THE HEIRESS HE THREW AWAY
My mother had never learned to hide things from anyone but me.
The locked drawer held one thick folder, and a name was typed across its label. Seraphina. Beneath it, in my mother's small, neat hand, was a date almost two years before I met the woman I married. I opened it standing up, and the first page was a private investigator's report, stamped and signed. It said that the missing Sterling heir had been located, a young woman of twenty two raised in an orphanage under the name Sera Lin, working nights at a bakery, unaware of her own family.