"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?"
