Reborn to Love Mr. Right – Episode 20
The new photograph unsettled Arianna more than Derek’s confession. Ivy stood half concealed behind a mirrored column, older than the girl at school yet unmistakable in profile. Her phone was raised toward Hayden and Arianna, placing her in the exact position from which the impossible picture had been taken. The image turned a familiar enemy into a witness whose role Arianna had never understood.
Jeff received treatment in an ambulance while police searched the drainage paths. He admitted that Victor had paid him for vehicle records and access codes, but continued insisting he never knew anyone would be hurt. Donald told him ignorance purchased with secret money was still a choice.
Victor refused to explain the photographs. He requested an attorney and smiled whenever detectives mentioned events from the future. The confidence suggested he knew enough to frighten them, although there was no proof he had experienced another life.
Hayden brought Arianna back to the mansion before sunrise. She watched him clean a cut on his palm from the van’s broken window. In the first life, his hands had been stained with her blood; this time, he had used them to pull someone else from a crash.
“You should not have had to save Jeff,” she said. Hayden fastened the bandage and reminded her that she had run toward the van first. He had followed her choice, not replaced it.
The distinction mattered. Arianna had once confused control with devotion because Derek made every demand sound protective. Hayden disagreed with her, worried about her, and still respected that her life belonged to her. Trust began to feel less like surrender and more like standing beside someone without disappearing.
At breakfast, Donald received confirmation that Victor’s ledger was genuine. The records connected him to embezzlement, identity fraud, and the covert vehicle operation. They did not prove a future murder, but they were enough to keep him in custody while investigators reconstructed the network. For the first time, the law possessed evidence that did not depend on anyone believing in rebirth.
Derek remained missing. His message to Ivy had bounced through several foreign servers, and the scheduled photograph contained no usable location data. Hayden believed he would seek money and transportation before attempting another attack. Every hour of silence gave him room to turn memory into another weapon.
Arianna suggested using Ivy. If the photograph was genuine, she had been present at the future ballroom and might know why Derek believed she ultimately betrayed him. If it was bait, Derek still expected them to confront her.
They met Ivy in the principal’s office after her mother arrived to challenge the suspension. Ivy entered prepared for another argument, but her defiance vanished when Arianna placed the future image on the desk. She stared at her older face for so long that no denial could sound convincing.
“Where did you get that?” she whispered. Arianna answered that Derek had scheduled it before the exchange on North Road. Ivy looked toward the window as if expecting him to appear outside.
Hayden asked whether she remembered taking the picture. Ivy denied it, then admitted she had dreamed of the ballroom for years. In those dreams, Arianna lay dying while Derek ordered Ivy to record proof that no one had helped her.
The detail matched the image, but dreams did not explain how a photograph crossed backward through time. Ivy said her nightmares always ended differently: after Hayden carried Arianna away, Victor took the phone and promised to make the evidence disappear.
In the erased future, Ivy had kept a cloud copy as protection. Years later, she traded it to prosecutors after Derek tried to blame her for the Taylor takeover. That betrayal sent Derek to prison and explained the hatred in his message.
“I didn’t know it was real until now,” Ivy said. She looked younger without Derek beside her, though not innocent. She confessed helping him lie about the car, spending Arianna’s money, and sabotaging the gala presentation. Every choice remained hers even if Victor had designed the larger trap.
Arianna offered no immediate forgiveness. She asked for the account credentials from Ivy’s future dreams, hoping something might still exist in the present. Ivy wrote an email address and password on the principal’s notepad.
The account opened. Its creation date was twelve years in the future, yet it contained three images uploaded the previous night. The first two were the photographs already delivered. The third showed Victor meeting an unidentified woman outside Taylor Industries on the day Donald would die.
Donald enlarged the woman’s face and went pale. Her name was Evelyn Scott, Hayden’s aunt and a former Taylor board member. She had disappeared after an internal investigation fifteen years earlier—the same year Victor created North Road Fleet Services.
Hayden rejected the implication that his family had helped murder Donald, but he did not look away from the evidence. He called Scott Global and learned that Evelyn had entered the country that morning using a private airfield. Her aircraft’s passenger record listed a second traveler under a false name.
The principal’s phone rang before they could identify the passenger. A secretary reported that a woman claiming to represent the Scott family had arrived to collect Hayden. Through the office window, Arianna saw Evelyn waiting in the hall—and Derek standing beside her in a tailored suit, smiling as though North Road had ended exactly as he planned.
