“Who called the police?”
The moment the officers walked in, the tension in the room ratcheted up several notches.
“I did.”
I stepped forward and approached the lead officer, Captain Godfrey James, giving him a brief, concise summary of what had happened.
Before I even finished, Laurel cut in：
“Captain James, don't listen to his nonsense. His son brought an entire class of kids into our shop to eat and drink. They ran up a tab of nineteen thousand nine hundred dollars. The boy said Mr. Henson would settle it when he arrived, so I put the whole bill together.”
“And now he's standing here shamelessly trying to weasel out of paying.”
“Honestly, I'm starting to think he and his son planned this together, using our shop for a free meal!”
The other servers jumped in the moment she finished：
“That's right. Every single one of us can confirm it. He has a son, about ten years old, who comes in every few days and calls him Dad right to his face.”
“This time it was his kid who came in to order. We only let the boy run a tab because they're regulars.”
“Who would've thought a company CEO would try to skip out on a twenty-thousand-dollar bill by denying his own son?”
Hearing the servers speak with such unwavering certainty, Captain James frowned and turned to me：
“Mr. Henson, are you certain you don't have a son?”
I nodded：“I'm certain.”
“I've been single my entire life. Never married, never had children. My civil records and registration can verify all of that.”
Laurel let out a mocking laugh：
“Not being married doesn't mean you don't have kids. Maybe you stay single so it's easier to have a different woman every other night.”
“Rich men always have skeletons in the closet. That boy's obviously your illegitimate son.”
I held Laurel's gaze for a long moment.
Then I turned to Captain James and spoke with deliberate gravity：
“Captain James, since they claim I regularly bring my son to this shop, I'd like to request that the public surveillance cameras along the entire route from my building to this café be pulled.”
“The front gate of my complex, the elevators, the hallways, the parking garage. Every public-area camera falls under police jurisdiction. Pull the footage and it'll be clear whether I've ever been seen entering or leaving the building with a ten-year-old boy.”
Captain James nodded and gave a few quick instructions to the young officer behind him.
The officer immediately got on the radio to the command center, requesting the surveillance footage along the route.
Laurel's expression flickered for just a second, but she recovered almost instantly and said in a breezy tone：
“Go ahead and pull it. The facts are the facts. We've got nothing to hide.”
Something cold dropped through my stomach.
That wasn't right.
Laurel's confidence didn't look like an act.
If this really was a setup, the mention of pulling surveillance should have rattled her.
So why did she look so sure of herself?
While I was still turning that over in my head, the young officer called out：
“The surveillance footage just came through.”
Captain James cast the footage onto the café's advertising screen for everyone to see.
The instant the image appeared, every person in the room went still……
