My pulse quickened.

His route home from the business trip ran in the opposite direction from the accident scene. He had no reason to be there. That alone was suspicious.

I dug through every detail I could remember, searching for more threads to pull.

I was working backward from a conclusion: Tyler and his assistant had framed me together. The pieces were already falling into place. All I had to do was wait for the police to arrive and verify every suspicion, one by one.

While I was still sifting through memories, footsteps echoed from outside.

They were here.

I sat up straight, shoulders back, and waited.

This time, I would drag the two of them straight to hell.

"Vivian, why did you do this?" Tyler looked at me, anguish carved into every line of his face. It didn't look like acting. It looked like I'd actually killed someone.

A second life, and yet this scene was burned into my memory.

He'd asked me the same question last time. The exact same words.

Back then, when they told me I'd committed a hit-and-run, I hadn't fought back. Hadn't said a word. I'd just let them take me away.

That was why my last life ended in bitterness and regret.

Not this time.

I asked the officers calmly, and sure enough, the reason for their visit was the same: a hit-and-run.

The script hadn't changed. Which meant I had the advantage.

"That's impossible." I looked directly at the officers. "I've been home all day. I never left. We have security cameras. You can check the footage."

"That's right, we have cameras." Tyler jumped in, his voice eager. He led the officers toward the monitoring system.

But when they discovered the cameras were down, my head went blank.

How?

Panic surged through me. I'd been careless.

I'd walked into this with assumptions from my previous life, treating the situation like a script I already knew. That was a mistake. If Tyler and Susannah Floyd were going to frame me, of course they would have tampered with things in advance.

Susannah stared at me. "What did my mother ever do to you? Why did you have to kill her?"

Her voice yanked me back to the present. I had to stay calm.

Tyler cut in quickly. "Susannah, I'm sure Vivian didn't mean to. It was just an ordinary accident. She panicked when she hit someone."

"Vivian, you shouldn't have run. If you'd stopped to help her, she wouldn't have died. If you'd just answered my calls, none of this would have happened."

Calls. Right, the calls.

"You called me?" I pressed. "Is that what you're saying?"

"Yes. I called you over and over, and you never picked up."

I thrust my phone at the officers. "Look. There are no missed calls on my phone. Not a single one."

Tyler leaned in to look, then held out his own phone. "Here. Check my call log."

His screen showed dozens of outgoing calls to my number.

How was that possible?

"You ran my mother over right in front of Tyler's eyes," Susannah said, her gaze boring into me. "He watched you abandon the car and flee. Why won't you admit it?" Her voice cracked with fury. "You even deleted the call records. What did my mother ever do to deserve this?"

The cameras were down. Tyler's phone showed a call history that mine didn't.

This had gone completely off script.

Stay calm. You have to stay calm.

I couldn't fall apart now. I was certain I hadn't driven anywhere.

I asked the officers where the accident had occurred. Then I turned on Tyler. "You were coming back from a business trip today. There's no reason you'd be on that road. So why were you there?"

I locked my eyes on his. If he was lying, there would be cracks.

Pain twisted across Tyler's face. "It's Women's Day. I wanted to surprise you. I'd had a necklace custom-made at a jewelry store over there. I went to pick it up."

"I never expected..." Tyler's tears fell. "I never expected to see you behind the wheel, running someone down."

A jewelry store.

There really was a jewelry store I liked on that road.

Could it really be that much of a coincidence?

"Contact the owner of that store. Verify whether Tyler actually ordered a custom piece for me."

Tyler reached out to the store owner himself. When the owner confirmed it, my legs went weak.

It was airtight. They must have planned everything well in advance, leaving me no chance to fight back.

"Vivian, I thought you were just venting when you said those things. I never imagined you'd actually kill my mother. This wasn't a traffic accident. This was premeditated murder."

Susannah kept calling me "Vivian" in that familiar tone, but every word out of her mouth cut deeper than the last.

The officers turned to look at her immediately.

My expression shifted. In my previous life, I'd been convicted of vehicular manslaughter. But now Susannah was clearly trying to escalate the charges.

"What did you just say?" I glared at her. "Don't you dare make baseless accusations."

"See for yourself." Susannah handed me her phone.

On the screen were chat screenshots between her and me.

"If you dare get that close to Tyler again, I'll make you pay dearly."

Susannah looked at me. "I'm Tyler's assistant. There's nothing between us. I know he's a wonderful man and you love him, but just because I work alongside him, you killed my mother? Don't you think that's a little extreme?"

I immediately scrolled through my own phone, searching. There was no such conversation anywhere in my messages.

"Of course you'd delete something like that," Susannah said. "Have a technician recover the chat history and the truth will come out."

I was certain I'd never sent those messages. Checking my phone would prove the truth.

The officers contacted a forensic technician. Fifteen minutes later, when the recovered chat history appeared on my screen, the blood drained from my face.

And the officers found something else in my phone's browser. They recovered a trove of deleted search history.

How to commit the perfect crime. Searches like that dragged me straight into the abyss.

"Vivian, how could you do this?" Tyler crouched on the ground in agony, pounding his fists against the floor.

"I didn't do it. I absolutely did not kill anyone. I didn't even leave the house today."

"Then where's the car? Where's the vehicle that hit her? If I drove into someone today, there would be evidence on it."

"After the incident, did anyone touch that car? It has a seat memory function. If I wasn't the one driving, there will be clues."

"Vivian, even now, you still won't admit it?" Tyler looked at me, his eyes brimming with disappointment. "Go look in a mirror first. Look at the wound on your forehead."

"The airbag deployed and shattered your sunglasses, leaving that cut on your forehead. Those sunglasses were found at the scene. Along with blood."

"The police have already collected blood samples for analysis. Refusing to confess will only make your sentence worse."

He was lying through his teeth. I rushed to find a mirror.

The moment I saw my reflection, the room tilted around me.

I really was injured.

How was that possible?

I'd been home the entire time. How could I have been hurt?

Tyler watched me. "Vivian, confess now, before the lab results come back."

No. None of this was right.

This time, I would not give in.

"I'll wait for the results."

I needed to stall. I needed more time to comb through the details, to find the cracks in their story.

But fate didn't seem willing to give me that time.

The words had barely left my mouth when an officer's phone rang. The lab results were in.

The officer looked at me. "The blood comparison is a match. The blood found in the vehicle involved in the accident is yours."

"Wait!"

"I've got it. I've figured it out."

I stared at Susannah. "I know the truth now. So what's it going to be, Susannah? Are you going to tell them yourself, or do I have to say it?"