4: 4
4
For a while after that, I threw myself into work, partly to earn my place on the project team, and partly to keep myself too busy to think about the Gilberts at all.
My work got noticed. People on the team praised it.
By now, I figured the Gilberts had probably heard I'd disappeared.
And they had.
The day they got home, they'd called me, and when they found my phone was switched off, Harry and Belinda actually came looking for me in person.
But when they learned I'd already given up my lease and gone, it stopped them short.
At first they were a little rattled, until Abigail said maybe I'd done it on purpose, just to make them worry about me.
The moment they heard that, Harry and Belinda decided not to look for me at all.
They'd wait for me to come crawling to them.
What they didn't understand was that I'd long since set them aside.
I was too busy.
Pushing the project forward took endless calculations and experiments, and I ran flat out every single day.
There was more and more for me to do on the team, and after just one month, my boss told me I'd been promoted.
They recognized what I could do, and it drove home a simple truth: if you want people to respect you, you need your own strength to stand on.
What I didn't know was that after a month of not finding me, Harry and Belinda had already panicked.
They went to the police department and reported me missing.
"Mr. Gilbert, Mrs. Gilbert, first of all, there is no Melinda Dickerson anywhere in our records."
"And second, you say your daughter is missing, but we've checked. Your daughter is named Abigail Gilbert, and she's right here beside you."
The officers looked at Harry and Belinda as they spoke.
Their faces changed.
Only they knew I was their real daughter.
But for Abigail's sake, they refused to admit it, and they'd never let me transfer my residency to them.
By the same token, to the outside world they only ever acknowledged one daughter: Abigail.
So now, when they told the police I was missing, of course the police wouldn't take it seriously.
On top of that, my file had long since been sealed under a classified identity. There was nothing for them to find.
Harry and Belinda went to the school next.
But the school told them the same thing. There were no enrollment records for me at all.
It was as if I'd never set foot in the school.
Losing all control, Harry and Belinda came apart on the spot.
They made a scene at the school, demanding to know how a girl who was obviously their student could simply have no enrollment records out of nowhere.
They demanded the school find me and give them their daughter back.
That day, I was on the project team.
It was the mentor who came to find me.
"Melinda, your biological parents are looking for you."
The mentor looked at me, and there was something complicated in her voice.
I paused for a second, then looked back at her and said quietly, "Teacher, I'm an orphan."
"Melinda, your parents already told me. They claimed you as their daughter years ago."
The mentor looked at me as she said it.
Left with no choice, I laid out everything I'd been put through in their house over the years.
"Teacher, the only one they ever saw was Abigail."
"To them, Abigail was their daughter."
"And me? I was nothing more than someone they could take or leave."
"Since they won't admit it, then I'm not their daughter anymore."
