Chapter 3

3

The moment I stepped onto the university campus, my students rushed up to me.

"Professor! A group of people just burst into the lab and hauled away all the equipment!"

"They even wiped the servers and destroyed our data logs!"

My phone buzzed. It was Clara.

She gave a cold laugh over the line. "Ethan, Evelyn might be soft-hearted, but I'm not."

"Since you want to be a big man, you can stop enjoying the life her money bought you!"

I hung up and blocked her number immediately.

Evelyn, soft-hearted? No, she was the puppet master.

By playing the victim, she got Clara to do all her dirty work for her.

She knew how much this project meant to me; this was a calculated strike to humiliate me.

Even my students were looking at me with resentment and judgment.

I ignored them and called a friend to arrange for new equipment.

Then, I started the grueling task of cleaning up the wreckage of my lab.

It wasn't long before the Dean called me into his office.

He was furious, telling me to fix my personal life before I brought more shame to the university.

My heart skipped a beat. I walked outside to see what was happening.

I could hear Clara's voice echoing from a megaphone across the quad.

"Professor Ethan Hayes is a piece of human garbage who abandoned his wife and child!"

"He was just a poor kid who crawled his way into a wealthy family by tricking his wife!"

"Now that he's successful, he's cheating and trying to dump the woman who built him!"

She was leading a group of influencers, filming a live stream as they marched through campus.

Students were flocking to the scene, pointing and whispering.

"Is that him? That's disgusting. He's a total gold-digger."

"I heard he's using the fact that his wife likes dolls as an excuse for divorce. How pathetic."

"Men really do turn into monsters the moment they get a little cash, don't they?"

The influencers spotted me and swarmed, thrusting cameras in my face and shouting insults.

They treated me like a convicted criminal.

I frowned, getting ready to speak, when Evelyn appeared with Maya.

She told Clara to stop and started explaining things to the crowd.

"My husband isn't a bad man. We're just having a little rough patch, and we'll fix it."

She walked toward me with Maya, reaching out to grab my arm. "Right, honey?"

In front of the cameras, she was the picture of a loving, forgiving wife.

In reality, she was a venomous snake.

I shoved her hand away with a look of pure loathing. "Get away from me. You make me sick."

Evelyn fell to the ground with Maya, scraping her elbow. She looked at me with wide, tearful eyes.

Maya started screaming and crying as if the world was ending.

The surrounding students were incensed, screaming for the university to fire me.