"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?"
It hit me like a slap I deserved.
Emma was right.
That woman had found someone to copy the handwriting, and used the fact that she was roughly the same height and weight as my daughter to put herself in front of me on purpose.
The whole thing could have been a trap, planned from the start.