Chapter 14 - THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO ME

The church record led us to a cemetery.

Elena Marsh had a grave.

Date of death: three months after I was born.

Cause: accidental drowning.

I almost laughed.

Another convenient death.

Naomi reopened the old case.

Within hours, an archived police report surfaced.

A fisherman had found Elena’s coat near the river.

Her body was never recovered.

That sentence changed everything.

No body.

Again.

I stood outside the cemetery with Catherine.

“What if she lived?”

Catherine took my hand.

“Then we find her.”

A retired detective named Paul Avery had worked Elena’s disappearance.

He was eighty-two now.

When we showed him Daria’s picture, he became angry.

“I knew that woman was lying.”

“What did she tell you?” Naomi asked.

“That Elena was unstable. That she abandoned her baby.”

“Did you believe her?”

“No.”

Avery opened an old metal box.

Inside were copies of notes he had kept after the case was closed.

One witness had seen Elena board a bus heading west.

Another reported a young woman matching her description at a clinic in Oregon.

The case was shut down by the district attorney.

That DA later became Daria’s personal attorney.

Naomi’s team tracked the clinic records.

A patient named Elena Marsh had indeed been treated there.

Then she changed her name.

Elena Price.

Alive.

Living in a small town outside Portland.

I stared at the address.

My biological mother was seventy-one years old.

Alive.

Before I could process it, Naomi’s phone rang.

Her expression hardened.

“What?”

She listened.

Then looked at me.

“Daria just boarded a private jet.”

“Destination?”

“Portland.”

My chest went cold.

She knew.

Somehow, she knew exactly where Elena was.

I called the airport authority.

“Ground the plane.”

Too late.

The aircraft had already taken off.

Catherine grabbed my hand.

“Samuel, if Daria reaches her first—”

“I know.”

For thirty-eight years, Daria had buried Elena without a grave.

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Now the woman she stole me from was about to come face-to-face with her again.

And this time, Daria had everything to lose.