“I can see that you have put in tremendous effort, Andreae, and I am touched. But...this is wrong. You, for one, know that I am not a rape victim.”

“I never said you were,” Andreae raised a brow, a twinkle in her eyes. “Where in the write-up did I state that?”

Jessica tapped her way back to the home page and did a quick check. Andreae was right. There were no lies.

“You are famous now, Jess. You have got to monetise your fame. The two of us will split the profits fifty–fifty. I think it is fair, given that I went through all the trouble to contact the vendors, order the custom-made merchandise and set up the website. What do you say?”

Jessica bit her lip. She had to grudgingly admit that the entrepreneur in Andreae surprised her. The air-headedness had been replaced by a sharp business sense. What Andreae proposed made sense. She really shouldn’t feel guilty about making some money after all she had been through.

“Okay. At least we are donating half of the proceeds from the sales of the merchandise to a charity,” Jessica conceded. “I can live with that.”

“No. Only from the white ‘J Bruise’ T-shirts.”

Chapter 9

Sharon had never felt so humiliated.

For an entire hour during the parliamentary session, she was bombarded by two speakers from the opposition party. Rashid Rahman claimed that she was the most insensitive politician he had ever had the dishonour to work with, while Jowene Tay accused her of being insufferably arrogant and elitist.

The ordeal was especially unbearable because she was not able to defend herself. Not because she was incapable of it, but because Elvis had told her not to.

That was the plan. He needed her to be publicly disgraced.

Both of them had been caught off-guard by recent developments in the aftermath of the Little India riot. Sentiments on the ground had shifted unexpectedly and leant towards sympathy for the migrant workers. Their strongest ally, the NGO called Migrant Workers Count Too, had gained ground in its efforts to connect with the public and effectively changed the perception of the community. And it was able to do so because it landed the perfect mascot—the girl who transformed herself from being a victim of the riot to a crusader for the migrant workers.

Jessica Tan Jia Lin was the chess piece that upset the game.

When Sharon visited her in the hospital the day after the riot, Jessica had claimed that she was not sexually assaulted in the ambulance. Sharon had taken her word for it and carelessly dismissed her as an insufficient victim to rally around. That was a miscalculation. As it turned out, the girl was a force to be reckoned with. And now it was too late; Migrant Workers Count Too had laid its claim on her.