Ch. I received a video 8 I received a video 8

Chapter 8 They Wanted Me to Lie 

“I was afraid you’d just end up getting even angrier,” I replied. 

My mother looked at me with her red rimmed eyes, her lips pressed into a tight line. 

She turned her head away and wiped the corner of her eye with her sleeve. She did not cry, but the tip of her nose had turned bright red. 

She inhaled deeply, pushed open the door, and walked ahead of me. 

That night, my father sat in the living room for a long time. 

He usually went to bed at about 10 p.m., but the living room light was still on even though it was already midnight. 

I got up for a glass of water and saw him sitting on the couch without the TV on. His phone screen glowed with screenshots of the online abuse directed at me. 

He scrolled through them one by one, his face expressionless. 

When he heard my footsteps, he looked up. “Sweetheart.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Didn’t you say you had evidence? Bring it out. I’ll go to the police station with you.” 

I stood there for a moment. Then, I went back to my room and downloaded the three screenshots from my cloud storage. 

My father put on his reading glasses and looked through them one by one. 

When he looked at the first one, his finger stayed pressed against the screen for a long time. By the second, there was a tight furrow between his brows. When he finished the third, he took off his glasses, set them on the coffee table, and rubbed his eyes. 

“That’s enough.” 

My father drove me to the police station on his scooter early the next day. 

I held on to the back of his jacket as the wind roared past my ears. 

The officer reviewing our case finished reading the documents before looking up at me, and then at my father. 

“Illegally accessing a computer system to tamper with someone else’s college application is grounds for us to open a case,” 

He paused. “Can we get the internet cafe’s security footage?” 

“The IP trace pointed to that location. I’ll request the security footage from the cafe.” 

The officer nodded and signed the last page of the report. 

1:3 

+15 Bonus 

We got the results three days later. The internet cafe’s security cameras had captured Silas and Rachel doing the deed. 

Sure enough, the two of them appeared together in front of that computer at 2 p.m. on June 12. 

As Silas sat at the terminal operating the mouse, Rachel stood behind him with one hand resting on his shoulder and the other holding a cup of milk tea. 

And so, the detention order was issued for them both. They were to be detained for seven days each. 

The police knocked on both Silas’ and Rachel’s front doors that same afternoon. 

Someone in our class group shared pictures of their arrest. 

When Rachel was escorted to the police car, she’d cried so much that all her makeup was smeared across her face. Mascara had streaked down her cheeks, leaving two black trails against her fair skin. 

Silas walked behind her with his head lowered. His expression was impossible to make out. 

I looked at the photo for a while, then set my phone face down on the table. 

Silas and Rachel were released a week later. 

They came straight to my house that very afternoon. 

I was folding clothes in my room when the doorbell rang. I assumed it was a delivery, so I walked over and opened the door without checking the peephole. 

Silas’ eye sockets looked sunken, and there was dark stubble covering his jaw. 

Rachel wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her lips were dry and cracked as she stood behind Silas with her shoulders hunched. 

I leaned against the doorframe. I didn’t move aside, and I didn’t invite them in. 

Silas stepped forward. His voice was so hoarse that I could barely recognize it. “Sonia, we need to talk.” 

I said nothing. 

“Post a statement. Say it was all a misunderstanding. Say we made the whole thing up, that none of it was real. That’s all you have to say.” 

He spoke much more slowly than usual, as though he had to search for every word. 

Rachel, who was standing beside him, nodded frantically, her hair falling into disarray. 

“We’ve already prepared the video. All you have to do is look at the camera and say, ‘What happened before was my fault. I made a mistake.’ We’ll handle the rest, and this will all blow over 

+15 Bonus