Seven Years Of Votes And Always One Short Chapter 09

I never expected that moment of their confrontation with me would be secretly photographed.

In the photos, Grandma and the rest wore wounded, pleading faces, while I turned and walked

away, cold as stone.

The headline was engineered to enrage.

[Fermat Prize Winner Turns Her Back On Her Family After Finding Success, Cold Toward Her Kin

Boosted by the fame of the Fermat Prize, the story blew up online at once.

With bad actors stoking the fire, public opinion tilted heavily against me.

[Who cares how successful she is? Turning her back on her own family says everything about her.

[Good thing the Shermans still have their adopted daughter. At least she’s devoted.]

[People like Jo Linley can stack up all the degrees they like. They’re still ungrateful wretches.]

Yara grew so angry she nearly dropped her phone.

“What awful things these people are saying!”

I smiled quickly to soothe her. “Don’t worry. I can handle this.”

I made a call right away.

“Detective Chase, any progress on the case from back then?”

I’d first reached out to Detective Chase the year my parents found me.

Back then, I thought Pearl looked familiar, she bore a strong resemblance to my adoptive mother.

So I’d tracked down the detective who worked my abduction case and asked him to keep digging.

His voice was grave.

“I was about to call you. We’ve found out the truth.”

Pearl was indeed the birthl daughter of my adoptive parents.

They’d been drowning in debt back then. They took me on purpose, planning to sell me off to some

remote mountain town.

But they accidentally noticed their own daughter shared some likeness with me.

So while Mom and Dad were being torn apart by grief, they left Pearl at the gates of the Sherman

estate deliberately.

One look at that familiar little face, and my parents’ hearts went out to her.

The moment Pearl was inside, they carried me off to a valley town with no road out.

The pity of it was that my adoptive parents were already dead in that crash, forever beyond the law’s

reach.

But aimed at the court of public opinion, the truth was a blade.

I posted every last piece of the evidence online.

The tide turned on a dime.

Old clips of me as the human calculator resurfaced.

Internet users traced the trail, discovering the original poster’s IP address, linked accounts, and

like history all belonged to a burner account run by Pearl.

As for those comments, the “country folk really can work” and “a sparrow dreaming of being a swan”, Pearl had bought an army of paid trolls to seed them.

Pearl lost her head completely and went live to sob her defense.

“I didn’t know Jo was that brilliant. I only wanted her to fit in with us sooner. I was helping her…”

“Toying with the woman and calling it help.”

“All that beauty, and all that scheming underneath.”

“Your parents abducted Jo Linley. Did you know?”

Pearl caught sight of that comment, and her face drained of color.

The viewers sensed the flinch, and a thousand amateur Sherlocks got to work.

The police kept pulling at the thread, and it came out that Pearl wasn’t entirely innocent either.

She’d known since childhood that she was there to take my place. Every year inside the Sherman walls, she found some way to wire money to her parents.

When the news reached the Shermans, none of them could believe it.

Grandma fainted where she stood and was rushed to the hospital.

Dad sat in the living room, his hair gone white overnight.

Mom sobbed until her voice broke.

“We raised the daughter of kidnappers, while shutting our own flesh and blood out for seven whole

years…”

Miles locked himself in his room and smashed everything inside.

Some online users sympathized with the Shermans, saying they were victims of losing their child

too.

But one maid from the Sherman estate leaked her account anonymously.

[I worked at the Sherman estate for ten years. I watched every vote at the annual family banquet. The first year they complained Jo’s hair was yellow. The second, her hands were dirty. The fifth, her

clothes were hick. Every year, she was one vote short. This year all lights turned green, until Pearl

carried the dog in to cast its vote.]

Then the surveillance audio from the Sherman garden surfaced online, posted anonymously.

Miles’s voice came through clearly.

“Grandma says rules are flexible. There will always be one rule to hold her back.”

“This year it’s her hair. Next year her hands. The year after, her manners… we’ll always find a

reason.”

Those words ignited public outrage.

[So those seven years of votes were just a setup to block her on purpose?]

[They toyed with a Fermat Prize winner for seven years?]

[Miles Sherman, do you deserve to be called her brother?]

The century-old prestige of the Sherman family collapsed completely.

The footage of Pearl presenting the dog for the family Bible was turned into a meme and spread like

wildfire.

[Sherman house rules: the dog gets the family Bible. The birth daughter doesn’t.]