Chapter 2

When I returned to our room, Lily was sitting in her chair, crying.

Julia stood beside her, awkwardly trying to comfort her. Her expression grew complicated when she saw me.

Lily wasn’t sobbing loudly. Her cries were quiet and restrained, her shoulders trembling just enough to make her look pitiful.

The moment she saw me, she shrank behind Julia like a frightened rabbit. Her eyes filled with fear.

“Claire… d-don’t come any closer.”

I looked at her and let out a disbelieving laugh.

“Lily, someone owes you an Oscar.”

Julia tugged gently at my arm and lowered her voice.

“Claire, maybe you should delete the video for now? This is getting really out of hand. Even our student affairs adviser has been asking about it.”

She clearly couldn’t understand why I had done it.

And I understood that.

To anyone who didn’t know the full story, installing a camera in a dorm room was an invasion of privacy, no matter the reason.

Lily was smart. She had seized on that point and turned herself into the perfect victim.

“I’m not deleting the video,” I told Lily. “It’s evidence that you stole from me.”

Lily cried harder. “I didn’t… I just picked up the wrong order… Why are you doing this to me?”

She struggled to breathe between sobs, as though I were the monster here.

“I’m doing this to you?” I gave a cold laugh, pulled out my chair, and opened my laptop. “Let’s go through everything, one item at a time.”

I opened an encrypted folder containing every record I had kept of my “missing” belongings over the past six months.

“March fifth. My brand-new SK-II facial essence. I used it once, and by the next morning, a fifth of it was gone. Guess whose desk suddenly had a travel bottle filled with the exact same product?”

“April twelfth. My mom sent me a limited-edition bracelet from overseas. I put it in my jewelry box without wearing it once. Three days later, it showed up on your Instagram with the caption ‘A surprise from my boyfriend.’”

“May first. The flash drive with the first draft of my paper disappeared. Two days later, as our class representative, you shared an ‘outstanding sample paper’ in the class chat. It was ninety percent identical to my draft.”

With every incident I listed, Lily’s face grew paler.

By the time I finished, she had stopped crying. Her lips trembled, but she couldn’t get a word out.

Julia was stunned too. She looked from me to Lily, sympathy giving way to shock and suspicion.

“Lily… is what Claire’s saying true?”

Lily sagged in her chair as though all her strength had drained away. She stared at me with venom in her eyes.

“You’re lying!” she suddenly shrieked. “Where’s your proof? You say I stole from you? Prove it!”

“Proof?” I turned my laptop toward her. “I marked the opening of my essence bottle with a fluorescent marker. I saved the full-resolution photo of your bracelet. It shows a distinctive scratch. And as for the paper…”

I paused and opened a document.

“My flash drive contains every version, from the initial outline to the finished draft, with timestamps for every revision. Your ‘sample paper’ only has a final version. Should I send all of this to the confessions page too, Lily? Let everyone decide?”

Her face went from pale to ashen.

She knew everything I said was true.

I had paid attention to all those seemingly insignificant details.

I thought showing her my evidence would at least make her back off.

But I had still underestimated how shameless she could be.