"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?"

It hit me like a slap I deserved.

Emma was right.

That woman had found someone to copy the handwriting, and used the fact that she was roughly the same height and weight as my daughter to put herself in front of me on purpose.

The whole thing could have been a trap, planned from the start.

All these years, I'd ignored my own flesh and blood and swallowed a stranger's lies instead.

Pushing Emma away again and again, even doubting she was really mine.

I raised my hand and slapped myself across the face.

"Mom was wrong… Mom was a fool."

Emma rushed forward and caught my hand. Her tears fell onto the back of it.

"Mom, I don't care if you yell at me. I'm only scared you'll stop wanting me."

My eyes burned as I pulled her into my arms.

"I'm sorry, Em. I blamed you for nothing. It was all Mom's fault."

"From now on I'll only trust you. I won't listen to anyone else."

Emma let out a breath against my ear and smiled. "It's okay, Mom. We're family. No scammer's going to break that with a few words."

But when I closed my eyes,

all I could see was the blind girl's face, impossible to shake.

So much sadness written across it, so much hurt.

Her face had been ruined, yet something about her still felt so familiar it ached.

A few days later, the blind girl found me again.

"Mom, what happened? Do you believe I'm your daughter now?"

She wrote the words on paper, her hand shaking with urgency.

I stared at her coldly. "Enough!"

"How long are you going to keep lying to me?"

"My daughter is safe at home. She hasn't left my sight in ten years. She has a happy family now, and she's pregnant."

"You honestly don't think a lie like that sounds ridiculous?"

My fury startled her.

She stood frozen for a long time, then without a second of hesitation, pulled two strands of hair from her own head and held them out to me.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

I already knew.

But she still wrote it down.

"If you don't believe me, I'll go with you for a DNA test."

When the results came back, I stood there holding the report and my hands wouldn't stop shaking.

I couldn't think straight.

Right there in black and white—the blind girl's DNA matched mine. She was my biological daughter.

I'd also had them run a fingerprint comparison while they were at it.

The fingerprints were a perfect match for Emma Sullivan.

My eyes went red on the spot. "What the hell is going on?"

The blind girl wept as her pen tore across the paper.

"Mom, just listen to me. Please, just listen."

"The day after the national college entrance exam, I went to summer camp—and someone grabbed me. They put someone else in my place."

"I never came back. For ten years, the person living beside you as Emma Sullivan has been a fake."

"She could be dangerous. She could be trying to hurt you. You have to be careful!"

I couldn't hold back any longer.

I made sure Emma was somewhere safe, then went straight home.

She was in the living room with her six-month belly, doing prenatal yoga.

I cut straight to it.

"Tell me who you are."

"Who sent you to take my daughter's place? What is your real name?"

She froze mid-pose and looked at me like I'd lost my mind.

"Mom, have you completely lost it?"

"Or have you been watching too many soap operas? Where is this nonsense coming from?"

"Didn't I just explain the whole scam ring to you the other day? Have you seen them again? Did they get to you?"