Unable to shake her growing fears, she turned toward the discarded diary. Driven by an urgent need for answers, she picked it up and flipped through the pages with trembling hands. The deeper she read, the more the walls of her world began to crumble.
Before I returned to my hometown, I had uncovered my father’s secret, which was he had another family.
My older sister, Isabella, was not just "adopted" from an unknown family but actually, she was my father's child from his second family.
After a private investigator followed him for several days, I discovered that the other woman in his life was his first love. She was ten years older than him. Because of the age gap, my grandparents fiercely opposed their relationship. So, my father could not marry the woman he loved and, in the end, he decided to marry my mother.
However, my father had only married my mother to appease his family. Secretly, he never ended his affair with the woman he truly loved. Together, they had a child and she was Isabella.
Both of us were his daughters, but Isabella was born from the woman he loved, which was why he showered her with affection. To legitimize her presence in our family, he lied to my mother. He convinced her that adopting a child would "bring a son into the family."
However, in fact, the reason why my mom did not get pregnant for a long time was because my dad had deliberately stopped it.
I wrote all of this down in my diary, along with the photo that confirmed everything. My original plan was to reveal this dark truth to my mother during our family’s Day of Death Celebration when the family came together.
However, before I could say anything, Isabella found out about my investigation.
That day, during The Day of the Death Festival, after walking a fair distance, my mother realized that she had forgotten to bring the offerings. So, she sent me back to our old house to retrieve them.
As soon as I arrived at the old house, my phone rang. It was the investigator that I hired. I was too busy discussing everything that he had discovered that I failed to notice that Isabella had entered the house and accidentally heard the direction of our conversation.
She then hid behind the door and eavesdropped. However, she became panicked when she knew I knew the truth. So, she grabbed an iron shovel that was resting by the door. And before I could do anything, Isabella struck me on the head.