Chapter 4The Good Samaritan Scandal

The crowd exploded.

“Tsk, tsk. She looks so proper, but she’s doing things like that!”

“Don’t you get it? The old guy’s got a pension! That’s prime real estate!”

“Her poor husband! Cheated on with an old man!”

Jonny seized the moment, lunged forward, and slapped me hard across the face.

“No wonder you never wanted to have kids with me! You were sleeping around this whole time!”

“What did I ever do to you to deserve this humiliation?!”

An officer immediately stepped between us. “Sir, please remain calm! Settle your personal matters in private!”

Jonny reluctantly backed away, his face a mask of feigned heartbreak.

I wiped the blood from my lip. My heart felt like it was being torn apart. He was using the child we lost… as a weapon against me. The child I had given up to honor his wish to be child-free was now just another tool for his moral grandstanding.

The officer picked up the underwear with two disgusted fingers. “Ms. Harris, does this belong to you?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, it’s mine, but…”

The reporters pounced on my hesitation, their cameras flashing relentlessly.

“But I have no idea how it got there,” I finished, swallowing my humiliation. “I lost that pair a while ago.”

Jonny sneered. “How else? You tried to seduce him and failed, didn’t you?”

But I didn’t break. I pulled out my phone and calmly played a recording.

It was the audio of me calling Ava to ask for time off. Her voice was crystal clear. “Okay, I’ll cover for you. You just focus on getting better.”

I held the phone out for the officer to hear, showing him the time-stamp on the recording.

Ava’s face went slack with shock. “You… you recorded me?” she stammered.

The next second, she was scrambling to recover. “That’s impossible! It must have been edited!”

“If you don’t believe it,” I said calmly, “we can have it professionally authenticated at the station.”

Ava seemed to receive a message on her phone, because she suddenly grabbed the officer’s sleeve.

“Officer, I just got the bank’s surveillance footage! It’s much more reliable evidence than some recording!”

The video that played on her screen made my blood run cold. It showed me, after leaving the bank, returning to my station to process Mr. Davies’s transaction.

The “me” in the video was wearing the exact same beige trench coat I had on today, right down to the hairstyle.

A smug, triumphant look crossed Ava’s face. “See? Who are you trying to fool with an edited recording?”

“Everyone, look closely! She asked for a day off, then turned right around to scam an old man!”

“That’s impossible! I was at the hospital getting my blood drawn! The police and the hospital have complete records!”

“This is obviously a deepfake!” I whirled on Ava. “Do you get some kind of sick thrill from framing me?”

She stood up straighter. “What are you talking about? That’s you in the video. I didn’t have time to fake anything. You’re just a coward who can’t admit what you’ve done!”

Jonny immediately jumped in to support her. “Ava is just trying to help you get on the right path! If you can’t even see that, then I want a divorce!”

The crowd began to stir again, a fresh wave of murmurs washing over me.

My temples throbbed. Remembering the tragedy of my past life, I gritted my teeth. “I have video evidence, too!”

The traffic cop retrieved his body camera from his patrol car.

“From 9:10 AM onward, Ms. Harris was under my surveillance the entire time. That includes the blood draw at the hospital, which was also fully recorded.”

He played the video. The footage clearly showed my movements at the exact same time as the bank video, creating a direct and impossible conflict.

The scene fell into a dead silence.

Faced with two completely contradictory videos, everyone was stunned.