The Dragon Mother Returns: Taking Back Everything That Belongs to My Daughter novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Forty-Eight Days

Clara didn't answer him.

She looked at the number on the back of her hand.

Then she went into the staff room and shut the door.

I walked out of my own kitchen past two guards who didn't stop me, and drove back to the motel with my hands steady on the wheel until the parking lot, where they weren't.

Forty-eight days from the memorial to Clan Day.

Forty-six left.

On April 1, I went to work.

The Dragon Clan tower is forty-four floors of black glass on Park Avenue. My grandmother picked the black.

The lobby guard at the turnstiles had been there twelve years.

He saw me come through the revolving door and stood up so fast his chair went over.

"Mrs. Oberlin."

"Good morning. Is my badge still working?"

"They cancelled it in January, ma'am."

"Then I'll need you to walk me up."

He came around the desk and walked me to the elevator himself, and he didn't call upstairs first.

The board was in session on the forty-third floor.

Twelve of them around the walnut table my grandmother shipped from Shanghai in 1970.

I walked in, and twelve faces did the same thing the bank president's had.

The vice chair was in my seat.

He was sixty-eight, and he'd been in my seat for eleven weeks and had started to like it.

"This is a closed session," he said.

"Then close the door behind me."

I pulled out the chair at the foot of the table and sat down.

"I know what you've been told," I said. "That I'm a woman who had surgery to look like Marguerite Oberlin. The police in Greenwich have my fingerprints. The bank has my code. The petition to undo my death certificate went to court on Monday. While you wait for a judge, ask me anything."

They looked at each other.

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