I Quit, and the Plagiarist Fell Apart Chapter 07

I Quit, and the Plagiarist Fell Apart Chapter 07

“Who would intentionally spell ‘I AM A FRAUD’ with their own chapter titles?!”

The host stared at Ivy in disbelief. “Does this mean the book is plagiarized?”

“No question. That’s the original author’s anti-theft watermark. Ivy copied it without even noticing.”

“She didn’t even change the chapter titles? Does this woman have any original bone in her body?”

The live chat went nuclear. Comments scrolled faster than anyone could read.

Before the interview even ended, Ivy ripped off her earpiece, stood up, and stormed out of the studio.

My mom laughed so hard she slapped the velvet couch, then pulled me into a crushing hug.

“Sweetheart, you played that like a pro! A hundred times sharper than your father!”

Right on cue, my dad called.

He said he’d found a lead—told us to meet him in the Scottish Highlands in three days.

My mom couldn’t wait. She booked the earliest red-eye flight on the spot.

At the airport, Rowan’s call came through.

“Maeve. You did this on purpose. You knew that poem was a landmine, and you put it in there for her to copy.”

I kept my voice light, playing dumb. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re a public figure now—be careful with your accusations. No evidence, and my lawyers will have a field day.”

“Fine. Fine. Just you wait.”

Click.

My dad had already arrived ahead of us. He sent a car to pick us up.

He said he’d dug through every channel and finally tracked down a lead—a former neural engineer living in the Swiss Alps, who’d built “custom devices” for the underground tech black market before going off-grid.

“It’s too late to go up the mountain tonight. We’ll head out at first light.”

I nodded. At the hotel, there were only a few hours before dawn. Lying in bed, I scrolled my feed and caught a new video from a book reviewer I followed: “Did Ivy Actually Write Her Own Scripts?”

The reviewer laid out a mountain of evidence: Ivy’s early video scripts had zero resemblance to her live-streaming speech patterns. Her MCN was known for “mass-producing influencer content.” And the kicker—the reviewer dug up her university records: a diploma-mill in Malta with no accredited literature program.

“I seriously doubt she wrote her own novels either,” the reviewer concluded.

The comments section went ballistic:

“Always knew those ‘creative inspiration’ videos were fake!”

“I went to school with her. Her essays were full of basic grammar mistakes. And now she’s a bestselling novelist? Yeah, right.”

I was so absorbed I didn’t notice the sky outside turning a pale gray at 4 AM.

We hit the mountain at dawn.

The engineer was a grey-haired German, his English laced with a Bavarian drawl. He listened to my dad’s story, said nothing, and asked me to hand over the smart bracelet Rowan had given me last year.

He pulled a handheld scanner out of a black instrument case and swept it over the sensor area on the bracelet’s inner band.

The screen lit up with a dense string of frequency data.

“There’s something here.” He stared at the display, frowning deeper. “Embedded under the sensor coating—a micron-thin neural signal capture chip. Not from any commercial manufacturer. Custom job.”

He set the scanner down and pulled up a waveform diagram.

“When you type, your wrist muscles and nerves emit extremely weak electrical signals. This chip captures those signals, transmits them wirelessly to the cloud, and the receiving device on the other end reconstructs them into—” He looked up at me. “—the exact sentences forming in your head.”

My mom’s voice cracked. “You’re saying… this bracelet can read her mind?”

“Not read minds.” He corrected her. “It reverse-engineers brain activity from your writing process into the sentences you’re thinking. Every word you type—every plot point you revise in your head but don’t commit to paper—all of it goes out through this bracelet.”

My dad’s face went dark. “Can you fix it? Money’s no object.”