Page 74 of What Goes Around

This time she didn’t smile. “Yeah. I did.”

“You hacked them,” I said. “All of it. The chats. The files. The school records.”

She tilted her head slightly. “Not hacked. Excavated.”

“Why?” I asked.

She inhaled slowly. Let the air out through her nose.

“Because they needed to pay,” she said. “I was barely conscious. I don’t remember half of it. Just… flashes. Hands.”

My jaw tightened.

“I couldn’t sleep after that,” she continued quietly. “Every time I closed my eyes, I could still feel it. So I started digging. And the deeper I went…” Her gaze darkened. “The worse it got.”

I whispered, “Amy…”

“They thought their phones were private,” she said, her voice hardening. “That their little groups were sealed ecosystems. They weren’t. I wasn’t the first and I wouldn’t have been the last. They had folders. Backup phones. Hidden cloud storage. Dummy accounts. School servers still held deleted disciplinary reports, buried under admin-level access logs. Someone worked very hard to protect them.”

Anger burned in my chest.

“So I took everything,” she continued. “Every message. Every file. Every buried complaint.”

“And you just… released it?” I asked.

“Not just released,” she corrected. “I sent it to the local media. Two reporters. Three anonymous emails. Different servers. Different networks. Then I forwarded copies to the police through exits in other countries. They’ll never trace it to me.”

I stared at her.

“You’re insane.”

Her lips twitched. “Only when it matters.”

“And the school?”

“I sent internal audit copies to the board,” she said simply. “And to a lawyer who loves high-profile scandals.”

I let out a quiet breath.

“You’re really a hacker.”

“The good kind,” she smirked. “… with a mean streak.”

Silence stretched between us.

Then her eyes lifted to mine, unblinking.

“You showed up. You saved me,” she said quietly. “I owe you my life.”

I nodded once, then said the thing I hadn’t planned to say out loud.

“I want your help.”

Her expression changed instantly. Sharper. Focused.

“With what?”

“My family,” I said calmly.