Law America, the Devil's Agent

Chapter 82 Unearthing the Dead Child in Your Heart

All the noise in the private room disappeared at the same time.

Matthew Benson's hand slipped off the doorknob, and he stood motionless as if struck from the inside by something.

The woman with the gold-rimmed glasses:

Erin Harper.

Her back, which had been ramrod straight, suddenly slumped. She covered her mouth with her hand and let out a suppressed, almost dry heave.

The bald man in the back row:

Trevor Novak took off his hood, revealing a face soaked with tears. His lips trembled violently, and he tried to say something but couldn't utter a word.

Some people slumped helplessly in their seats, hugging their shoulders and curling up into a ball.

He felt helpless and terrified.

Just like back in the day when I would hear footsteps in the hallway of my dorm room.

"So I hope everyone can sit down quietly and read it all."

This might be of some help to everyone.

Okay?

No one answered.

But one by one, everyone returned to their seats.

Everyone was confused and helpless.

Matthew finally walked back to his seat, head down, hands clasped together on his knees, knuckles white from the force.

Morris leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then opened them again, looking at the curtain on the stage that had not yet been drawn.

He didn't know what he would see next, but for the first time in many years, he felt that maybe someone knew where he was, maybe someone really cared.

The curtain was drawn back again.

The lights in the second half were dimmer and colder than in the first half, and Oliver was dragged into a world he could not resist.

Nancy.

Oliver's companion, the girl who grew up in a den of thieves, repeatedly questions the night sky with her hoarse and mournful voice—

Is this kind of life worth it?

When she sang, "In my dreams, I see a road with no end, a road that leads to a place where someone will accept me," everyone in the box held their breath.

Morris had cried all his tears, leaving only a dry, burning sensation in his eyes.

He gripped the armrests of the seat tightly, his knuckles turning white, his back stiff.

When Nancy was beaten to death while protecting Oliver, her body slowly fell from a high point on the stage, finally being swallowed by a white light—

A long-suppressed growl came from the back of the private room, like a caged beast that had been locked up for too long finally making its first sound in the iron cage.

Oliver was recaptured and taken back to the thieves' den. Sykes held a gun to his head and dragged him into the fog of London Bridge. Everyone thought he was finished; this child was destined to struggle to his death in the mire from birth.

Then, things took a turn for the better.

Led by clues left by Nancy before her death, Mr. Brownlow arrived with the police at the last moment. Gunshots rang out over the Thames, and Sykes fell from the bridge and disappeared into the dark river.

The stage lights suddenly blazed on, and Oliver got up from the floor, stood in the sunlight, and was embraced tightly by Mr. Brownlow.

The curtain slowly fell in the bright lights, and Oliver finally got the home he had never had before.

The lights in the private room came back on, but no one applauded, and no one stood up.

They were still in that play, still on the road where Oliver crawled from the mud to the sunlight, still in the white light where Nancy shielded that child who had never been treated kindly from a fatal blow.

Just then, a voice came from the front of the private room.

He did not deliver a formal speech on a podium or provide a narrated monologue.

It's as if it's slowly telling a story that's both familiar and unfamiliar to them, a story that's been slowly told to this group of people who are struggling because one nightmare leads to another.

Link leaned against the railing at the front of the box, the lights in the theater lobby behind him already on, and the noise from the audience could be faintly heard.

He looked at the seven or eight pairs of eyes in front of him, some red and swollen, some downcast, and some still in a daze, and began to explain the play that had just ended in a calm, almost cold tone.

"Oliver had already run away three times when Sykes had a gun pointed at him."

Every time, I was caught, beaten, intimidated, and threatened that it would be worse next time.

But he still ran away a fourth time. Why?

Because he knew that if he gave up the fourth time, he would never have a fifth.

Nancy grew up in a den of thieves and was never treated kindly by anyone, but she still chose to take that bullet for Oliver.

She did this not because anyone had promised her anything, nor because anyone would come to save her, but because she couldn't bear to be the one who did nothing.

It took Oliver several years to go from being pushed into a pile of coffins as a living corpse to having his hands warmed by the fireplace in a gentleman's house.

This is not a process of waiting for justice—justice has never come looking for him.

This is his process of constantly running away, getting caught, and climbing out of the mire.

The ending of this play wasn't achieved through waiting, but through tearing each other apart.

He paused for a moment, straightened up from the railing, and slowly scanned the private room with his gaze.

"Nancy got beaten, Oliver got beaten, and all the kids who were never recorded got beaten."

But they all rebelled. Not as heroes, not as victors—but in the smallest, most desperate, and most unknown way.

They didn't win, but they didn't disappear either.

His tone began to rise slightly, sounding less like he was giving a speech and more like he was slamming stacks of long-forgotten evidence onto the table, page by page.

"Every ticket in this box was sent by me. You are not lucky members randomly selected; you are the kind of people personally selected by the internal investigation office of the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Philadelphia."

Each and every one of you, during your childhood and adolescence, suffered the same systemic abuse within the walls of Sacred Heart Elementary School and Sacred Heart Church—

From clergy, from school administration, from those who were supposed to protect you.

Your complaints were suppressed, your names were blacked out, and your files were locked away in drawers, gathering dust.

You thought this matter had been buried, but it hasn't.

It's sitting right here in this private room, next to each and every one of you.

I understand you want to leave.

I understand that you want to pull open the door to the private room and shut all this out behind you.

If you get up and leave now, no one will blame you, no one will accuse you of being weak.

You can leave here and go back to the lives you've spent years rebuilding for yourselves, pretending this night never happened.

But I only offered my helping hand this once.

What I brought you was more than just a play, a story, a night of tears and anger —

It's an opportunity, a chance to turn the tide.

He stared directly into every pair of eyes in the private room, his voice lowered, but every word was like a hammered nail striking everyone's eardrums.

"But what if you choose to stay!"

If you choose to close this door, you can take back the anger that has been weighing on your hearts all these years.

"Then tonight we'll exhume the grave together, dig out the truths buried deep in the filing cabinets, and use them as a class-action lawsuit to smash them in their faces."

The dark private room was deathly silent.

No one spoke, but no one stood up either.

Some people had their heads down and were gripping their knees tightly with both hands.

Someone is silently shedding tears.

Someone buried their face in their hands, their shoulders shaking violently.

Someone was repeatedly clenching and unclenching their fist.

Morris kept his head down, his hands clasped tightly on his knees, so tightly that you could hear the sound of his knuckles cracking.

He recalled his childhood, a winter that never seemed to end.

In the dormitory, that person pinned me to the bed, covered my mouth, blocked my breathing, and made everything blurry.

He wanted to escape, he wanted to flee from there, he wanted to escape that hellish place.

That night, he ran to the iron fence at the edge of the playground and tried to climb over, but the fence was too high.

He squatted under the fence for a long time until his hands and feet were so cold that he lost all feeling, and was finally pulled back by the patrolling dormitory supervisor.

The cycle of suffering continues.

He always thought he hadn't climbed over the fence that night because it was too high, but later he realized:

It's because no one was waiting on the other side of the fence to catch him.

But now, there is a person standing on the other side of the fence.

It wasn't the dormitory supervisor, the police, or the psychologists who advised him to "forget the past."

The man stood at the very front of the private room, the corridor lights behind him shining in and casting his silhouette in a shape he had never seen before.

He thought that maybe things would be different this time.

Matthew Benson's fists were clenched so tightly on his knees that his knuckles turned white. Tears fell onto the back of his hands, but he didn't wipe them away; he just gasped for breath.

Erin Harper took off her glasses, her eyes blurred with tears. She wiped them with her sleeve again and again, finally burying her face in her hands and crying silently.

Trevor Novak took off his hood, crumpled it in his hand, and let out a muffled roar, as if he had been suppressed for too long.

Some people stood up and then sat down again. Some were trembling, some were taking deep breaths, some buried their faces in their hands, and some were pinching their wrists tightly with their fingers, as if they needed the pain to confirm that they were not dreaming.

Morris turned around and looked at the heavy door of the private room—it was just a few steps away, quietly open.

Outside the door is a red-carpeted corridor, at the end of which is a spiral staircase leading down to the theater lobby, and outside the lobby are the streets of the old town.

His normal life was just outside the door.

Once you step outside, everything that happened tonight can be treated as an overly dramatic event, and you can wake up tomorrow and continue being a normal person.

He stared for a long time, then turned his head and looked ahead again.

The door slowly closed behind him—

I don't know who closed it; it could have been blown away by the wind, or it could have been pushed by someone who stood up.

In short, it's closed.

It was they who shut it down, and they also shut it down.

Link stood by the door, watching them stand up one after another, and then watching them sit down one after another in painful struggle. He curled his lips into an exaggerated smile.

"Alright, everyone."

Everyone made the right choices.

Now let's open the coffin and dig up the grave, to save that dead child within us once again.