Chapter 9 - The Stranger's Blood
I stared at the doctor, waiting for the punchline of a terrible, misplaced joke.
My father stumbled backward, hitting the wall as if all the oxygen had been violently sucked from the room.
“That’s impossible,” Chloe said, her voice shaking with disbelief.
“We have the same birthday, we grew up in the same house, we are sisters!”
The doctor offered a sympathetic, deeply uncomfortable nod.
“You may have been raised as sisters, but biologically, you are not related to each other at all,” he stated firmly.
“Furthermore,” the doctor added, turning his gaze toward my father, “Maya’s blood type is AB negative.”
My father’s face turned the color of ash.
“Neither you nor your late wife possessed the genes required to produce an AB negative child,” the doctor said softly.
“Chloe is your biological daughter, sir, but Maya is not.”
The doctor left the folder on the table and quickly exited the room, giving us privacy to process the catastrophic news.
I looked down at my hands, the scarred tissue suddenly feeling like it belonged to a complete stranger.
For eighteen years, I had believed I was half of a whole.
I had sacrificed my body to save my twin sister, only to find out she wasn't my sister at all.
“Dad?” Chloe whispered, looking at him with wide, terrified eyes.
“What is going on?”
My father slid down the wall, putting his face in his hands as he began to sob quietly.
“Your mother,” he choked out between heavy breaths.
“She had complications during the delivery.”
He looked up at me, his eyes filled with a lifetime of hidden sorrow.
“You weren't born in a hospital, girls, you were born at a private clinic in Mexico.”
He slowly stood up, walking toward the window to look out at the city skyline.
“Chloe was born healthy, but her twin sister didn't survive the night,” he confessed, his voice breaking.
My heart shattered into a million pieces.
“Your mother was completely devastated, she threatened to end her own life if she lost her baby,” my father whispered.
“The doctor running the clinic offered us a solution.”
He finally turned to look at me, his eyes begging for forgiveness.
“He said a teenage girl had abandoned a healthy newborn baby girl in the waiting room just hours earlier.”
I was a replacement.
A stolen, abandoned child used to fill the void of a dead daughter.
“I’m so sorry, Maya,” my father cried.
Before I could even process the betrayal, Chloe stepped forward and aggressively grabbed my uninjured hand.
“She is my sister,” Chloe declared fiercely, staring our father down.
“Blood doesn't matter.”
She leaned down, pressing her forehead against mine.
May you like
“She saved my life twice, and she is my sister forever.”
Suddenly, the door to the hospital room violently burst open, revealing a man standing in the hallway.
