ring of people had already gathered outside the Lucky Grill.

Some held banners, some held up phones live-streaming, some shouted at the top of their lungs, "Give me back my family, you heartless owner."

I saw the boss standing behind the rolling shutter, squared off against the crowd through the iron gate.

When he saw me, his eyes lit up, like a man grabbing a lifeline, and he jabbed his finger frantically in my direction.

"It's her! It's that part-timer! The camera caught her mixing something into the sauce!"

"She did it, all of you go after her!"

Every last one of them turned in unison to look at me.

Then the crowd surged toward me like mad dogs that had caught a scent.

"It's her!"

"Give me back my family!"