The cruel truth!

Maeve opened her mouth, her lips moving, the guilt in her eyes deepening. A trace of unwillingness to accept it still lingered in her voice.

"No, that's not it. If I'd been more careful back then and noticed something was wrong sooner, that plane might never have crashed."

Solomon knew the whole story, but deliberately put on a puzzled expression and followed up on her words:

"What do you mean? Was there more to it?"

Maeve fell silent for a moment, her hands tightening slightly until her knuckles turned white.

Too much guilt and pain had built up inside her, and she had no one she could confide in. Now, looking at Solomon, she actually felt a faint urge to talk.

Perhaps no one but Solomon could understand her torment anymore.

She drew a deep breath, finally made up her mind, and slowly began revealing the truth.

"We'd already boarded the plane. Madelyn said there were only three hijackers aboard, but there were actually four. Another one was hiding in the cockpit, and he accidentally killed the captain. To kill that hijacker, Homelander used his Laser Eyes and destroyed the plane's controls along with him. If I'd acted decisively then, maybe the controls wouldn't have been destroyed. Even with the captain dead, those passengers might have survived."

As she spoke, her grip on the steering wheel grew tighter and tighter, veins bulging over her knuckles. She actually crushed the hard rim of the wheel flat.

She murmured to herself, her voice full of despair.

"To save one person, I ended up sacrificing 123 people. The most ridiculous part is that the person I wanted to save didn't survive either. If I'd been more decisive then and sacrificed the captain, maybe everything would have been different."

Hearing that, Solomon couldn't help letting out a quiet laugh.

He truly thought Maeve was far too naive. Even now, she still hadn't seen Homelander's true face.

That laugh was like a needle, instantly piercing through Maeve's emotions.

She whipped her head around and glared fiercely at Solomon, her eyes filled with anger and incomprehension, her voice trembling slightly.

"What are you laughing at? What's so funny? Those people are all dead. I abandoned them myself, and you can still laugh!"

Solomon stopped smiling and said lightly:

"Did you never consider that Homelander destroyed those controls on purpose?"

Those words exploded like a thunderclap in Maeve's mind, making her heart abruptly skip a beat and her entire body freeze.

Instinctively, she slammed on the brake. With a piercing screech, the car stopped dead in the middle of the road.

The drivers of several cars close behind had no time to react and all braked hard, their tires screeching against the road, nearly crashing into Maeve's car.

Horns immediately blared behind them in an unending chorus, and some people stuck their heads out to curse.

Maeve noticed none of it. She simply stared fixedly at Solomon, her eyes full of disbelief as she asked in a trembling voice:

"What... what did you mean by that?"

Solomon glanced in the rearview mirror at the long line forming behind them and the furious drivers, his tone still calm.

"Wouldn't Homelander know his Laser Eyes would destroy the controls? Besides, Laser Eyes can be controlled. No one understands Laser Eyes better than Homelander, right?"

Maeve's eyes instantly grew unfocused, and the scene from that day replayed involuntarily in her mind.

After Homelander's Laser Eyes sliced through the hijacker's body, they continued without the slightest pause, cutting the console behind him in half as well and completely destroying the central controls.

Yet he could clearly control his lasers precisely, just as he had when killing another hijacker in the cabin: clean and efficient, without damaging anything else.

So Homelander had destroyed the controls on purpose. He had deliberately made the plane crash.

From the very beginning, he had never intended to let those 123 innocent people live!

She trembled all over, her lips quivering as she murmured to herself, as though asking Solomon, yet also asking herself.

"Why... why would he do that?"

Just then, a flurry of urgent, violent pounding sounded, accompanied by a burly man's furious roar.

"Do you fucking know how to drive? Slamming on the brakes like that-are you trying to die? Open the door! Get the hell out here! I'll fucking kill you!"

Solomon looked up and saw a heavily built man standing beside the driver's door, pounding frantically on the window with both hands. His face was full of fury, his glare so vicious he looked ready to devour someone.

He glanced at the furious man outside the window, then at the dazed, distraught Maeve, who was trembling all over. In a calm voice, he slowly laid out the truth.

"Saving a plane full of people would only earn him the gratitude of 123 people. But by not saving them, Homelander could use this atrocity as a legitimate pretext to enter the military sphere. Then he could save more people and receive more adoration and gratitude, while Vought International could use the incident to send its stock price soaring and gain both fame and fortune. In his eyes, those 123 lives were nothing more than stepping stones."

Maeve was no fool. She had simply been too caught up in it, swept along by guilt and self-deception, to see through that thin veil for the moment.

Now, with that prompt from Solomon, the details she had deliberately overlooked and the truth that had been concealed instantly fell into place in her mind. All her doubts and lingering unwillingness to accept it had answers.

She drew a deep breath, her chest heaving as she forcibly suppressed the shock, anger, and sorrow surging inside her. With her fingertips trembling slightly, she slowly lowered the window.

All the distraction and hostility instantly vanished from her face, replaced by a warm, appropriate smile. Her tone was apologetic yet composed.

"Hi, I'm terribly sorry. Something came up just now, and I had no choice but to brake suddenly. Sorry for holding everyone up."

The burly man's face had still been full of rage, but the instant he recognized Maeve's face behind the window, his anger evaporated.

He instinctively stepped back, his eyes filling with delighted surprise and awkwardness. He even began to stammer.

"N-no, it's fine, it's fine, Ms. Maeve! I-I'm a devoted fan! Could I... could I take a photo with you?"

Maeve's smile remained warm. She nodded gently and said kindly:

"Of course."

The burly man hurriedly pulled out his phone and excitedly leaned toward the window, taking a photo with Maeve with the utmost care.

After taking the photo, he thanked her over and over, then returned to his car beaming with joy, his earlier anger long forgotten.

Maeve watched him walk away and slowly rolled up the window.

Almost the instant the window closed, her smile vanished completely. The temperature around her plummeted, her eyes turned ice-cold, and her lips pressed tight, uncontainable coldness and anger churning in her eyes.

Without a word, she pressed the accelerator. The car slowly started moving and drove on ahead, while the interior fell into deathly silence once more, even more oppressive than before.