Chapter 4

After the breakup, I felt low for a little while.

But mostly I was furious.

That moldy orange ended up somewhere I couldn't even say, and everything else that belonged to Clark, all of it, went straight into the trash.

I vented about the whole thing to my best friend, and it got her worked up too.

The next morning she shook me awake in a panic, firing off screenshot after screenshot for me to look at.

"This is bad, Angie, look at this. Isn't this post about you? A bunch of people are already digging up your info. I bet your social account is about to blow up."

The screenshots were a call-out post. The gist was that I was a gold digger, a social climber, vengeful, controlling.

The anonymous poster claimed his girlfriend had made a big show of generosity on Valentine's Day, given him a gift expensive enough to press charges over, then called the police to have him arrested, lying that the gift had been stolen.

And that the camera came with an anti-theft tracking system, first so she could keep tabs on her boyfriend, second to feed her own habit of picking fights over nothing.

It even said something about how he'd sent his girlfriend a Valentine's cash gift, and she'd sent back $250 to mock him and insult him.

Below it, a whole crowd of thin-skinned male users had jumped in to defend him, and off his one-sided story alone they'd cast me as some kind of "conspiracy theory" expert.

"This woman is truly vicious. She's playing mind games, isn't she? Control, revenge, humiliation, chipping away at her boyfriend bit by bit so he'll turn into her most obedient little pet!"

"Right, no man would ever want a woman like that, so she gets clingy and insecure and pulls this kind of stunt. Has she got no shame?"

"If you ask me, this woman just hasn't been hit enough. If she had been, she'd be crying and begging, 'I won't do it again'!"

"Somebody find this woman so we can teach her a proper lesson, and she'll know she was wrong."

……

Further down, the filth got even worse. I couldn't stand to keep reading myself.

From all the details, one glance was enough to tell this was a post Clark had written, all about the fight between him and me.

Within the hour, my social account was flooded with strangers, most of them men, all of them piling on, throwing hostile words at me.

I showed it to my best friend, and she was livid too.

"Clark's gone way too far, Angie. What are you going to do? Should you just call him and make him delete the post?"

"No. Once he's put it up, he won't delete it that easily."

"Then what do we do?"

I thought it over and settled on a plan fast.

"Report it. I'm going down to the station again."

"Huh? Report it again?"

"Yeah. Send me all those screenshots, and the link to the post too. Once I've got the evidence in hand, I can file a report the second I walk in."

An hour later I was at the police station.

The officer who took me was the same one from last time, and he recognized me right away too.

When I said I wanted to file a report, he had it down to a routine by now. He got the report started quickly and called Clark in.

This time I was the one waiting at the station for him, so he was in no hurry at all, dragging his feet for nearly two hours before he finally strolled in.

The moment he heard I'd reported him again, he stared at me with contempt written all over his face, thinking I'd done it as an excuse to see him.

"What is it, you want to get back together? I blocked you, so now that you can't reach me you call the cops to track me down?"

"You're overthinking it."

I tossed the printed screenshots down in front of him and got straight to the point.

"Talk. Do you want to be arrested and go to jail, or do you want to pay me emotional-damages compensation?"

"What are you even talking about?"

Clark was baffled. He picked up the screenshots, skimmed a few lines, and right there his face went ashen.

"What's this supposed to mean? I never posted any……"