In my last life, they'd shoved all the blame onto me and painted themselves as the victims.
At least before I died, I'd learned it was all an act.
But in this life, I didn't know that yet.
If they truly had no idea what happened—if the explosion really was an accident—then their rage right now was genuine.
And I was the one responsible. Two lives lost. A $300,000 luxury car reduced to ash. All on me.
"Stop hitting her!" An officer pulled my parents back. "The investigation isn't finished. You can't take the law into your own hands."
"What's there to investigate? She did it!" Mom wailed, beating her chest. "What did the James family do to deserve this? We raised a curse in human skin!"
They brought me back to the village and locked me in the main room of the house.
Night fell. I curled up against the wall, my mind a tangled wreck.
Those memories of my past life—of my parents conspiring together—were they real or not?
If they were innocent, then what did those twenty years of my previous life even mean?
A fog crept over my thoughts. Had I actually lost my mind? Were all those memories from my past life nothing but delusions?
In the dead of night, I slipped out through the window and crept toward the pond, hoping to find some trace of evidence.
What I found instead were my parents and my brother.
Their voices were barely above whispers, but I caught enough.
"What do we do? The plan changed? She actually sank the car?"
"If she really sank it, then whose car exploded?"
"Doesn't matter. It already blew up. We stick to the original plan..."
"What about the two people who died? They're actually dead—but they're not the two we arranged..."
"Who did it?"
"No idea. But hey, saves us the money we would've spent staging it."
Ice flooded my veins. Every nerve in my body went numb.
They had a plan all along.
The explosion, the deaths, the debt from my last life—all orchestrated by them. All real.
But in this life, the explosion and the deaths had turned genuine, spiraling beyond what they'd anticipated.
And still, they were going to go through with it. Still going to hang it all around my neck. Still going to make me their scapegoat.
"What about the car in the pond?" That was Phil's voice. "Why is it gone?"
"No idea. Maybe she remembered wrong and never actually sank it."
"Impossible. I went to the pond this morning. There's a hole in the ice—something definitely went under."
"Then what happened? The car grew legs and walked off?"
"Who cares. There's no evidence now. Nobody's going to believe a word she says. We just insist it was her car and make her pay."
"But those are two human lives. You really want her to go to prison?"
"Prison? Nobody's going to prison. She just pays up. We'll play the loving family, act like we're helping shoulder the burden. She'll be so grateful she won't question it. Then we send her out to work and funnel every penny back to us—same as the plan. She's our cash cow."
I knew it.
What I'd heard on my deathbed in my last life wasn't a hallucination.
This was their plan all along.
But if all of it was real, then where was the e-bike I'd sunk to the bottom of that pond?
My parents didn't know. Phil didn't know.
All they wanted was to run the same con again. Keep draining me dry.
And even if they couldn't bleed me for money, they'd still find a way to dump every last shred of responsibility on my shoulders.
But the only way to clear my name was to find that e-bike.
Then it hit me.
When I'd first bought it, I couldn't afford to pay in full, so I'd gone with an installment plan.
The seller had installed a GPS tracker in an inconspicuous spot on the frame.
They said the tracker could only be removed once the bike was fully paid off.
With that thought, I headed into town that same night and found the dealer. I asked him to check the e-bike's GPS location.
One look at the screen, and my world shattered.
I finally understood where the e-bike I'd sunk in the hillside pond had gone—and whose bike had actually exploded.
