Chapter 2

Before the crowd could even react, I was already in the police car, vanishing from everyone's sight.

To my surprise, Maureen came to see me at the detention center early the next morning.

"I watched the replay of that surgery's live stream 15 times last night but didn't find anything out of the ordinary throughout the entire procedure.

"I also interviewed the other doctors and nurses who participated in the surgery, and all the evidence points to you intentionally abandoning the operation, resulting in the patient's death."

Mid-sentence, she suddenly paused, then looked at me with a complex expression.

"Kathleen, do you need me to arrange a psychological evaluation for you?"

I smiled and replied, "I'm not crazy, Ms. Ingram."

She stared fixedly at my face, as if trying to find some answer there.

"Tell me, why did you flee in the middle of surgery?"

Instead of answering her question, I asked her one of my own, "Why do you think a couple who gave birth to a son with congenital heart disease would go and adopt a girl?"

Maureen was stumped by my question.

After a long silence, she suddenly rose to leave.

But before she did, she asked me seriously, "Can I trust you?"

"Ms. Ingram, you only need to trust the truth," I replied with a smirk.

After Maureen left the detention center, she drove straight to Mom and Dad's house.

But by the time she got there, several media outlets were already there. They'd all come to interview Mom and Dad. One media outlet was even running a live stream the entire time.

In the video, Mom and Dad clearly recognized Maureen as the journalist who'd handed me the microphone the day before, and they promptly put on devastated expressions.

Maureen directly asked them the very question I had posed to her before.

"Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox, may I ask why you adopted Kathleen? Does it have anything to do with Douglas having a heart condition?"

Mom and Dad exchanged a glance, and the former immediately replied with a troubled expression, "To be honest, we did adopt Kathleen for selfish reasons.

"Since Douglas had a heart condition, we were terrified of outliving our only child and just as afraid that if we died first, there'd be no one left to care for him. But we've always seen Kathleen as our own daughter and even treated her better than Douglas."

Mom and Dad opened the doors to my room and Douglas', respectively.

"Everyone, take a look. This big room here? That's Kathleen's. She's got the largest bed in the house all to herself, and because she loves dressing up, she even has two closets.

"Meanwhile, Douglas lives in the smallest room. Once you fit a single bed and a closet in there, there's barely room to turn around."

At that moment, Dad walked up to the camera holding a ledger.

"There are people online claiming we pushed Kathleen to study medicine just so she'd treat Douglas and look after him, but we never did that. Kathleen pursued medicine because it was her own passion."

He then held the ledger out for the reporters to see, turning each page one at a time.

"When her first SAT score wasn't high enough, we paid to send her to the best prep school to retake them. Treating Douglas' illness had already drained most of the family's savings, so in order to send her abroad to study, we had to sell the houses we both owned back in our hometowns.

"Her tuition and living expenses abroad cost us nearly 400 thousand dollars. We were so worried that she might feel insecure about being adopted that we even transferred this house, our only remaining home, into her name. What more does she want from us?"

Mom wiped the tears from the corner of her reddened eyes and added, "Even biological parents who've done this much would have a clear conscience! But I never imagined she'd repay us like this. She just stood there and watched Douglas die on the operating table."