A Baby Made of Lies

At 3:00 p.m., Rose Jenkins, the new hire who had barely been here a few days, suddenly tagged me in the company group chat with a few hundred people in it.

[Hi, can you stop hammering your keyboard? The noise is making my stomach hurt! The baby I'm carrying is sleeping. If you shake it into a concussion, I swear I'll make your whole family pay for it!]

I rushed to explain. I was racing to finish a proposal that was due soon, and I was using a silent keyboard. But she wouldn't believe me, no matter what I said.

I kept my patience and explained it over and over. To avoid any more trouble, I even asked if I could move out to the hallway to work.

What I didn't expect was that a week later, she would storm into the break room with a kettle of freshly boiled water and dump it straight over my head.

I collapsed in a pool of scalding water, my skin blistering and tearing open. She kept screaming as if she had lost her mind and smashed my head with her high heels, over and over.

"It's all your fault! I lost the baby! Your keyboard noise shook my son to death!!"

My vision blurred.

By the time everything went black, I still couldn't understand how a silent keyboard could possibly kill someone.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day she first went off on me in the group chat.

This time, faced with the same insults, I didn't back down. I went straight into the chat and fired back.

[Stop pretending you're pregnant. You've got more going on down there than your dad does!]

The moment my message hit the chat, the group that had been buzzing with hundreds of people discussing work went dead silent.

A few seconds later, Rose Jenkins' messages exploded across the screen.

[Stella, what the hell are you talking about? I'm three months pregnant! I've got the ultrasound right here. How dare you make stuff up about me!

[Everyone, come look! Stella can't have kids herself, so she can't stand seeing anyone else pregnant!

[@HR @Philip Look at the kind of person you hired. I'm calling the police! This is defamation! This is harassment!]

She started making a scene, and people jumped in to back her up. Every finger pointed straight at me.

Paisley Gill from the design department wrote: [Stella, that's way too far. How can you say something like that to a pregnant woman? That's seriously messed up.]

Someone else tried to calm Rose down.

[Rose, take it easy. Don't get upset for the baby's sake. Stella was just joking.]

But Rose wasn't letting it go.

[Joking? Who jokes like that? We're not even that close. She's just jealous I married well, and I'm carrying my husband's baby!

[My pregnancy's already unstable. The doctor told me over and over that I need to be careful. And this woman's out here, pounding her keyboard like a construction drill! If anything happens to my baby, she's the first one I'm coming after!]

People from other departments started chiming in, too.

[Exactly. She already said she's not feeling well. Can't you keep it down a little?]

[It's already afternoon. Can't your proposal wait until tomorrow? Why are you picking on a pregnant woman?]

Reading all of that, I actually laughed.

In my last life, this was exactly how they cornered me, step by step, until there was nowhere left to go.

I explained again and again that I was using a silent keyboard. I even carried my laptop out into the hallway just so I wouldn't bother her.

And what did I get in return?

A kettle of boiling water poured over me from head to toe.

By the time I died, my skin had been burned raw, my skull cracked under the heel of her shoe. The last thing I saw in this world was Rose's twisted, hysterical face.

I closed my eyes. I could still feel the searing heat of that water, as if it had burned itself into my soul. Anger and hatred surged in my chest, crashing into each other.

Rose kept tagging me in the chat, as if she had gone completely off the rails.

[What, cat got your tongue? Why aren't you saying anything now? Feeling guilty?

[Did you do it on purpose? You just don't want me to have a good life, right? I finally got pregnant, and you had to ruin it, didn't you?]

[If anything happens to my baby, can you afford to pay for it? Are you going to pay with your life?]

I stared at her text, and whatever restraint I had left finally snapped. I hit record and sent a voice message into the group, my tone cold and steady.

"Pay with my life? Pay you back for what, the crap you're carrying?"