CHAPTER 4 — THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE
I replayed Vanessa’s sentence until the words stopped sounding real.
Margaret isn’t her real mother.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
Mr. Whitaker did not answer.
He searched through the files from Box 317 until he found an envelope marked PERSONAL RECORDS.
Inside were two birth certificates.
The first was the certificate I had seen all my life.
Emily Rose Carter.
Mother: Margaret Elise Carter.
Father: Thomas James Carter.
The second certificate listed the same birth date and hospital.
But the name of the mother was different.
Laura Anne Bennett.
I stared at the photograph from the bank.
The young woman with dark hair and the scar above her eyebrow.
Laura.
My biological mother.
“Who was she?” I asked.
Mr. Whitaker’s face was pale.
“I knew Margaret had a younger sister. I believed she died before you were born.”
The photograph proved otherwise.
Laura was standing beside Margaret while visibly pregnant.
Vanessa had been a child in the background.
I turned to the leather journal.
Near the middle, I found an entry dated twenty-four years earlier.
Laura came home tonight. She says Richard has been following her. She is terrified he will take the baby.
Another entry followed.
Laura disappeared after giving birth. Richard says she left voluntarily. I do not believe him.
The final entry on the page was written in darker ink.
I will raise Emily as my own until I learn the truth.
My entire childhood shifted beneath me.
Margaret had not merely been my mother’s sister.
She had taken me in after Laura vanished.
Richard must have known.
And somehow, Vanessa had known too.
We contacted the detective listed on my mother’s documents.
Detective Marcus Hale arrived within an hour.
He listened to the audio recordings and examined the toxicology report.
“This gives us probable cause to question Richard,” he said. “But it does not prove he caused Margaret’s death.”
“What about Laura?”
Hale studied the photograph.
“I’ll reopen the missing-person file.”
“You believe there was a file?”
His expression told me the answer before he spoke.
“There was.”
Laura Bennett had been reported missing three days after my birth.
The investigation had been closed six months later when a handwritten letter appeared, supposedly from Laura, stating that she had left Savannah willingly.
The letter had been authenticated by a private handwriting expert.
The expert’s name was Richard Vale.
My phone rang.
Vanessa.
I answered.
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then she whispered, “Emily, you need to leave Savannah tonight.”
“You knew about Laura.”
“I was seven years old.”
“You knew Richard was drugging Mom.”
Her breathing became uneven.
“I tried to control the amount.”
The coldness in her answer frightened me more than a denial would have.
“Where is Richard?”
“I don’t know.”
“You drove him away from the bank.”
“No,” Vanessa said. “He forced me to follow you. Then he took the car.”
A loud crash came through the phone.
Vanessa gasped.
“Dad?”
Her voice moved farther away.
Then she screamed.
The call ended.
When Detective Hale reached Richard’s house, the front door was open.
Vanessa was gone.
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But in the living room, written across the wall in my mother’s lipstick, were five words:
EMILY WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO LIVE.
