After the Fake Heiress Jumped into the Sea

My mother answered the phone. My soul hovered beside her, clearly hearing the calm, detached male voice on the other end.

"Hello, is this Mr. Valerius's residence? This is the Southgate Precinct. We found an unidentified female body in a vacant lot in Westwood. Based on our preliminary investigation and cross-referencing with missing persons reports, we suspect it may be your missing daughter, Elara Valerius."

The color drained from my mother's face in an instant.

Her hand holding the phone trembled slightly. Her gaze subconsciously drifted to Seraphina Valerius, who was playing video games on the carpet with my brother.

Seraphina Valerius heard the name "Elara Valerius" and immediately looked up, a flicker of something unnatural passing through her wide, innocent eyes.

"Mom, who's on the phone?" she asked nonchalantly.

Before my mother could answer, she burst into an exaggerated laugh, as if she had already guessed what it was about.

"It's not a scammer, is it? There are so many of those calls these days, saying so-and-so from your family got into trouble and you need to send them money."

"How could something happen to a person like Elara Valerius? She's probably shacked up in some man's bed, having the time of her life."

It was as if her words had jolted my mother back to her senses. Her initial panic was immediately replaced by disgust.

Her voice turned cold and hard as she spoke into the phone. "Officer, you must be mistaken. My daughter is perfectly fine; she isn't missing. The person you're talking about is just someone we took in from the orphanage. She was rebellious and ran away on her own. She has nothing to do with our family. Don't call us about this kind of thing again. It's bad luck!"

With that, she slammed the phone down.

It was as if I suddenly couldn't feel pain anymore.

Hearing her call me "bad luck," hearing her scoff at the news of my death, I felt a strange sense of calm.

Perhaps I'd heard it so many times I'd just gone numb.

So in their minds, I wasn't even worthy of having my life or death confirmed.

My life or death wasn't even as credible as one of Seraphina Valerius's flippant guesses.

But while they wanted to deceive themselves, reality wouldn't allow it.

Half an hour later, a police car pulled up in front of the Valerius estate.

Two grim-faced police officers came in, showed their badges, and succinctly explained their purpose before demanding that the family come to the station immediately to identify the body.

This time, no one could claim it was a scam.

On the way to the police station, the atmosphere in the car was terrifyingly oppressive.

Seraphina Valerius must have found the silence too awkward, or perhaps she wanted to further solidify her position in the family, because she began to prattle on with her "analysis."

"Dad, Mom, Bro, don't you worry."

"I think this must be another one of Elara Valerius's ploys for sympathy. She saw that I came back and that you all treat me so well, so she felt resentful and deliberately cooked up this whole scheme to win your sympathy."

"Maybe she ran off with some good-for-nothing boyfriend, got dumped, and was too embarrassed to come back. So she decided to stage this whole drama to make us beg her to return."

My brother, Caden Valerius, scoffed. "She had a boyfriend?"

"Of course she did," Seraphina Valerius immediately chimed in, her voice laced with a hint of mystery and contempt.

"Don't you remember, Bro? Didn't I tell you last time that I saw her getting all handsy with some guy from off-campus? The man looked like he was almost forty, driving a beat-up van. You could tell he was bad news just by looking at him. I said a couple of words to her about it, and she actually talked back to me, claiming she was just picking up a package."