Chapter 1

Tags: Ghost Perspective, Biased Family, Medical Examiner Mother, Family Regret

While I was being butchered alive by a killer, my medical examiner mother was busy shopping with my adopted sister, Rachel.

After gouging out one of my eyes, the killer used my phone to FaceTime my mother.

The call rang a few times before being flatly declined.

When the killer tried calling again, he had already been blocked.

He looked down at me with a mocking smirk.

When the police were called to the crime scene, my mother stared at my mangled corpse, repeatedly cursing the killer’s sickening cruelty.

She just didn't realize that the girl lying there—dead in the most horrific way imaginable—was her own daughter.

My body was discovered in the backwoods behind the hills.

By the time I was found, I had been dead for a week.

Under the sweltering summer heat, the corpse had already decomposed and begun to reek.

The morning jogger who found me was pale as a ghost. He vomited uncontrollably as his trembling fingers dialed 911.

A sudden, urgent call dragged my mother away from Rachel’s birthday party, sending her rushing straight to this cold, gruesome crime scene.

Though she had seen countless nightmarish scenes throughout her career, her brow instinctively furrowed the moment her eyes fell on my mutilated body, a flicker of pain crossing her face that she couldn't hide.

After a week of intense sun exposure and decomposition, the body had already swollen into a horrific, bloated state. The face had been smashed in with a heavy object—a bloody, pulpy mess of shattered white bone. I was stripped stark naked, parts of my broken bones piercing right through the rotting flesh, exposed to the world like a silent scream of agony.

My mother slipped on her gloves to begin the preliminary examination.

The body was a sticky, liquefied mess. After a long moment, she reached down to my ankle and removed a bracelet dangling a tiny puppy charm.

I watched her, a knot forming in my chest.

My grandmother had given me that bracelet before she passed away.

It was on my birthday.

Rachel and I were born only a day apart.

Yet Mom and Dad could never remember my birthday. Every year, after throwing a lavish, extravagant party for Rachel, Mom would head straight back to the department and stay gone for weeks.

That year, Grandma had painstakingly woven that bracelet for me, even engraving my name onto the charm.

When Rachel saw Grandma give it to me, she pretended to be jealous and called Mom, crying.

That evening, Mom stormed into the house and lashed out at me furiously.

"You're actually jealous of your sister? Just because I threw her a birthday party, you ran to your grandmother to stir up drama and spite Rachel? Why are you so malicious?!"

Mom glared at me, her voice dripping with venom.

"Emma, don't play these petty games with me. So what if you're my flesh and blood? Rachel has lived with us for twenty years. She matters infinitely more than you ever will. You're nothing but an ungrateful stray!"

With that, she yanked the bracelet off my wrist, sneered at it, and snapped it in two before hurling it out into the yard.

The memory was still burned into my mind. That night, I had sobbed in the dark bushes for hours until I finally found it sitting in a muddy puddle.

I thought Mom would definitely remember that bracelet.

Instead, she expressionlessly dropped it into an evidence bag.

I let out a soft sigh. There was no sadness left in me, only a deep sense of resignation.

She never loved me. How could she possibly remember?

When I was little, both of my parents were busy with work and left me to be raised by my grandmother in the countryside. While other kids had their parents by their sides, little me spent every waking moment praying for the day they would come take me home.

When I turned nine and had to start school, Grandma told me that Mom and Dad were finally coming to bring me back.

I was ecstatic beyond words.

Yet on the way to pick me up, Dad ran into an armed robber. He never came back.

Mom wept until she could barely breathe at Dad's funeral.

When I was finally brought home, I discovered there was already another girl living there.

That girl was Rachel.