Chapter 3

I froze for a second, then asked without thinking, "Who are you people?"

The old man spoke respectfully. "My name is Joshua James. I'm the butler of the Henson Group."

"We've searched for you for twenty-three years. Today we've finally found you."

I was still lost. "The Henson Group?"

"I don't know any Henson family. Are you sure you haven't got the wrong person?"

Joshua took out a photo of my birth parents when they were young. Looking at it, I could see that my mother and I had looked exactly alike at that age.

But what mattered most was this: Joshua had already found me days ago.

He had followed me to the hospital for my prenatal checkup, and while I wasn't looking, he'd plucked a few strands of my hair and run a paternity test.

"Miss Henson, this is the DNA report. Your blood match with the chairman is 99.99 percent."

"On the back of your neck, on the left side, isn't there a small, faint-red mole?"

A shock went through me, and my hand went to the back of my neck.

That mole was tiny and hidden. No one but me knew it was there.

My eyes stung, and my voice shook. "My birth parents. Where are they now?"

Joshua's face turned bitter. "The moment madam gave birth to you, someone stole you away."

"She searched for you for years, wore herself down, and passed away ten years ago."

"The chairman never stopped looking for you all these years. His health is poor now, and he lives at a private care facility. When he heard we'd found you, he was so overcome he couldn't sleep all night. He sent me ahead to bring you home."

The tears fell without my permission. So I wasn't a child no one wanted.

Joshua looked at me with aching sympathy. "Miss Henson, all these years, you've suffered."

"We learned you married Bertram Gilbert of the Gilbert Group, and that you donated a kidney to him. We pulled the surgical records from back then, and we found something."

Uneasiness rose in me for no clear reason. I asked, "Found what?"

Joshua's expression darkened. "The kidney you donated back then was never transplanted into Bertram Gilbert at all."

"That private hospital is owned by the Henson Group. We went through every surgical file."

"After your kidney was removed, it was wheeled into another operating room that same day and transplanted into a woman named Rose Fox."

"Bertram Gilbert's kidney function was normal the whole time. He never had kidney failure at all."

My eyes went wide, and for a long moment I couldn't take it in.

My voice trembled. "That's impossible!"

"He showed me the diagnosis back then, and the doctor told me..."

Joshua handed me a stack of documents and said in a low voice, "All of it was fake."

"These are the surgical records from that time, Rose Fox's kidney-failure medical file, and the transfer records between Bertram Gilbert and the hospital director."

"Rose Fox was in the late stage of kidney failure back then and desperately needed a donor. You happened to be a match."

"So Bertram Gilbert made up the lie that he was sick, and tricked you into donating your kidney."

I looked at the surgical record in my hands. The recipient's name was written there plainly: Rose Fox.

So it had been a scam from the very start.

The day Bertram Gilbert knelt in front of me, crying and begging me to save him, what he was really thinking about was how to carve my kidney out for the woman he loved.

Like a fool, I had loved him with everything in me for three years.

My child was gone. My kidney was gone. My adoptive father's factory...

All of it destroyed in their hands.

This debt, I would make them pay back a thousand times over.