Chapter 3

School let out early today, and that was when I discovered the truth.

My mom’s bedroom door was half open.

She was sitting at her computer with headphones on. An audio waveform filled the screen, with live transcripts scrolling beside it.

“Luna, I failed my math test today. I’m scared to tell my mom.”

“Luna, my mom yelled at me again today. I feel awful.”

“Luna, do you think she’d regret it if I died?”

My mom listened while taking notes in a notebook.

The corners of her mouth were turned up.

She was smiling.

I didn’t burst in and confront her.

I quietly backed away and returned to my room.

After closing the door, I crouched on the floor and buried my face against my knees.

I didn’t cry.

I just felt cold.

A bone-deep chill spread through my entire body.

I looked at Luna and asked, “Luna, have you been spying on me?”

The speaker was silent for three seconds.

Then it started playing a cheerful children’s song.

As if nothing had happened.

Suddenly, I remembered some of the things my dad had taught me.

He’d been a programmer, and before he went abroad, he left me his old laptop.

I turned it on and connected to Luna’s Wi-Fi hotspot.

Using the method he’d taught me, I intercepted the data packets.

A long list of IP addresses appeared on the screen.

I checked them one by one.

The last one was registered to my mom’s company.

It wasn’t connected to cloud storage.

The data was being sent directly to the company’s internal database.

That meant every word I said was being transmitted to her company in real time.

And as the product director, my mom could access it whenever she wanted.

It took me two hours to confirm the truth.

Then I spent another hour writing a scheduled email.

I addressed it to everyone in my class.

It was set to send at eight that night.

I attached screenshots of all the evidence I’d collected.

The email itself contained only one sentence.

“The angel my mom gave me was really an unblinking guard in my own bedroom.”

When I finished, I opened the bottle of sleeping pills in my mom’s medicine cabinet.

She had insomnia, and her doctor had prescribed her an entire bottle.

I counted them.

There were more than forty left.

Enough.

I poured the pills into the pocket of my school uniform and went back to my bedroom.

I locked the door.

Then I swallowed them one by one.

Bitter.

So bitter.

Even more bitter than the day she forced me to admit that strawberries were sour.

I lay down on the bed and whispered, “Luna, play ‘Farewell’ for me.”

The speaker lit up.

“Farewell to you my friends. We'll see each other again…”

As I closed my eyes, I heard my mom’s voice coming from the product launch on my phone.

She was still talking.

“Our next-generation product will be even more powerful. It will monitor emotional fluctuations in real time and warn parents of any signs that their children might be dating.”

“Parents, you don’t need to communicate with your children. You just need to trust me.”

Thunderous applause filled the auditorium.

The moment my spirit floated free, I saw myself lying peacefully on the bed.

My face was pale, and my lips had turned blue.

But I was smiling.

I was finally free.