The war in my chest woke up.
He spotted me and smirked. “Of course,” he said. “You again.”
People turned.
Whispers started.
A few phones lifted out of habit, then lowered when they saw the “NO PHONES” sign.
He walked toward the table like he was inspecting a crime scene.
“You proud?” he asked, voice loud enough for everyone. “You get your little project moved so you don’t get the store in trouble?”
“This isn’t my project,” I said. “It’s theirs.”
He laughed. “That’s cute,” he said. “You know what else is cute? Acting like this solves anything.”
I stared at him.
Every instinct in me wanted to hit back.
With words.
With anger.
With the same heat that made the first video.
But I remembered what that live-stream woman taught me.
Anger is easy to steal.
Calm is harder.
So I asked him something instead.
“Why are you here?” I said.
His smile faltered.
“For my own eyes,” he snapped. “I wanted to see who shows up to this… circus.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve seen it. You can go.”
He didn’t move.
His jaw worked like he was chewing a secret.
Then he said, lower, “My daughter saw the video.”
I didn’t expect that.
He kept his eyes on the table, not on me.
“She hasn’t talked to me in months,” he said. “She called to tell me… I sounded like her mother.”
The room got quiet.
Not the frozen kind of quiet.
The listening kind.
He swallowed.
“She’s pregnant,” he said.
A murmur moved through the crowd like wind.
He cleared his throat, voice rougher now. “She told me she’s scared,” he said. “And she told me if I ever said something like that in front of her kid—she’d never let me meet him.”
He finally looked at me, and for the first time, he didn’t look powerful.
He looked… cornered.
Like a man facing consequences he can’t buy his way out of.
“I didn’t come to apologize,” he said quickly, pride snapping back on like armor. “I came to… I don’t know. Prove something.”
“Prove what?” I asked.
His eyes flicked away. “That I’m not a monster,” he muttered.
The words hit the room like a dropped plate.
Because we all knew what it felt like to be judged as one thing.
A villain.
A sucker.
A scammer.
A “boomer.”
A “taker.”
A “coward.”
We all knew what it felt like to be reduced.
I stepped closer, slow.
“Do you think that nurse was a scammer?” I asked.
He hesitated.
That hesitation was the real answer.
Finally he said, “No.”
“Do you think that baby deserved to go hungry to teach his mother a lesson?” I asked.