Chapter 4

"I shouldn't have come."

Claire Hayes sat on one of my cheap plastic stools, her hands tightly wrapped around a cup of warm coffee she hadn't touched.

She had short hair and wore a faded gray hoodie. She looked about six or seven years older than me.

"How did you find me?" I asked.

"The student forums," she said with a dry laugh. "The moderators keep deleting the threads, but screenshots are still circulating. Someone posted your location in the comments."

"Why did you come?"

"Because when I saw your name, I just knew." She finally took a sip of the coffee. "It’s exactly what happened to me."

"What do you mean?"

"The video you showed... it was real, wasn't it?"

I didn't answer.

"You don't have to say anything," she said, smiling bitterly. "He did the exact same thing to me five years ago. I was in my final year. I was halfway through my dissertation when he brought in a younger female student. Very submissive, very obedient. Soon, my research data was handed over to her. When I confronted him, he told me my academic performance was inadequate."

"And then?"

"He withheld my thesis approval for two years. In the second year, he forced me to abandon my research and start over with some dead-end topic. I couldn't take the financial and mental toll anymore. So I dropped out."

"Did you report him?"

"I tried everything on campus. It went straight into the shredder. I even wrote to the State Board of Higher Education—no one ever replied."

"Why?"

"No hard evidence," she said, setting her cup down. "No security footage, no recordings. It was my word against a prestigious, tenured professor's."

I pulled out my phone and logged into my cloud drive.

The folder was empty.

My activity logs showed that last Friday at 3:17 AM, someone had accessed my account remotely and wiped all the backups. The login device was a desktop computer.

A computer inside our university lab.

"They blocked all your exits," Claire whispered.

"Then why did you come find me?"

"Because I’ve spent the last five years in regret," she said. "If someone had stood with me back then, maybe things would have turned out differently."

She stood up and left the half-empty coffee on the table.

"If you’re still planning to fight this war, let me know. I'm in."

She walked away.

The traffic on the overpass began to dwindle.

I sat on my stool and started packing up my tools.

Underneath everything in the bottom of my toolbox lay an old, cheap smartphone.

It was my test phone. I used it to test screen sensitivity and fingerprint readers after doing repairs. It was linked to the same cloud account as my primary phone, set to sync automatically.

I pressed the power button. The screen lit up—11% battery remaining.

I tapped into the file manager. Sitting quietly in the synced folder was an MP4 file, downloaded on October 12th—the day after I had copied the footage from the security office.

I tapped it.

The silent video started playing. From the hallway camera's perspective, Dr. Henderson's office door was slightly open, and the silhouettes of the two people inside were unmistakable.

I locked the screen and gripped the phone tightly.

Suddenly, a pair of bright headlights swept over me.

A black sedan pulled up across the street, its engine idling.

The driver's side door opened.

Dr. Henderson stepped out, crossed the road, and pulled up one of my plastic stools, sitting down right across from me.

"How's business?"

"How did you know I was here?"

"Some of my students are your customers," he said, crossing his legs. "Did you sign the paperwork Evelyn brought you?"

"No."

"Chloe, I've been teaching for twenty years. The smart students take the money and move on. The stupid ones..." His gaze drifted over the old smartphone in my hand. "...insist on running headfirst into a brick wall."

He stood up and brushed off his trousers.

"The lawsuit papers will be sent to your family's house the day after tomorrow. Criminal defamation with heavy civil damages—care to guess the amount?"

He leaned in close, his face inches from mine. The streetlights cast his long shadow completely over me.

"Whatever future you have left, I will take it. And what I can't take, I will make sure is utterly destroyed."

The sedan merged back into the traffic, its red taillights disappearing around the corner.

I looked down at my toolbox. The screen of the old test phone was still glowing faintly through the gaps between my tools.

11% battery. One surviving backup. And the phone number of a woman who had dropped out five years ago.

I pulled out the old phone and plugged it into a power bank.

Then, I sent a text to Claire Hayes.

"You said you’ve regretted it for five years. If you had another chance... would you dare to take it?"

Two minutes later, she replied.

"Do you have a plan?"

"Yes."