Chapter 13 - THE WOMAN WITH MY FACE
The notary sent a photograph from the security camera outside his retirement complex.
The woman wore her hair shorter than mine and walked with a limp, but her resemblance to me was unmistakable.
She could have been my sister.
As far as I knew, I had no sister.
My father died when I was nineteen, leaving behind debts, a toolbox, and a set of stories about a family that was always respectable.
Judith had repeated those stories so often that I stopped questioning them.
Lily studied the photograph.
“Look at her left hand.”
A small star-shaped scar marked the base of the woman's thumb.
I had seen the same scar in a photograph tucked into my father's old ledger.
At the time, I thought it was a young Judith.
We retrieved the ledger from a storage closet and found the photograph exactly where I remembered it.
On the back someone had written: Eleanor, 1976. Keep her safe.
Marisol located a birth record for Eleanor Carter, born eleven months before me in a neighboring county.
The record named my father, but the maternal entry had been sealed by court order.
I felt the floor drop beneath me all over again.
“Was she his daughter?” I asked.
“That's one possibility,” Marisol replied.
“Don't let the resemblance outrun the evidence.”
Sophie was furious that every question seemed to uncover three more.
Emma was quieter.
“She might have had a whole life not knowing us,” she said.
A message came from the woman herself before we could find her.
The email contained no greeting.
I was asked to sign papers in your name. I did it twice. I refused the third time.
Below it was a photograph of a rusted green gate.
Meet me alone if you want to know why Rebecca disappeared.
I showed Marisol.
“No,” she said immediately.
I nodded.
I was done making choices that placed my daughters in danger.
But at dawn, Emma was missing from her bedroom.
On her pillow lay a note.
May you like
I am not going to the gate. I am going to bring someone home.
