Chapter 6 - The Mother Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
Richard dropped the phone.
“No.”
Walter picked it up.
“Detective, repeat that.”
“The woman traveling with Diane has identification under another name,
but facial comparison strongly suggests she may be Emily.”
Richard was already grabbing his coat.
At the airport security office, the woman sat behind glass.
She looked older.
Thinner.
A scar crossed her temple.
But she was Emily.
Richard pressed both hands against the window.
Emily looked up.
Her face collapsed.
“Richard.”
He could barely breathe.
“You’re alive.”
Diane sat in another room demanding counsel.
Emily began crying.
Richard’s anger arrived after the shock.
“You let us bury you.”
“I didn’t know.”
“What does that mean?”
Emily explained that after the crash, she woke in a private clinic with
memory loss and serious injuries. Diane told her Richard and Sophie had
died.
Walter’s blood ran cold.
Emily had spent years believing her family was gone.
“Why would you trust Diane?”
“I remembered her from before the crash. She said she was helping me.”
Diane had arranged false identification and moved Emily between private
care facilities.
As Emily’s memory returned, Diane convinced her Richard had remarried
and wanted nothing to do with her.
“Then why were you leaving with her today?” Richard asked.
Emily wiped her face.
“Because yesterday I found Sophie online.”
The room went silent.
“A school photograph,” Emily whispered. “I knew her face.”
She confronted Diane.
Diane panicked and told her they had to leave the country before Walter
“took Sophie away forever.”
Emily pretended to agree.
At the airport, she intentionally triggered additional screening.
“I needed someone to stop us.”
Richard bent forward, sobbing.
Walter turned away to give him dignity.
The reunion with Sophie required care.
Nora prepared everyone.
Sophie entered a quiet room holding Caleb’s hand.
Emily sat on the couch.
For several seconds, neither moved.
Sophie knew her mother from photographs.
“Mommy?”
Emily covered her mouth.
“Yes.”
Sophie looked at Richard.
He nodded through tears.
Then Sophie walked forward.
Not ran.
Walked.
She touched Emily’s cheek.
“You got older.”
Emily laughed and cried at the same time.
“So did you.”
“I thought you were in heaven.”
“I thought you were too.”
That sentence broke every adult in the room.
Sophie climbed into her mother’s lap.
Walter stepped into the hallway.
Mendoza followed.
“We questioned Diane.”
“And?”
“She denies causing the crash.”
“Of course.”
“She claims Vanessa did.”
Walter stared.
“Vanessa was barely part of the family then.”
“According to Diane, Vanessa knew Richard socially before Emily died.”
Walter remembered Vanessa claiming they met afterward.
Another lie.
Mendoza continued.
“Diane says Vanessa wanted Richard long before the accident.”
Walter felt sick.
Vanessa’s cruelty toward Sophie might not have begun with jealousy after
marriage.
It might have begun before Emily disappeared.
That evening, Walter confronted Vanessa at the police station.
She laughed when he told her Emily was alive.
“You think that fixes anything?”
“No.”
“Richard will run back to her.”
“This isn’t about Richard choosing a wife.”
“It always was.”
Walter studied her.
“You hated Emily.”
“She had everything.”
“And Sophie?”
Vanessa’s expression changed.
“Sophie looked at me every day with Emily’s eyes.”
Walter finally understood something uglier than money.
Sophie was a living reminder of the woman Vanessa could never erase.
Vanessa leaned toward the glass.
“You want a villain, Walter? Ask Emily why she was meeting Diane the
night of the crash.”
Walter paused.
“What?”
Vanessa smiled.
“Emily wasn’t running from Diane.”
She was meeting her voluntarily.
“Why?”
Vanessa sat back.
“Ask your perfect daughter-in-law.”
Walter returned home.
Emily was asleep beside Sophie.
Richard sat nearby.
Walter did not wake them.
Then he noticed Emily’s purse open on the chair.
A folded document protruded from it.
He should not have looked.
But he saw his own name.
He pulled it free.
It was an old agreement.
Signed by Emily.
Signed by Diane.
May you like
And witnessed by Vanessa.
The date was two days before the crash.
