Heartstrings on Fire novel Chapter 506

Agnes has always been a clock-in, clock-out type of gal.

Lately, she's been up to her eyeballs in work stress.

Her company's just gone and set up a new Journalism Society in Willowbrook Town, called "NEWS", and they've got their sights set on her as president.

Agnes has been batting away this idea for months.

But today, she got hauled into the boss's office yet again.

Agnes didn't want to go back to Willowbrook Town right now. First off, her son Nocturne was sick and needed regular treatments.

Secondly, she just didn't feel it's the right time.

She knew that someday she would have to go back.

There were some loose ends and responsibilities that she needed to tie up.

Over the years, Agnes had been working at the biggest news corporation in Manhattan, partly for personal reasons.

For the past four years, she'd been digging into her mom's old graft and charity fraud case.

Looking back, there were a lot of things that still didn't add up.

The reason Agnes kicked off her investigation again was because she bumped into Alicia while working at The Journalism Society.

Alicia was a small-time actress in the entertainment industry twenty years ago, never really made a name for herself, and ended up marrying a Manhattan tycoon and settling down here.

While shooting "Nebula Dreams", Agnes overheard the director, Hamish, mention Alicia.

At that time, Agnes didn't think much of it.

But Agnes remembered that Alicia was a graduate of StoryMasters Academy, same class as her mom Julia.

During an interview, Agnes got to chat with Alicia, who's now a bigwig behind the scenes.

Agnes asked her about the old times.

Alicia, Julia, and Alyssa Whitfield used to be roommates.

They had a very good relationship. Even though Alicia ended up in Manhattan, it didn't put a damper on their friendship.

And then there was the graft case.

Agnes was determined to get to the bottom of it.

Her one and only wish now was to bring the truth to light and clear Julia's name.

Agnes had already dug up some leads.

Apparently, Julia had bribed government officials with over five million.

This was later exposed, leading to the dismissal and imprisonment of those officials.

Because this incident involved all kinds of major corruption cases. Both men ended up getting sentenced to over a decade in prison.

One of them offed himself before he could be locked up.

The other one had already served over a decade in the Capital's high-security Lockdown Penitentiary.

But, according to what Nate learned by hacking into the system, the guy had been so well behaved over the years that he had his sentence reduced by three years and was recently released from prison.