Chapter Fourteen: The Delivery
The package arrived on a Tuesday, just like the email from Denise Webb had done all those months ago.
Lina almost missed it. She was rushing out the door, late for a client meeting, her arms full of fabric samples and catering menus. The courier was a young man in a blue uniform, holding a plain cardboard box about the size of a shoebox.
"Mrs. Blackwood?" he asked.
"Yes?"
"Sign here, please."
Lina signed. She took the box. She set it on the entry table and forgot about it.
She did not remember it again until that night, when the twins were asleep and the penthouse was quiet and she was finally sitting down with a cup of tea.
The box was still there.
Lina stared at it.
There was no return address. No identifying marks. Just her name, written in black marker, in handwriting she did not recognize.
She should have been suspicious. After everything she had been through—the coma, the trial, the years of betrayal—she should have called Ethan, or Margaret, or the police. She should have treated the box like a potential threat.
But she was tired. And curious. And some small, stubborn part of her refused to live in fear.
Lina opened the box.
Inside, nestled in a bed of crumpled newspaper, were two things: a thumb drive and a photograph.
The photograph was old. Faded. The corners were soft, as if someone had held it many times. It showed two young women, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, standing in front of a college dormitory. They were laughing, their arms around each other, their faces full of the careless joy of youth.
One of the women was Lina's mother.
The other was a woman Lina did not recognize.
Lina stared at the photograph. Her mother looked so different here—young, carefree, unburdened by the coldness that had defined Lina's childhood. She was wearing a oversized sweater and jeans, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. She looked happy.
Lina had never seen her mother look happy.
She set down the photograph and picked up the thumb drive.
Her computer was in the home office. She carried the drive there, her heart beating faster than it should. She inserted it into the USB port.
A single video file appeared.
Lina double-clicked.
The video was grainy, clearly old, clearly recorded on a device that had not been state-of-the-art even at the time. The audio crackled. The lighting was poor.
But the faces were clear.
Lina's mother, younger, sitting on a couch in what looked like a college apartment. Beside her, the same woman from the photograph. Across from them, a man Lina did not recognize.
And in the corner of the frame, barely visible, a child.
A little girl, maybe three years old, with dark hair and serious eyes, playing with a set of blocks.
Lina leaned closer to the screen.
The little girl was her.
She knew it with the same bone-deep certainty that she knew her own name. The shape of her face. The way she tilted her head when she was concentrating. The small mole on her left hand.
She was watching a video of herself as a child, in a room she did not remember, with people she did not know.
The audio crackled again. Lina turned up the volume.
"...can't keep doing this," the陌生 woman was saying. Her voice was urgent, almost desperate. "Eleanor, you have to tell him. He deserves to know."
Lina's mother shook her head. Her expression was cold—the same coldness Lina remembered from her own childhood, the same mask she had worn for as long as Lina could remember.
"He doesn't need to know," Eleanor said. "He's not her father. He has no claim to her."
"But he's been paying for everything. The apartment. The food. Your tuition. He thinks she's his."
"Let him think that."
"That's wrong, Eleanor. You know it's wrong."
Lina's mother smiled. It was not a nice smile.
"What's wrong," she said, "is letting a good opportunity go to waste."
The video ended.
Lina sat in the darkness of the home office, her hands shaking, her mind racing.
She had just watched her mother admit, on tape, that the man Lina had grown up believing was her father—Richard Chen, the man who had testified against his own wife, the man who was serving three years in a minimum-security facility—might not be her biological father.
And that someone else had been paying for her life, believing she was his daughter.
Lina looked at the photograph again. The陌生 woman. The college dormitory. Her mother's rare, genuine smile.
Who was the woman?
Who was the man in the video?
And who had sent her this?
---
Lina did not sleep that night.
She sat in the home office until dawn, watching the video over and over, studying every frame. She looked for clues—a calendar on the wall, a book on the shelf, anything that might tell her when and where the video had been recorded.
The calendar showed a date: October 12, 1992.
Lina had been born in 1990.
She was two years old in the video.
The book on the shelf had a title she could just barely make out: Introduction to Psychology, Third Edition. A college textbook. The same college textbook Lina had used when she took Psychology 101 in her freshman year.
The video had been recorded on a college campus. In a dorm room or an apartment. When Lina was two years old.
Her mother had been in college. Lina had known that. Eleanor Chen had earned a degree in business administration, though she had never worked a day in her life. But Lina had never thought about what her mother's life had been like before she became Eleanor Chen, wife of Richard Chen, mother of Lina.
She had never thought about the possibility that Richard Chen might not be her father.
Lina picked up her phone.
It was 5:47 in the morning. Too early to call anyone. Too early to do anything except sit in the dark and wait.
She called anyway.
"Margaret," she said when her lawyer's sleepy voice answered. "I need you to find someone for me."
---
Margaret arrived at the penthouse at seven o'clock, looking frazzled and curious and slightly annoyed.
"This better be good," she said, accepting a cup of coffee from Lina. "I had to cancel a deposition."
"It's good," Lina said. "Or terrible. I'm not sure which."
She showed Margaret the photograph. The video. The thumb drive.
Margaret watched the video three times, her expression shifting from curiosity to concern to something darker.
"Do you know who the other woman is?" Margaret asked.
Lina shook her head. "I've never seen her before."
"The man?"
"No."
"And the child is definitely you?"
Lina nodded. "It's me. I don't remember that day, but it's me."
Margaret set down her coffee cup. "Someone sent this to you for a reason. The question is who and why."
"The return address on the box was fake. I already checked."
"Of course it was." Margaret was quiet for a moment. "Lina, I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly."
"Okay."
"Do you want to know the truth? Even if it's ugly? Even if it changes everything you thought you knew about your family?"
Lina thought about the question.
She thought about the coma. About waking up with no memories. About the slow, painful process of rebuilding her life. About all the times she had wished she could just go back to sleep, back to the darkness, back to not knowing.
But she was not that person anymore.
"Yes," Lina said. "I want to know."
Margaret nodded. "Then we start with the woman in the photograph. Do you have any idea who she might be?"
Lina looked at the image again. The陌生 woman's face was familiar somehow, though Lina could not place it. The shape of her eyes. The curve of her smile.
"Wait," Lina said slowly. "I think... I think I've seen her before."
"Where?"
Lina closed her eyes, searching her memory. The face floated there, just out of reach.
"My grandmother's funeral," Lina said. "I was maybe ten years old. There was a woman there. She wasn't family, but she came anyway. She stood in the back and cried. My mother told me to stay away from her."
"Did she have a name?"
Lina shook her head. "I never knew. But I remember something else. After the funeral, my mother and father were arguing. My mother said something like, 'She has no right to be here. She gave up that right when she walked away.'"
Margaret's eyes sharpened. "Walked away from what?"
"I don't know. I was ten. I didn't understand."
"But you understand now."
Lina looked at the photograph again. At the陌生 woman's face. At her mother's rare, genuine smile.
"I think," Lina said slowly, "that woman might be my real mother's sister. Or something like that. Someone who knew the truth about who my father really is."
"Or was," Margaret corrected gently. "If the man in the video is your biological father, he might still be alive. He might have been paying for your life for years, believing you were his daughter."
Lina's stomach turned.
"If that's true," she said, "then my mother stole from him. Lied to him. Used him for money."
"Would that surprise you?"
Lina thought about the contract her parents had signed with Ryan. The money that had changed hands. The way her mother had sold her, literally sold her, to the highest bidder.
"No," Lina said. "It wouldn't surprise me at all."
---
The investigation took three weeks.
Margaret hired a private investigator—a woman named Detective Teresa Flores, retired, with a reputation for finding people who did not want to be found. Teresa was small and quiet and moved through the world like a ghost. She asked few questions and took extensive notes.
Lina gave her everything: the photograph, the video, the thumb drive, the box it had come in. She gave her names and dates and the fragmented memories of a ten-year-old girl at a funeral.
Teresa nodded, asked a few questions, and disappeared.
For three weeks, Lina heard nothing.
She went to work. She came home. She played with the twins. She slept beside Ethan and pretended she was not counting the days.
But Ethan knew.
He always knew.
"You're worried about something," he said one night, as they lay in bed together. "You've been worried for weeks."
Lina had not told him about the video. She had wanted to wait until she had answers, until she knew what she was dealing with. But Ethan's gray eyes were steady and patient, and Lina was tired of keeping secrets.
She told him everything.
Ethan listened without interrupting. When she finished, he pulled her close and held her.
"Whoever sent you that video," he said, "they wanted you to know the truth. They wanted you to start asking questions. That means they're on your side. Or they want you to think they are."
"I know."
"We'll find out who it is. Together."
Lina nodded against his chest.
"And Lina?" Ethan said.
"Hmm?"
"Whoever your father is—biological or otherwise—it doesn't change who you are. You're still you. You're still the woman I love. You're still the twins' mother. Nothing can change that."
Lina closed her eyes.
She wanted to believe him.
But somewhere, in the back of her mind, a small voice whispered: The truth always changes things.
---
On the twenty-second day, Teresa Flores called.
"I found her," she said. "The woman in the photograph. Her name is Katherine Young. She's your mother's younger sister."
Lina's breath caught. "My aunt?"
"Your aunt. She's been living in a small town about three hours from here for the past twenty years. She's not married. No children. She works at a library."
"Why did she disappear?"
Teresa was quiet for a moment. "That's a question you'll have to ask her yourself."
Lina wrote down the address.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she called Ethan.
"I need to go somewhere," she said. "And I need you to come with me."
---
Three Hours Later
The town was small—the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, where the main street had a diner and a hardware store and a post office, where the library was the biggest building in town.
Lina and Ethan parked in front of that library.
They sat in the car for a moment, neither of them speaking.
"Are you ready?" Ethan asked.
Lina looked at the library's front door. Somewhere inside, a woman who might have the answers she was looking for was shelving books or helping patrons or living the quiet life she had chosen.
"No," Lina said. "But I'm going in anyway."
She got out of the car.
Ethan followed.
The library was small and cozy, with overstuffed chairs and reading lamps and the familiar smell of old paper. A few people were scattered around, reading newspapers or working on laptops. Behind the front desk, a woman with gray-streaked hair and kind eyes was stamping books.
Lina walked to the desk.
The woman looked up.
Her eyes went wide.
She knew. Lina could see it in her face—the recognition, the fear, the hope.
"Hello, Aunt Katherine," Lina said.
Katherine Young's hands trembled.
But she smiled.
"I've been waiting for you," she said. "I sent that package three weeks ago. I was starting to think you'd never come."
---
End of Chapter Fourteen