Ten years ago, my daughter scored 717 on the national college entrance exam and became the top scorer in the country.

After that, everything went her way. Professor at a prestigious university by twenty-seven, married to the Ashford heir—her first love. A beautiful life.

She got pregnant, and I went to Saint Mercy Monastery to pray for blessings.

A girl found me outside the gates. Mute, blind, dragging one leg. She shoved a piece of paper into my hands, frantic.

It read:

"Mom, someone took my place. I'm your real daughter, Emma Sullivan. I was the top scorer on the national college entrance exam."

——

I held that piece of paper tight, convinced it was some kind of prank.

By the time I turned around, she was gone.

I couldn't shake it the whole way home.

The moment I walked through the door, my daughter's voice met me, bright and laughing. "Mom! I just bought durian. Come try some."

"I've been craving it ever since I got pregnant. Picked it up fresh from the market."

Durian. The word stopped me cold.

Before the exam, Emma couldn't stand durian.

Even a whiff of it made her gag.

But after the exam, somehow, she could eat it.

I'd never thought much of it at the time.

I'd asked a doctor once, and he said taste changes were perfectly normal.

But now I kept thinking about that note someone had pressed into my hands outside the monastery.

A chill ran straight through me.

Could it be true? Could my daughter really have been switched?

How? How was that even possible?

Ten full years had passed since the exam. Who could have swapped my own child right under my nose and left me none the wiser?

She must have noticed me staring, because she came over, worry creasing her face.

"Mom, you look awful. Did the trip to Saint Mercy Monastery wear you out?"

I looked at her face. The longer I looked, the less I recognized.

Something in her bearing, deep down, was nothing like the child I'd raised for eighteen years.

"I'm fine. Got a bit of wind on the road."

I waved it off, slipping the note into the deepest fold of my pocket.

She pulled me to the sofa and cracked the durian open. The sharp, pungent smell flooded the room instantly.

She held out a piece, eyes eager.

"Mom, here—try some. It's really sweet."

I stared at the pale flesh in her hand, and my stomach turned.

My daughter used to retch at the smell alone.

But this woman was eating it bite by bite, savoring every mouthful, and the weight on my chest grew so heavy I could barely breathe.

I tested her.

"Emma, do you remember what we ate the night before the exam?"

Her hand paused mid-bite.

Then she smiled.

"Of course. Just simple home cooking, right? Something light so it wouldn't mess with my test."

Something went cold behind my eyes.

Wrong.

The night before the exam, my daughter had been too nervous to sleep. I made her a bowl of brown sugar glutinous rice balls.

Her favorite. The one time I let her break the no-sweets rule.

The woman in front of me had no idea.

I kept my face still and pressed on.

"What about when you were little? What bug were you most scared of?"

She answered without thinking.

"Cockroaches. Everyone's scared of cockroaches."

My heart sank all the way to the floor.

My daughter had only ever been afraid of caterpillars. She'd never flinched at a cockroach in her life. She'd stomp them with her bare foot and not think twice.

Every answer was wrong.

Not a single one was right.

On the surface I held it together, but inside I was coming apart, and I couldn't stop staring at the woman sitting across from me.

My eyes went red.

The silence stretched until I couldn't hold it anymore. When I finally spoke, my voice came out scraped raw.

"You're not my daughter, are you?"

The air went dead.

She looked up at me. Something cold flickered at the corner of her eyes, there and gone, and then it was confusion and meekness again.

"Mom, what are you even saying? If I'm not your daughter, then who is?"

I clenched my fists and stared at her without blinking.

"Impossible. You're not my daughter."

"None of it lines up—not a single memory!"

Emma paused. Then she set the durian down and laughed.

"The night before the exam, you made me sweet rice balls in brown sugar syrup. Your own hands. And what I'm scared of is caterpillars—not cockroaches."

"Cockroaches are *your* thing. You shriek every time you see one, and I'm the one who charges over and smashes it with a shoe. Isn't that right, Mom?"

She caught my stunned expression.

Her smile stretched wider.

"I was messing with you. Look at your face."

"All right, all right. You're getting on in years—I won't pull that kind of joke again."

I stood there, numb, watching Emma scoop up the kitten and carry it off to be fed. Something in my chest unclenched—but it didn't settle all the way down.

Had I really… been overthinking this?

That evening, Emma turned to her father with a laugh just pointed enough to cut. "Dad, you'll love this. Mom bumped into some blind girl on the street today and actually decided I must be a fake. Her own daughter—an impostor. Isn't that hilarious?"

My husband Eustace blinked, then turned to me with a sigh.

"Stop letting your mind run wild. She just got pregnant. She needs rest. Don't say things like that and upset her."

"We raised this girl with our own hands. How could we possibly be wrong?"

I nodded. "Maybe I've been reading too many novels lately. I was overthinking it."

And that was the end of it.

But the unease wouldn't leave. It sat in my bones. More than once, I caught myself already on the road to Saint Mercy Monastery before I'd even decided to go.

Hoping to run into that blind girl again, just like the last time.

But I wasn't so lucky.

I sat there from sunrise until the last light bled out of the sky.

She never appeared.

Then one day, while I was out shopping, I saw her again.

She was just as agitated as before, limping toward me, making desperate sounds that weren't quite words.

When she saw the confusion on my face, she pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper and started writing.

I leaned closer—and the breath locked in my throat.

She had written:

Mom, please believe me. I really am your daughter, Emma Sullivan!

If you don't believe me, look.

Below those two lines, she wrote several more.

The blood drained from my face. My vision blurred red at the edges.

"Who are you? These lines are from my daughter's essay on the national college entrance exam. From ten years ago!"

"How could you possibly know what she wrote?"

My hands were shaking as I gripped the paper.

The blind girl nodded frantically, and two streaks of blood slid from her sightless eyes.

My heart seized. Could this girl really be my daughter?

Even the handwriting was identical.

I stumbled home barely able to keep my footing, and before I could even push the door open, my legs gave out.

"Mom?"

Emma opened the door and stared down at me.

"What are you doing sitting on the ground? The floor's freezing. Come inside."

I looked up at her unbothered face, and only one thought remained.

The handwriting. I had to see her handwriting.

I took out a sheet of paper and a pen and held them out to her.

"Emma. The essay you wrote for the national college entrance exam. Write it again. Word for word. Exactly."

The color drained from her face. She stared at me like I'd lost my mind.

"Mom, what's gotten into you? Out of nowhere, you want me to rewrite my exam essay?"

"I'm a university professor now. You want me to sit here writing something that childish? People would laugh me out of the room."

Her fingers curled tight, but she didn't pick up the pen.

I let the smile come—cold and thin.

"You don't dare write it? That's what I thought."

"If you can't reproduce it, then I refuse to believe you're my daughter."

She bit her lip, hesitating for a long time. Neither of us moved. Neither of us spoke.

Emma let out a sigh. "Mom, I'm pregnant. Why are you putting me through this?"

"The exam was ten years ago. How could I possibly still remember it?"

I smiled coldly.

"Anyone else might forget. But you're Emma Sullivan. My daughter was born gifted. Photographic memory."

"Emma, if you're afraid to write it, that tells me everything."

She looked at me again, twice, and sighed.

After a long pause she picked up the pen, lowered her head, and began to write—stroke by careful stroke, achingly slow.

I stood beside her, staring without blinking, barely remembering to breathe.

Fifteen minutes later.

A complete exam essay, finished.

I picked it up.

The room tilted. Cold washed through my entire body.

The handwriting was identical to the original essay from ten years ago.

Down to the last stroke.

Every little habit in the pen strokes, every smudge where a wrong character had been scratched out and corrected. All of it, exactly the same.

A roar filled my skull, and my mind went completely blank.

How was that possible?

My hands trembled as I looked at her.

"How... how can your handwriting be identical to back then?"

She raised her eyes to mine, wide and glassy with the wounded look of a child accused of something she didn't do.

"Mom, I'm not lying to you."

"I am your daughter."

I shouted.

"Then what about the note from that blind girl at Saint Mercy Monastery?! Her handwriting was exactly the same as yours!"

"And the exam essay is confidential. How would some stranger know what you wrote on the national college entrance exam?"

Emma blinked, then shook her head with a quiet laugh.

"Because she's a scammer, Mom. That's all she is."

She pulled up a video and held it out for me to see.

"Mom, I spent years worrying you'd get taken in by those health-supplement hustlers, always trying to wise you up. And you still went and got played by some street-level con girl."

"I looked into her, just briefly, and the truth came right out."

"Anybody tells you anything and you just swallow it whole. A stranger says I'm not your daughter—something that insane—and you're ready to believe her over me."

"Why is it so easy for you to trust a stranger but not me?"

Her tears came in a rush, her face crumpling, lashes dark and wet—the picture of someone breaking down because she'd been wronged by the one person who was never supposed to doubt her.

My hands shook as I took the phone from her, eyes locked on the screen.

The video began to play.

It was the same blind girl I'd met at Saint Mercy Monastery, pressing notes into people's hands every time someone passed.

She hadn't only fooled me. She'd fooled plenty of older women just like me.

And she'd been detained by police multiple times.

"Mom, look. This is the alert the police posted."

"For that same blind girl. They've been looking for her for months."

"She's pulled this exact routine on so many people. I just never imagined you'd fall for it too."

Something clenched hard around my heart, and I couldn't get a single word out.

The image rose in my mind: that blind girl standing in front of me, a line of bloody tears running from her eyes, knocking her forehead to the ground, desperately trying to explain.

Writing it over and over again on that piece of paper:

"Mom, I'm your real daughter, Emma Sullivan! Please believe me!"

Could she really have been nothing but a con artist?

Emma's voice kept going beside me.

"Mom, I'm a university professor. I deal with cases like this all the time."

"That blind girl? This kind of thing is never one person working alone. It's a whole ring behind her."

"Think about it. If what she told you were true—if she really was the daughter you lost ten years ago—blind, mute, crippled—how exactly would she have kept herself alive all this time?"