Reborn to Love Mr. Right – Episode 34
Hayden stared at the photograph of his mother beneath the gym floor. The official report said she died in a single-car accident after leaving a charity meeting. According to the archive timestamp, she had entered Victor’s hidden room less than an hour before the crash.
Arianna wanted to reach for him but waited until he turned toward her. Grief had already been used to control both of them; she would not decide what comfort he needed. Hayden took her hand without speaking.
The image showed his mother carrying a red document case. Police had recovered no case from her vehicle. In the background, one server door stood open, revealing the same empty slot where the master key had been stored. Her expression held urgency rather than fear, as though she still believed evidence could reach safety before danger reached her.
Evelyn agreed to another interview after learning the photograph existed. She had denied involvement in her sister-in-law’s death for years, but the archive gave investigators a route around that denial. Hayden attended against his father’s request.
Inside the interview room, Evelyn’s confidence looked thinner than before. She admitted Hayden’s mother discovered the student surveillance program and planned to expose it. Evelyn insisted Victor acted alone when he sabotaged her car.
Hayden asked why she concealed the archive afterward. Evelyn claimed she feared Scott Global would collapse if the public learned its research hardware supported illegal surveillance. She had chosen the company’s reputation over justice and called that cowardice protection. Every year of silence had made the original crime harder to expose and easier to repeat.
“You protected the people who killed her,” Hayden said. Evelyn lowered her eyes but did not deny it. The silence ended any remaining illusion that family loyalty had motivated her return.
She revealed that Hayden’s mother removed the original master key and mailed it to someone she trusted. Victor built a replacement, but it controlled only the current relay. The original key could identify the Witness account and authenticate every future file.
The package had been addressed to Donald Taylor. It never arrived because Martin Shaw intercepted it on Victor’s instructions. Martin believed the red case was destroyed, yet his police statement mentioned storing old client property in a bank vault.
Investigators searched the vault and found the case beneath nineteen years of Taylor contracts. Inside lay the original key, Hayden’s mother’s handwritten notes, and a sealed letter bearing his name. Martin had never opened it.
The letter explained that she discovered the archive comparing probable outcomes generated from personal data. Before her death, it began displaying records that no prediction model could have created. She believed the system was receiving information from “a timeline displaced by profound regret.” Her careful scientific handwriting grew uneven around those final words.
Hayden read the sentence twice. His mother had documented the first impossible file twelve years before Arianna’s rebirth. The archive’s connection to the future existed before Derek or Arianna returned, waiting for an event powerful enough to complete it.
Her notes warned that Victor wanted to provoke that event. He believed extreme regret at the moment of death could send memory backward and make the archive commercially priceless. Arianna felt sick realizing Victor may have encouraged their deaths to test a theory.
Evelyn insisted she never believed the temporal research. She helped conceal the surveillance program, not an experiment involving Arianna. Yet her later alliance with Derek showed how quickly disbelief became opportunity once he returned with future knowledge.
The original key unlocked a partition the replacement could not access. A list of failed timeline contacts appeared, followed by one successful connection labeled Witness-I.R. Ivy went pale when she saw the initials.
She denied creating the account in the present. Hayden reminded her that the sender might be a future version of someone alive now. Ivy’s dreams, cloud password, and knowledge of the ballroom all pointed toward a connection she had only partially experienced. Facing her own future felt more frightening than confronting Derek because she could not blame a stranger.
The partition contained a scheduled video encrypted to open after Victor’s arrest and Derek’s recapture. Both conditions had been met. Arianna authorized playback while police recorded the screen.
An older Ivy appeared, seated in a dark room with a healing scar across her throat. She addressed Arianna by name and said the archive allowed only fragments to cross. “If you’re seeing this, Derek remembered too soon, and Victor found the first packet.”
Future Ivy warned that Victor’s arrest was temporary. He had placed evidence against guards, prosecutors, and judges inside the archive, giving accomplices reasons to release him before their own crimes surfaced. The next attempt would occur during his courthouse hearing.
The video ended with a precise time the following morning. Arianna called the prosecutor, but an alert arrived before the phone connected: Victor Cross had suffered a medical emergency in custody and was already being transported to the courthouse hospital.