Chapter 45 Chapter Nineteen of Grade Me Harder
I told Professor Wolfe everything; what I thought, and why Serena had gone after us. He listened, calmly, and he understood. We both knew it wasn’t just about jealousy anymore. Serena wanted to ruin us.
So, we came up with a plan to expose her.
Step one was clearing his name. But that was easier said than done. The story had been so perfectly crafted, so calculated, that finding proof he never abused that minor felt almost impossible.
And after the scandal recently broke, people were merciless. They dug up his past and dragged Wolfe’s name all over the internet. Twitter, Reddit, blogs—everywhere you looked, someone was calling him a predator.
A lot of people believed he should’ve been thrown back in jail. “Once a creep, always a creep,” they said. To them, the fact that he slept with a college student just confirmed it. It didn’t matter that I was legal. Or that I consented. Or that I was the one who initiated it. None of it mattered.
“He hasn’t changed.”
“He never will.”
I tried not to read the comments, but I couldn’t help it. I kept arguing with people, trying to make them see the truth. Trying to make them understand. How could they speak like that when they didn’t even know him? When they didn't know the truth?
The hate was constant. Cruel. And I was scared—scared that it would hurt him.
But it didn’t.
Wolfe just shrugged. “They’ll have to do better than that to piss me off.”
He said he was used to it. That this wasn’t the first time people tried to tear him down, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.
And just like that, a week passed. Then two. But the scandal didn’t die. Where was the usual cycle? You know, where some new celebrity mess blows up and everyone forgets the last one within a week?
Not this time. It was like someone was making sure it stayed alive. Keeping it fed. Keeping it fresh. And we didn’t need anyone to spell it out for us.
Serena Cross.
My dad kept on calling over and over again but I couldn't answer his calls. I might break if I did.
Professor Wolfe’s POV
I’ve spent most of my life as a professor—to be exact, Bianca's professor. When Bianca lie, she pause. Then blink. Then look away. When she wants something from you, she tilts her chin up just slightly, offering a sliver of a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. People think words are how we communicate. But it’s the spaces between them that reveal the truth.
Serena Cross was too smooth. Always had the right things to say, the right things to wear. She was polite, dependable, and useful. The kind of woman most men would be flattered by. But she made me uneasy. And I could never explain why until the day I saw the scar.
It was just a moment.
Her blouse shifted when she leaned forward to hand me a file. That scar curved faintly beneath her collarbone, resembling a soft crescent but in a ragged form that might have gone unnoticed by anyone else.
But not me.
Because I had seen that exact scar before—years ago. Bianca Alvarez. That was her name then. She used to touch that scar when she lied. She claimed it was from a dog bite. Her voice broke when she accused me under oath. She looked me straight in the eye.
And I was convicted.
For years.
That’s how long I sat in a cell while the world outside labeled me what she said I was. A predator. A monster. My name and face were splashed across every local paper. Parents pulled their kids out of school. Colleagues deleted my number. And she disappeared.
Until now.
Now she had another name. A sharper, more mature look. And the guts to walk into my office every other day like she hadn’t destroyed my life.
I didn’t tell Ava—not at first. I needed to be sure. Needed it to be real. Not some paranoid delusion. The next day, I noticed her handwriting. It was a handwriting that wasn't just similar to Bianca's but the exact same. It was Bianca but I needed evidence.
That night, I went home, poured myself two fingers of whiskey, and dug out a cardboard box from the back of my closet.
The case files had yellowed slightly. I unfolded the old photographs. Bianca was younger, softer around the eyes, but the structure was there. Her gaze. Her mouth. Even the scar never changed much now that she had grown.
I read through her testimony again. Word for word. Her trembling voice, the tears, the gasp when she said “he locked the door behind me.” She’d played the victim so well, That bitch.
Then my fingers touched something.
I found it.
A psychologist’s note. Buried in the back of the file. The psychologist, Dr. Alan Crouse had been assigned by me to assess Bianca after a series of classroom disruptions and outbursts at my old school, six months before I was thrown into jail.
Because I saw Bianca as a friend and bright student, seeing her act the complete opposite of how I knew her made me take matters into my own hands. I took her to a psychologist and he gave me this paper after three weeks of constant visiting.
The first page was routine.
The second note mentioned "problems with managing emotions" and "copying symptoms related to trauma."
But the third...
“Patient exhibits signs of trauma but also manipulative tendencies. Incidents of fabrication in prior educational settings. Noted coping mechanism: self-soothing behavior—touching scar when under emotional stress.”
I closed the file and leaned back in my chair. The same behavior. The same scar. The same woman.
Only now she called herself Serena.
The next morning, I watched her carefully. Not obviously. But enough. She tilted her head when she lied. Blinked twice. Still touched that damn scar whenever she felt cornered. I asked her a question I already knew the answer to—whether she'd filed the department’s report last week.
She said yes. Blinked. Scar. Tilt.
A lie.
She hadn’t filed it.
That girl was back. I kept a close eye on her, making sure she didn't do anything stupid. I must have let my thoughts show too much because she noticed that I saw through her. Then she threatened me, saying she had evidence that could destroy Ava. I knew that this time she wasn't bluffing, so I withdrew myself more to protect Ava, but I guess the damage was still done.
After discovering that Selena refused to let the scandal die, it was high time we did something to make it go away.
We started simple. Ava knew her way around a computer better than I ever could. She traced usernames, digital footprints, and cached data. I pulled old records, reached out to a former student who owed me a favor—Jason, now working in cybersecurity.
It took time. Late nights. Clicking through old yearbooks, social media forums, and messages Serena thought she’d buried.
But she hadn’t buried them deep enough.
We found posts under the name “C.Ross” using the same IP address as her dorm. One of them linked back to a deleted Facebook account—bianca.a.lvz. Same birthday. Same photo, barely visible in the thumbnail. Same scar.
Then came the texts.
Jason found a backup cache from an old student WhatsApp group, Bianca had created with only three members. Messages from Bianca, panicked, the night before my arrest.
“I had to say it. I couldn’t let them take Xander.”
“I love him. I know he has some anger issues that need to be fixed but I promise you that there is progress and we are working towards that as a couple so I had to lie”
It wasn’t specific. She never said my name. But the context was damning.
Then Ava snuck into school and found the camera.
Planted in my office. Disguised as a smoke detector. It recorded everything—hours of footage. Every time Ava and I touched. Spoke. Fucked.
She had been watching.
And then came the best part.
I managed to get CCTV footage of a young Bianca being dragged by her hair out of a supermarket in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, 2018. It was past midnight. The streets outside were still lit with fireworks, but inside that dim, near-empty store, the footage was brutal. Xander yanked her down by the scalp, threw her to the tiled floor, and crushed her hand beneath his boot like she was nothing.
But that wasn’t even the worst part.
Earlier that same night, under the pretense of needing to pee, he led her toward the back of the store. When no one was paying attention, he shoved her into the men’s restroom. What happened inside wasn’t on camera. But we didn’t need footage to know what he did. Because when they came back out a few minutes later, Bianca could barely walk. Her steps were shaky. Her eyes were red and distant, her neck marked with faint reddish bruises. When she bent to grab a cart, her shirt lifted just enough to reveal bluish scars blooming across her ribs.
Xander was careful. Strategic. He never hit her face—he knew better. Marks there were harder to explain. Harder to hide.
We gathered it all, footage, texts, photos, and I compiled it into a binder for someone who once helped ruin me.
Detective Alan Kim.
He didn’t say much at first. Just read. Listened. Watched. His eyes didn’t flicker when he heard Serena’s confession, but his knuckles whitened around the binder’s edge.
“She changed her name?” he asked finally.
“Yes.”
He leaned back, eyes scanning the file like it might change if he looked hard enough. “Do you want to sue her?” he asked. “You could take her to court for defamation. With this much evidence, she wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“She didn’t just lie about me,” I said, staring at the grainy still of Serena—no, Bianca—on the CCTV. “She made me a villain in a story she wrote herself. And the worst part is, people believed it. They looked at me like I was a monster.”
He didn’t speak.
“I don’t want money. I don’t want a courtroom apology crafted by some PR team. I want her to live with the truth she buried. I want the world to see what she did, not just to me, but to everyone she stepped on to keep her lies afloat.”
Now, it was left for Ava to finish the rest.