Chapter 1

Wendy Jeffords was hugging her belly, looking deathly pale. She stumbled toward me and grabbed me by the arm. "I think I'm about to go into labor… Please, Ciara, take me to the hospital. It hurts so much…"

The look on her face, the tone of her voice, and even the forceful grip on my arm were exactly the same as they were in my past life. My mind went momentarily blank.

In my past life, she had approached me the same way, crying about how she was not able to get a cab and how only I could help her give birth to her baby safely. I believed her, so I drove her to the hospital in my new car, speeding all the way in an anxious state.

I took a shortcut to get to the hospital faster, but after two hours of surgery, the doctor walked out of the surgery room with a pained look on his face. "The baby suffocated because its umbilical cord was wrapped around its neck. We weren't able to save it."

My knees went weak, and before I knew it, Wendy started wailing from the hospital room, "This is all your fault! Why did you have to take that shortcut? There were bumps throughout that road, and you killed my baby for driving through there!"

All I could do was apologize because I did not know better, but Wendy refused to let this go. On the day she was discharged, she appeared in front of my office, holding a white sign painted with red words that read, 'Ciara Snow is a murderer! She killed my baby when she drove dangerously!'

Wendy had grown up with my mafia boyfriend, Clay Colton, and she begged him to use his contacts in the local media to help her. Before noon, clips of Wendy protesting outside my office started trending online.

The article with the headline, 'Female Bentley driver murdered baby!', garnered 40 million views, and pictures of me were splashed all over the internet.

[Is she allowed to murder just because she's rich?! This case needs a retrial!]

[People like her don't deserve to live in this world.]

[That woman lost a baby. How can a murderer like her still go to work like nothing had happened?]

That afternoon, my superiors called me into the office for a meeting. "This has caused our company's reputation to suffer tremendously. You don't need to come to work anymore."

My employee card was blocked before I even left the building.

The next morning, Clay came over to my house with Wendy. "You killed Wendy's baby, Ciara. It was a major blow to her, and she's emotionally damaged." He held the crying Wendy in his arms tenderly and said to me, "You have to redeem yourself by being responsible for her."

That was how I became a free maid for Wendy for a month. I would go to her house at 6:00 am every day to cook, clean, and do her laundry, while she stayed in bed to cry, scream, or curse at me. "Give me back my son! Why weren't you the one who died? You owe me everything!"

After suffering for a month, I finally went home, only to find that my parents had been harassed and hurt during this period, and ended up being admitted to the hospital. My relatives refused to pick up any of our calls, and my friends cut off contact with me.

Despite being found innocent by the court, everyone treated me like a criminal. I eventually suffered from depression and jumped off a building.

I snapped out of it when Wendy's fingernails dug hard into my flesh. She was still looking pitiful while looking like she was trying to hold back her pain, just like how she was in my past life. I slowly pried her fingers off my arm, one by one.

After that, I took a step away from her. "Call an ambulance if you're about to go into labor," I said calmly. "What does this have to do with me?"