Twenty Years Later, I Became Her Boss Chapter 07

Twenty Years Later, I Became Her Boss Chapter 07

I said nothing.

No one in the studio said anything either.

Richard collapsed back into his chair, his face ashen.

Lauren gripped his arm so tightly that her nails dug into his suit.

Anna shrank into the corner of the couch, no longer able to maintain even a trace of her elegant composure.

I stood onstage, holding the microphone.

My palm was damp.

I had prepared for this moment for twenty years. I had thought I would be calm when it finally came.

But now that I was truly standing here, my hand still began to shake.

“Richard Bradford.”

My voice came through the microphone with a faint tremor.

“Those were your corporate crimes. But that isn’t all.”

Richard looked up at me in confusion.

“Because what you owe me goes far beyond business.”

I took a deep breath.

“You also owe me two lives.”

The studio fell completely silent.

The giant screen lit up again.

The first image was a photograph of a young woman in a floral dress, smiling beneath a magnolia tree.

That was my mother twenty years ago.

The second was a yellowed hospital record bearing the hospital’s official certification seal at the bottom: the patient died after resuscitation efforts failed due to massive blood loss; the fetus was stillborn due to fetal distress.

The third was a hospital staffing transfer memo.

It was dated that rainy night twenty years ago and ordered the on-call obstetrics team pulled from the maternity ward to treat a woman with a headache.

Only one name appeared on the approval line.

Richard Bradford.

The studio erupted.

“A mother and baby both died?”

“He pulled OB specialists away from a woman hemorrhaging in labor to treat a headache? What kind of person does that?”

Richard shot to his feet so violently that his chair toppled to the floor.

All color drained from his face. He pointed at me, his voice cracking.

“Who are you? Who the hell are you?”

Lauren’s face had gone pale too.

She stared at the authorization form on the screen. A few strands of her carefully styled hair had slipped loose, her lips moved soundlessly, and she stumbled one step back.

I did not answer.

I simply reached into the pocket of my suit and took out a piece of paper. It was old and carefully folded, its creases worn soft and its color yellowed with age.

I unfolded it and held it up.

It was a birth certificate.

It read:

Child’s name: Emily Bradford.

Mother: Laura Parker.

Father: Richard Bradford.

“Richard Bradford.”

I called his name, then slowly took off my glasses.

Lauren stared hard at my face.

She recognized me.

She let out a scream and stumbled backward, pointing at me with a shrill, piercing voice.

“It’s you! How are you still alive?”

Richard’s eyes widened too. When he looked at me, there was no guilt in his eyes, only shock.

“You…”

My voice carried clearly through the studio and reached the tens of millions of viewers watching the livestream.

“I am the child you drove out of the Bradford family twenty years ago.”

“My mother’s name was Laura Parker. She was Richard Bradford’s legal wife. Twenty years ago, she suffered a massive hemorrhage during labor, and Richard had every doctor pulled away from her to treat Lauren’s headache. My mother and my unborn brother both died on that delivery table.”

I took one step forward and looked down at Richard, who had collapsed to the floor.

“I came back to make you pay for my mother and my unborn brother.”

The entire room fell into dead silence.

Then every camera flash went off at once.