All Chapters of The Life She Stole: Chapter 11 - Chapter 14

"I wasn't disgraced. I got my identity back! I'm Dylan Morgan. I had the top score in the state in 1996!"After shouting it out, he crouched on the floor, wrapped his arms around his knees, and sobbed like a child.I stood beside him and cried with him. Wind swept across the balcony, making the clothes hanging out to dry sway back and forth. It looked so much like the way we'd spent all those years, my father and I, drifting through one hardship after another.At last, it was over.…Three days later, the evening news aired a joint statement from the Department of Education and federal investigators. The report ran for a full three minutes.The anchor's voice rang clearly through televisions across the country."Recently, following public reports concerning the 1996 case in which Dylan Morgan was impersonated and denied his rightful place at a university, the Department of Education and federal investigators formed a special investigative task force. The investigation has now co

My dad took the ID card and stared at it dozens of times. The name Dylan Morgan was printed neatly across it, and in the photo, he was grinning so broadly that his face was creased with wrinkles, his eyes bright as stars.That night, he even clutched the ID card in his hand while he slept, afraid he might lose it. He woke several times in the middle of the night, pulled it out to look at it, and only then could he settle back to sleep.The next morning at breakfast, he suddenly said to me, "Danny, I want to go back home and visit your grandparents' graves. I want to tell them the good news. And I want to visit Ms. Winter's grave, too, and thank her for remembering me all these years."Rosamund had passed away the month before. Before she died, she'd specifically asked her son to give my dad his old schoolwork, award certificates, and the teaching notes she'd kept for years. She'd said that her student had finally been admitted to Ashford University, and she could rest easy now.