My Future Self Begged Me to Walk Away Chapter 04

Ulysses’ eyes were completely bloodshot, his grip on my shoulders tightening until it felt like my bones would shatter.

“What the hell did you say to Melody tonight?”

I knit my brows in agonizing pain. “What kind of madness is this? I didn’t say a single thing to her.”

“Liar!” Ulysses roared. “I saw it myself! Right before the gala ended, you exchanged a few words with her.”

“A few minutes later, she vanished. Her phone is turned off.”

“The last security camera caught her heading down Waterfront Road. She’s gone missing right near the North River Bridge!”

In that exact moment, the woman who had been floating beside me began to tremble uncontrollably, crying out in utter devastation.

“That’s the place… Claire…”

“When Melody faked her death years ago, that was the exact bridge she jumped from!”

My eyes widened in pure disbelief.

This time around, I hadn’t cried. I hadn’t made a scene. I hadn’t even uttered a single harsh word to Melody. So why was she still going through with a fake suicide just to frame me?

Countless thoughts swirled frantically in my head, but Ulysses didn’t give me a single second to process. Dragging me out the front door, he floored the accelerator and sped all the way to the North River Bridge.

The river wind howled around us. He pinned my a deep, uneven old scar marked her wrists in a vice grip, forcing half of my torso out over the bridge railing.

“Speak! What exactly did you say to her?”

The phantom screamed, throwing herself over him. But she was nothing more than an apparition; her hands passed through Ulysses’ body again and again, incapable of touching a thing.

“I didn’t,” I choked out, shaking my head with immense difficulty. “I didn’t say a single word to her…”

“You’re still denying it!”

Before the words could fully leave his mouth, a shout echoed from the distance. “Mr. Vanderbilt! We found a letter left behind by Miss Sterling!”

My heart sank all the way to the absolute bottom of my chest. I knew that every single syllable in that letter would be engineered to point a finger at me.

Sure enough, Ulysses skimmed the pages for only a few seconds before his expression turned entirely thunderous. “Claire! What do you have to say for yourself now?”

“She wrote that you called her cheap, that you claimed she stole your wedding, and that you said you’d only ever find peace if she died. You already got everything you wanted, so why did you have to drive her to the absolute edge?”

I was suffocating under his grip, yet I still forced a ragged shake of my head. “It wasn’t me…”

But nobody believed me.

For the next three days, the search and rescue teams scoured the river surface day and night. Alive, there was no sign of Melody; dead, there was no body to be found.

Ulysses did absolutely nothing to contain the news. Overnight, I became the most vilified, malicious woman in all of Port City. Groundless articles accusing me of driving a girl to suicide flooded the media. My photographs were edited into funeral portraits, and my phone was inundated with threatening messages. Wreaths and letters written in blood piled up at my front door; someone even mailed a bloody razor blade to my address.

On the morning of the fourth day, I received a termination email from my company. The reasoning was brief and explicit: conduct detrimental to the company.

Almost simultaneously, a call from Ulysses flashed on my screen. “Hold a press conference. Issue a public apology and admit that your verbal provocation is what caused Melody to take her own life.”

“As long as you do exactly that, I will still marry you.”

The phantom in the air grew frantic, her voice raspy from shouting. “You can’t do it! Holding a press conference means you’re accepting a fabricated crime! You’ll never be able to wash that stain off for the rest of your life!”

I remained silent.

Every single detail leading up to Melody’s disappearance began to play back in my mind like a movie reel. A faint, blurry realization suddenly clicked.

I froze in my tracks. Could it be…?

“Fine,” I said, my voice steady. “I’ll hold the press conference.”

The second I hung up on Ulysses, I quickly dialed a different number. “I’ll give you ten million dollars. Find a woman for me.”

On the day of the press conference, the venue was packed to the brim with journalists. Ulysses sat squarely in the center of the very front row, staring at me with a completely blank expression.

I walked up to the stage, stopping right before the microphone. Scanning the sea of righteously indignant faces in the crowd, I suddenly couldn’t help but let out a soft chuckle.

Instantly, the entire room erupted into chaos.

“She’s actually laughing! Does she even have a shred of humanity left?”

“She drove someone to their death and doesn’t feel a single bit of remorse!”

“Viper! Get off the stage!”

The wave of insults rushed toward me like a tide. I waited patiently until the roaring voices began to settle before I finally spoke into the microphone.

“I think all of you have gotten one fundamental fact wrong.”

“In this entire situation, someone did indeed lose their life.”

I paused deliberately, looking down at the bewildered, suspicious expressions plastered across everyone’s faces, before I calmly delivered the final sentence.

“However, that person wasn’t Melody. And as for the actual murderer… it’s Melody herself.”