"Emma. The essay you wrote for the national college entrance exam. Write it again. Word for word. Exactly."
The color drained from her face. She stared at me like I'd lost my mind.
"Mom, what's gotten into you? Out of nowhere, you want me to rewrite my exam essay?"
"I'm a university professor now. You want me to sit here writing something that childish? People would laugh me out of the room."
Her fingers curled tight, but she didn't pick up the pen.
I let the smile come—cold and thin.
"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.