Chapter 4

The moment the state lottery headquarters opened, I was the first person in line to claim my payout.

By then, my mom had left over a hundred missed calls. I ignored every single one.

She had also bombarded my phone with dozens of gruesome photos of my dad in the hospital bed.

Photos could easily be staged or photoshopped.

My lived experience and my memories were real.

After rushing back to the local hospital in my hometown, I finally returned her call and asked for their location.

She told me to head to the end of the 7th-floor corridor.

When I arrived, I saw my mom standing by an open window, her eyes bloodshot, clutching a heavy metal wrench in her hand.

I stopped several feet away, keeping my guard up. "Mom, what are you doing over there? You said Dad was in critical condition. Why aren't you by his bedside?"

She slowly turned her head, looking at me with dead, hollow eyes. "Your father is gone. We didn't have the cash up front to authorize the life-support machine. He passed away an hour ago."

I froze. A bitter scoff almost slipped past my lips.

To trick me out of the cash, she was truly willing to invent anything.

In my previous life, the second they got the transfer, they vanished into thin air to live like royalty.

How could my dad possibly be dead?

Before I could call her bluff, she suddenly swung the wrench and smashed the corridor windowpane.

The violent crash made me jump. "Mom! What the hell are you doing?!"

She stared at me quietly, a twisted, heartbroken smile pulling at her cracked lips. "Chloe... your father and I only ever had you. We lived our entire lives for you."

"And when it mattered most, you chose green paper over his life."

"Now he's dead. And in my heart, my daughter died with him."

"There's nothing left for me here."

Without another word, she stepped onto the ledge and threw herself out of the seventh-floor window.

My mind went completely blank. A wave of suffocating shock pinned me to the floor.

She... she jumped?

She killed herself right in front of me?!

They were supposed to be lying!

My dad wasn't really sick! Why would she commit suicide?!

My brain shut down completely. Like an empty shell, I stumbled down the stairs and walked out onto the pavement.

There she was. My mother's mangled body lay in a pool of fresh blood.

Moments later, the morgue staff brought me in.

My father was really there. Cold. Lifeless.

He really had been in a fatal car accident.

The horrifying truth slammed into me like a freight train: my parents hadn't lied to me. The mirror had.

Yet the lottery numbers in the mirror were one hundred percent real!

Why were the visions about Liam and my parents twisted into lethal deceptions?

In less than forty-eight hours, the three most important people in my life were dead.

Even with millions sitting in my bank account, the agony squeezed my lungs so hard I couldn't breathe.

How did everything go so terribly wrong?!

When our extended relatives arrived and learned that I had won millions but refused to pay for my dad's surgery, causing both my parents' deaths, they went berserk.

"You selfish parasite!"

"You murdered your own parents for cash!"

They swarmed me, screaming curses, shoving and clawing at me.

In the violent scuffle, someone shoved me hard. I fell backward, my head slamming against the sharp edge of a concrete planter.

Warm blood gushed from my skull. My vision blurred as excruciating pain washed over me.

The familiar, chilling sensation of my heart failing began creeping into my chest, just like in my previous life.

Endless confusion and bitter resentment drowned my dying thoughts.

Why?

Even after a second chance at life, why was I still doomed to die in a pool of my own blood?

As my eyes drifted shut, ready to surrender to the darkness, a blinding thought struck my mind like lightning!

I finally figured out [Paywall] what was wrong with that damn mirror!

I finally understood the sickening truth behind this entire nightmare!