Reborn to Love Mr. Right – Episode 32
The old gym had been closed since the fire damaged the science wing, leaving its hallways silent beneath temporary lights. Arianna returned after dark with Hayden, Ivy, police technicians, and the principal. The volleyball court looked smaller than it had on the morning she awakened there.
Victor’s clue pointed beneath the place where she had learned to lose for Derek. Arianna walked to the service line where she once deliberately missed shots to protect Ivy’s pride. A newer section of flooring formed a narrow rectangle beneath the faded paint.
Technicians lifted the boards and found a metal access hatch. The principal had no record of construction beneath the court, though the gym had been renovated with a Scott Foundation grant fifteen years earlier. Evelyn and Victor had built their secret inside a charitable project.
A concrete stairway descended to a room lined with obsolete servers. Most had lost power, but one black cabinet pulsed with a blue status light. Its cooling system drew electricity through the school’s emergency circuit, allowing it to survive every shutdown. Dust covered the floor everywhere except a narrow path leading directly to the active machine.
Hayden recognized Scott research hardware from his mother’s closed laboratory. The equipment had been designed to preserve data during catastrophic industrial failures, not communicate across time. Someone had altered it with Taylor forecasting software and a cloud-storage relay.
Ivy entered the password from her future account. The cabinet unlocked, revealing folders dated years that had not occurred. Each contained photographs, transaction records, and fragments of messages from the erased future.
Arianna found records of her accident, Donald’s false death certificate, and Derek’s takeover of Taylor Industries. The archive held proof she had once begged the world to believe, but using it publicly would require explaining how evidence existed before the crimes. Vindication sat within reach while remaining almost impossible to present without sounding delusional.
One folder bore Arianna’s name and the current date. Inside was the hospital image, captured through a stolen security reflection and assembled by the server. The photograph had not been taken by a person standing behind her; the archive had reconstructed the angle from several cameras.
The discovery made the technology less supernatural without explaining the future files. Hayden suggested the original data might have traveled backward when Arianna and Derek returned. The archive was not predicting every event; it was comparing their choices with information carried from the life they erased.
Ivy found a user log listing three administrators: Victor, Evelyn, and an account identified only as Witness. Victor’s access had been blocked the moment Donald survived. Evelyn’s ended with her arrest. Witness remained active.
A message opened across the central monitor. “Victor will release the false confession at midnight.” A countdown appeared beside a video file showing Donald admitting that he staged his own poisoning to manipulate Taylor Industries stock.
The video looked convincing, but Arianna recognized sentences assembled from her father’s speeches. Victor planned to turn the truth into scandal while markets were still unsettled. If the public believed Donald engineered the crisis, every arrest connected to it would appear politically motivated. Facts would remain visible yet lose their power beneath a more entertaining lie.
Police disconnected the external relay, but the countdown continued on an independent battery. Hayden’s technicians could erase the local file without knowing how many copies Victor’s network had prepared. Stopping the release required control of the archive’s master key.
The administrator log showed the key had been removed three hours earlier. School cameras captured a maintenance worker entering the gym during the hospital attack, when every guard had focused on Derek. His face remained hidden, but his gait looked familiar to Ivy.
She identified Jeff Davis. Derek’s father had been released to monitored medical custody after North Road because prosecutors considered him a cooperating witness. Victor had found another man whose guilt made obedience easy.
Arianna called Jeff while detectives traced his ankle monitor. He answered from a bus station and denied taking anything. When she mentioned the false confession, his breathing changed. He admitted Victor promised to reduce Derek’s sentence if he retrieved one small drive.
“Victor cannot reduce anyone’s sentence,” Arianna said. Jeff replied that a father still had to try. His devotion resembled Martin’s desperation, but Jeff had spent years teaching Derek that love meant protecting him from consequences.
Hayden asked Jeff to deliver the drive to the police. In return, they would document his cooperation but offer no false promises. Jeff remained silent long enough for Arianna to hear an announcement naming the next departing bus.
Officers reached the platform as Jeff’s bus pulled away. They stopped it outside the station and found his abandoned jacket in the rear seat. The master key was missing, and his ankle monitor had been wrapped around a water bottle.
At midnight, every screen in the underground room went black. Donald’s manufactured confession began playing on phones and news sites across the country. Above the video, Victor had added a title designed to destroy the Taylors in six words: “The Heiress Who Faked Her Father’s Death.”