When I came to again, I was lying in a hospital bed, gauze wrapped around my head and my arm.
Through the door I could hear my parents arguing with the Hardings.
My mother broke down, sobbing in anguish.
"My daughter's been driven to this because of you people. What more do you want from her?"
Aileen shrieked back, shrill and cutting:
"She's still alive, isn't she? But my son was driven to his death by her!"
"Pay me five million and I'll let her go. Otherwise I'll hound her for the rest of my life. I'll ruin her name, I'll make it so she can't show her face anywhere!"
I shoved the door open, lifted my phone toward the Hardings, and said:
"I never did anything to Drew, so I'm not paying you a cent. This is extortion!"
I pointed at my own bandaged head.
"Assault is a crime you go to prison for. I've already called the police. You can say all this to them."
The police arrived and told Aileen it had been preliminarily confirmed that Drew's death had nothing to do with me.
Then they took the relatives who'd beaten me into custody.
Aileen fell apart, refusing to listen, refusing to believe it, wailing that the police were shielding a murderer.
The video of her scene outside my office that morning had already begun spreading in small circles online.
Josephine Robles, the assistant I'd trained myself and trusted completely, told me she'd believe in me no matter what happened.
She also told me a lot of people had reported me to the company, and management was in a meeting about it right now.
I don't know who put the idea in Aileen's head, but that night she started a livestream, playing the grieving mother, weeping and choking on her words as she milked her sob story and spread her lies.
She painted the dead Drew as a devoted, sincere, honest, solid catch of a man.
And she smeared me as an arrogant, gold-digging, cold and heartless woman who thought she was better than everyone, who'd shown up to a blind date full of hollow entitlement.
She cried like the sky was falling.
"My son was gentle by nature. It was so hard for him to finally fall for someone, and he genuinely wanted to make it work with her."
"Fine, she didn't think my son was good enough. But why did she have to humiliate him every way she could, call him a toad reaching for a swan, call him a good-for-nothing who only made twenty thousand a month, tell him he was wasting the air he breathed?"
"My son was outstanding from the time he was little. He was my pride. I'd never seen him so crushed, his eyes all red, like he had nothing left to live for."
The livestream shot straight to the top of the local trending list, and the traffic exploded.
Countless people who had no idea what really happened were taken in by her tragic performance, their sympathy pouring out.
In her livestream they cursed and abused me with no limits at all.
As the rumors kept snowballing, strangers online doxxed me, digging up everything there was to find.
My parents' address, my workplace, all my social accounts were exposed.
My inbox filled up with vile abuse, curses, and ugly speculation.
Buckling under the pressure, the company cut me loose, forcing me to resign.
My promotion to sales director, about to go through, was rescinded.
Seven years of sleepless nights, of grinding away at my career, destroyed in a single stroke.
My parents were followed by furious strangers, harassed and threatened. My mother slipped on a banana peel someone threw and broke a bone on her way home from the grocery store.
My father was smeared with doctored photos claiming he'd had an affair and a child out of wedlock.
In the end his workplace let him go over "conduct issues," his good name ruined at the last.
With no way to defend himself, my father was so furious his heart gave out, and he ended up in the hospital too.
The steady life we'd had, the job I loved—all of it collapsed because of Aileen's malicious lies.
Aileen sent an anonymous message demanding I publicly apologize and pay out five million on my own, and then she'd give me a way to live.
Looking at my parents in their hospital beds, pale, suddenly aged ten years, I clenched my fingers.
I'd thought that as long as I cooperated with the investigation, I could clear my name.
But Aileen kept pressing, closing in for the kill, until I finally saw her clearly: this wasn't simple grief over a lost son.
She was using her son's death as a cover to extort me and destroy my life.
I refused to let her have her way!
