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any reason to disbelieve what they told me. After all, who would ever suspect they’d been kidnapped as a newborn? That was some serious low-budget Hollywood crime thriller material right there.
    Armstrong hesitated at my question. “Er…your biological mother passed away several years ago. I’m sorry.”
    “Oh.”
    There was another long silence as I collected my thoughts.
    “So what’s going to happen to my father? Well, not my biological father…you know.”
    “He’ll be remanded in custody until the case goes to trial,” Detective Armstrong replied. “We have numbers for therapists and other resources you might want to use. Anything you need, give us a call and we’ll do our best to help out.”
    “I bet you’ve never seen a case like this, huh?” I asked, picking at my nails and trying my best to conjure up a rueful smile. Nothing came. Right now I doubted I’d ever smile again.
    “No, not in my twenty-two years as a cop,” he replied slowly. “I’ll come back around in the next few days to update you on what’s going on, and I’ll also leave you with Mr. Vierra’s contact details. As I said earlier, he’s very keen to meet you.”
    I nodded, and he patted me on the back before standing up and leaving behind a sheaf of papers with some numbers written down for me to contact if I wanted or needed to. As he left, he turned his head over his shoulder. “I’m very sorry, Miss Keller. You should call a friend or someone else close to come and stay with you. This is going to be a very difficult period for you.”
    I bade him goodbye and then sat on the sofa, my whole body still numb. In just one hour, my life had basically turned into some sort of soap opera drama. It was so ridiculous I suddenly wanted to laugh, but all that came were tears. A seemingly never-ending flood of tears. My whole life had been a lie. Literally.
    And to think on my way home from work I’d honestly thought my day couldn’t get any worse.
    Happy freakin’ birthday to me.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    ARIZONA
    The last few days had been like a blur, and the news that my parents had lied to me for my entire life was still sinking in. I didn’t even know what to call them anymore. I still thought of them as my parents, but they weren’t. I couldn’t even refer to them as my adoptive parents, because that wasn’t the case.
    I’d gotten into contact with Roy Vierra’s personal assistant when the DNA results had confirmed he was my father. When I’d called, she immediately tried to transfer the call directly to him, but I refused. I did want to meet him, but I didn’t want the first time we spoke to be over the phone. It just felt like a copout that way. No, I wanted to meet him in person; my real father, the man who’d never given up looking for me.
    His name still sounded really familiar to me, so I’d done a quick bit of Googling. The first thing that came up when I typed his name into the search bar was his company page, and it turned out he owned Rosacorp, a massive conglomerate that owned hotel and food chains, real estate ventures, tech companies…almost anything you could think of. That must have been where I’d heard of him before.
    He obviously liked his privacy, because there wasn’t much about his personal life on the website. All it said was that he’d been born in Mexico City and moved to the States when he was a teenager. He’d built his company from scratch, and about fifteen years ago it had really taken off. Now he and his business partners were worth billions. Fifteen years ago…so I would have been four at the time. I would have barely been older than a toddler when my father became one of the richest men in the world, and I wondered how I would have turned out as a person if I hadn’t been stolen from that hospital. Would I have been some spoiled, uppity little brat? Would I have felt entitled to everything purely because of who my father was?
    I wasn’t sure, but the one thing I did know was that my