The Dragon Mother Returns: Taking Back Everything That Belongs to My Daughter novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Real

Paisley's voice rang off the glass.

"Daddy looked," she said into the microphone. "He went through every file in that vault. There's no birth certificate for Clara with her name on it. Not one."

Her phone was still up, live. I could see the little number climbing in the corner. Sixty thousand. Seventy.

"Clara was adopted," Paisley told it. "Or bought. That's why she was never home. Clara isn't even her blood. So who's the fraud now?"

The old aunts turned to each other.

My cousins from Boston looked at me with sudden interest.

Clara had gone white.

Not with doubt. With rage.

I opened my mouth, and the Undertaker beat me to it.

He got up out of his chair, slowly, eighty-one years old, and walked to the end of the table where the microphone cord ran.

He pulled the plug out of the wall.

The speakers went dead.

"I drove Margie to the hospital the night that girl was born," he said, in his ordinary voice, which carried fine. "In the snow. In my own car. She was on a call with Hong Kong until the nurse took the phone off her."

Someone laughed and stopped.

"I held that baby before her grandmother did," he said. "She had a lot of hair and a very bad temper. She still does."

"The birth certificate is in the state of New York's files," the family lawyer said dryly, holding up her phone. "Not in a vault. That's where they keep them. I pulled a copy this morning when I heard what Miss Keel was saying in the lobby."

On the screen behind me, she put it up.

Clara Oberlin. Mother: Marguerite Oberlin.

Paisley looked at it.

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