---- Chapter 13 Noah didn' t just offer moral support; he was a quiet force of action. While | packed my few belongings for Portland, he was at his computer, his brow furrowed in concentration. He was a doctor, but his college minor had been computer science. He hadn' t lost the skills. He worked late into the night, fueled by coffee and a fierce sense of justice. He was tracing the source of the renewed harassment, the local proxies, the layers of anonymity. He found it. A digital breadcrumb trail leading back to a specific IP address, one that, with a bit more digging, he linked to a luxury hotel in New York City where Isabella Vance was known to frequent. He didn' t stop there. He found a vulnerability in the hotel' s guest Wi-Fi, a backdoor. He slipped past their firewalls, a ghost in their machine. He accessed Isabella' s cloud storage, her email accounts. ---- He saw her then, not the glamorous socialite, but the petty, vindictive woman, gloating in private messages about my torment. He found emails to private investigators, instructions for the smear campaign, even a deleted draft of the blog post, full of her vitriol. Evidence. Hard, undeniable evidence. He sent her an anonymous, encrypted message. A single line: "| know what you did. And | have proof." Then he compiled everything - screenshots, emails, IP logs - into a secure file. Isabella, back in her New York penthouse, received the message. She probably laughed it off at first. Another crank. Then, a second message arrived. A short video clip. Her, at a charity auction, sneering at a less fortunate guest. Audio of her making a cruel joke about someone' s appearance. Something no one else should have had. And a link to a countdown timer. 24 hours. "A public apology to Mia Hayes, posted on all your social ---- media, and all defamatory content about her removed. Or this, and much, much more, goes to Ethan Cole. And the press. Tick-tock, Isabella." Panic must have set in. She would have scrambled, called her lawyers, her PR people. But the evidence was irrefutable. The threat, specific and terrifying. Exposure to Ethan, to her precious social circle, to the wider world - it would be ruinous. The next morning, | woke up in my small room, the boxes c 2& packed. My phone, the new one Noah had given me, buzzed. A message from him. "Check Isabella Vance' s Instagram." Hesitantly, | did. And there it was. A stilted, formal apology. "| wish to publicly apologize to Ms. Amelia Hayes for any distress caused by recent online content. This content was inaccurate and has been removed. | regret my actions." The gossip blog posts were gone. The pictures, vanished. | stared at the screen, disbelieving. ---- Noah knocked and came in, a tired but triumphant smile on his face. "She also booked a one-way ticket to a very remote spa in Switzerland. Indefinitely," he said, handing me a cup of coffee. "You did this?" | whispered, overwhelmed. "How?" He just shrugged. "Let' s just say she was persuaded that a long vacation was in her best interest." Tears welled in my eyes. Tears of gratitude, of relief so profound it left me weak. "Noah, |... | don' t know what to say. Thank you isn' t enough." He put his arm around me. "You're worth it, Mia," he said softly. "You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be free." He looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, but his gaze was steady, full of warmth. He had fought for me, a silent, digital knight. The weight that had been crushing me for years began to lift. | cried then, not tears of pain or shame, but tears of pure, unadulterated relief Like a dam bursting. ---- He held me, letting me soak his shirt, until | was cried out. "The sun' s coming up, Mia," he said, gesturing to the window where the first pale light of dawn was breaking. "A new day." A new day. And for the first time in a long time, it felt full of promise.