If You Didn't Kill Your In-laws, Who Did?

When Linda Reese finally found me, she brought a group with her. I was curled up beside a garbage bin, my body caked in filth.I trembled as I stuffed scraps of discarded food into my mouth, my eyes hollow. I looked no different from a walking corpse.She stood beside me, shaking, her eyes rimmed with red.“How did it come to this…”The moment I heard that familiar voice, my whole body jolted. My foul hands froze in midair.It was Linda.A sharp pain clenched my heart. Instinctively, I tried to hide, unwilling to let her see how utterly ruined I had become.I struggled to flee, but several people pinned me down, holding me fast until I couldn’t move at all.Linda bent down, closing in on me. Her scorching gaze was filled with desperate hope.“Finn, I’ll ask you one last time… what is the truth behind my parents’ deaths?”The people beside her stared at me with bloodshot eyes, their fists clenched so tightly their knuckles cracked.Once again, the image of that night surfaced

Blood dripped onto Linda’s clothes, and in her eyes, struggle and pain intertwined.“Finn… you want everyone to know the truth, don’t you? You just can’t speak it out loud. Right?”The silver needles churned through my brain, the agony turning my vision black. I had barely begun to shake my head when a surge of electricity slammed into me.Blood mixed with saliva slowly spilled from the corner of my mouth.The scene shifted again.I was kneeling in a pool of blood, my body shaking. The blade in my hand was slick with blood as I desperately pressed down on my parents-in-law’s gushing wounds.Warm blood soaked through my fingers.Their pupils were unfocused. They tried to speak, but no sound came.Sobbing, I tore strips from my clothes to bandage them, only to clutch sticky, shattered organs.The onlookers whispered among themselves. Someone sighed.“The way he’s trying so hard to save them—how could he be the killer?”Another scoffed coldly.“What a convincing performance. M

The crowd’s eyes were glued to the figure on the screen, horror written across every face.Linda collapsed to the ground, utterly drained. The knife slipped from her hand, clattering against the floor.“No… no, this can’t be…” she murmured, her voice trembling.There was something eerily familiar about the figure on the screen that unsettled her.The spectators whispered among themselves, trying to make sense of what they saw.“Just now, the screen picked up the scream of the police chief’s father, but her mother never appeared. Could it be… the person who killed her father was her mother?”“If that’s true, it would explain why Finn never spoke of it to the very end.”"So does that mean we’ve been falsely accusing him all along? If her mother killed her father, then the one committing the current murders must be someone else entirely.”Pale and shaking, the crowd’s eyes were filled with regret and self-reproach.“If Finn did nothing wrong, then what’s the difference between th

A heart‑rending scream from my mother‑in‑law echoed through the screen.My soul shuddered instinctively, tears sliding down from the corners of my eyes.The killer’s face emerged clearly before everyone watching.Linda staggered backward, nearly knocking over the machine.On the screen, the figure wielding the knife and carving into her mother slowly lifted her head—revealing a twisted face identical to Linda’s own.The room went deathly pale.“How is this possible? The killer is the police chief?”“No… it can’t be her…”“Run! The killer is the police chief!”Linda stared at her blood‑stained hands, trembling, exactly the same as in the image.“No… impossible… How could it be me? It can’t be me!”Gregory froze for a moment, then forced himself to sound calm.“This… this must be a tampered memory! The killer deliberately disguised herself as you!”His fingers shook as he swept a cold smile across the crowd.“The memory decoder is a new product. Data misalignment is normal.

The memory froze on the moment Linda took me away.She collapsed to her knees, screaming in despair.I hovered in the air, watching her face twist with agony. A dull ache rose from the depths of my soul.“Finn… I’m sorry… I didn’t know… I really didn’t know…”She crawled to my corpse, but there was no longer a single intact piece of flesh left on my body.Her tears fell onto me. Yet I could no longer soothe her the way I once had.Gregory grabbed Linda, trying to pull her to her feet.“Linda, these memories are all fake! Don’t let him fool you—he and the killer were working together!”At that moment, the director of the psychiatric hospital spoke in a grave voice.“Linda did suffer from dissociative identity disorder in the past. During an episode years ago, she set fire to someone’s home. Because she was mentally unstable and still a minor at the time, the court did not sentence her, ordering compulsory treatment instead. Her parents chose to bury the truth forever in order t