[ I Fell In Love With My Own Daughter ]

The Cursed Miracle

Luvia’s eyes narrowed, the "overthinker" brain instantly going into overdrive. "I’ll drive you. We can cancel the mountain trip if you’re not—"

"No!" Eliza said, more sharply than she intended. "No, I just... I need to be alone for an hour. Please. I’ll see you at the apartment."

Luvia looked hurt, her hand lingering in the air for a moment before she slowly lowered it. "Of course. If that’s what you need. I’ll have Ron bring the car around for you."

As Eliza walked out of the office, she didn't look back. She couldn't. She felt the weight of the paper in her pocket like a ticking bomb. The mystery had been solved, but the answer was a nightmare that threatened to burn down the entire world they had built together.

Luvia stood in the center of her empty office, the silence ringing in her ears. She felt a sudden, inexplicable chill, a memory she couldn't quite grasp fluttering at the edge of her mind like a moth against a windowpane. She looked at the desk where Eliza usually sat, her heart sinking with a sudden, nameless dread.

The past wasn't staying in the past anymore. It was coming for them both.

Chapter 13: The Echoes of a Ghost

The rain in the city didn’t just fall; it wept. By the time Eliza reached the apartment, her hair was plastered to her forehead, and her blazer was heavy with the damp chill of the evening. She didn’t use her key; she fumbled with it, her hands shaking so violently that the metal clicked uselessly against the lock until the door swung open from the inside.

Teliny stood there, a bright, expectant grin on her face, a glass of wine in one hand. "There she is! So? Give me the details. Did the report say she’s 0.01% related to a mountain goat? Did you see the look on her—"

Teliny’s voice died in her throat. The glass of wine tipped dangerously as she took in the sight of Eliza.

Eliza wasn’t laughing. She wasn't wearing the triumphant "I caught her" smirk of a prankster. Her face was a mask of sheer, unfiltered devastation. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and her chest was heaving with silent, jagged breaths.

"Eliza? Hey, hey... what happened?" Teliny set the glass down on the entry table and grabbed Eliza’s shoulders, pulling her into the warmth of the living room. "Did she find out? Did Luvia get angry?"

Eliza couldn't speak. She simply reached into her pocket and pulled out the crumpled white paper. She handed it to Teliny with a hand that looked like it belonged to a ghost.

Teliny took the paper, her brow furrowed in confusion. As she read the bold, clinical lines at the bottom—Relationship Probability: 99.99%—the color drained from her face until she looked as pale as Eliza.

"This... this isn't possible," Teliny whispered, her eyes darting back and forth across the page as if she could change the numbers by looking at them hard enough. "It’s a mistake. The lab messed up. They mixed up the samples with a different case. Eliza, this says she’s your mother. That’s... that’s impossible. You guys are... you’re together."

"The DNA doesn't lie, Teliny," Eliza choked out, finally collapsing onto the sofa. She buried her face in her hands, her voice muffled by a sob. "The behavior, the name, the way she looks at me... it wasn't just a coincidence. It was a recognition. Something in her blood knew me before her mind did."

Teliny sat beside her, wrapping a protective arm around her. She didn't offer empty platitudes. She knew Eliza’s mind was currently a graveyard of every memory they had made over the last month—the kisses, the nights in the resort, the declarations of love. If the paper was true, their beautiful romance was a tragedy of cosmic proportions.

"We need to know the 'how'," Teliny said firmly, her voice regaining its strength. "Luvia is barely twenty years older than you. Even if she was a teenager... how did you end up in an orphanage? Why doesn't she remember? Come on. We’re going to find out."

The Silent Gate

Within the hour, they were in Teliny’s car, driving toward the outskirts of the city where the St. Jude’s Home for Foundlings had once stood. It was the place Eliza had been left as an infant, the only origin story she had ever known.

But when they arrived, there was no orphanage.

The iron gates were rusted shut, wrapped in thick, skeletal vines. The building itself was a blackened husk, the windows boarded up with rotting wood. A sign out front, bleached white by years of sun and rain, simply read: PROPERTY OF THE STATE – CLOSED 1998.

"It’s gone," Eliza whispered, staring at the ruin. "Everything is gone. The records, the people who were there when I was brought in... there’s no one left to ask."

She felt a hollow coldness settling in her marrow. It felt as though the universe was deliberately erasing the path behind her, leaving her trapped in a present that felt like a lie.

"Not everything," Teliny said, her eyes narrowing as she looked at Eliza. "You have that box, Eliza. The one you brought with you when you moved in. You said the head nun gave it to you when you turned eighteen. You said it was the only thing you had from the 'before' times."

The Box in the Back of the Closet

They raced back to the apartment, the silence in the car heavy with a new kind of desperation. Eliza scrambled into the back of her closet, pulling aside rows of the "tempting" clothes she had bought for the trip—clothes that now felt like a taunt—until she found the small, battered wooden chest.

She sat on the floor, Teliny hovering over her shoulder.

"Start with the necklace," Teliny said, pointing to the delicate silver chain resting on top of a folded, yellowed baby blanket.

Eliza picked it up. It was a unique piece—a silver locket in the shape of a stylized 'S', but the craftsmanship was intricate, almost mechanical.

"Luvia wears one exactly like this," Teliny whispered. "I saw it when she was in the pool at the resort. She keeps it tucked under her shirt most of the time, but the 'S' is identical. It’s not a brand, Eliza. It’s a custom piece."

Eliza’s heart hammered. She set the necklace aside and began digging deeper. Underneath the blanket and a small, rusted rattle, she found a bundle of old newspapers, wrapped in plastic to keep them from disintegrating.

She unwrapped them slowly. The date on the top paper was from twenty-one years ago.

"Look at the headline," Teliny gasped.

The article wasn't on the front page; it was buried in the science and health section of a local gazette. The headline read: MEDICAL MARVEL: THE INFANT OF THE IRON LUNG.

The article detailed a high-profile, highly secretive medical experiment at a private clinic. It spoke of a young woman from a "prominent family" who had suffered a traumatic, premature delivery after an accident. The mother had survived, but the child was so underdeveloped that standard medicine couldn't save her.

“In a move that has sparked both awe and ethical debate,” the article stated, “doctors at the Stone-funded Research Wing have developed a first-of-its-kind 'Electric Incubator'—a synthetic womb designed to mimic the mother’s internal environment. The child, whose identity remains a strictly guarded secret, is the first to be successfully transitioned from a biological to a mechanical gestation.”

Eliza’s breath hitched. She scanned the lines, her eyes burning.

The article mentioned that after the child was "born" from the machine, the family—overcome by the scandal and the trauma of the accident—had supposedly ordered the child to be sent away. The doctor in charge had disappeared shortly after the project was shuttered.

There was a photo in the center of the page. It wasn't of a person. It was of a sleek, metal-and-glass pod, humming with wires and glowing lights.

"The electric incubator," Eliza whispered, her voice trembling. "I wasn't just born, Teliny. I was... I was manufactured to survive because Luvia’s body couldn't hold me. I was a secret she was forced to give up before she even had a chance to hold me."

"And look at the last paragraph," Teliny pointed.

“The young mother, whose age has led the family to seek a total erasure of the event, has reportedly undergone 'trauma-erasure therapy' to ensure the stability of the family’s corporate interests. The Stone estate remains silent on the fate of the infant.”

Eliza dropped the newspaper. The room seemed to tilt.

Luvia didn't remember because they had made her forget. They had taken her child, put it in a machine, and then wiped the memory of the pregnancy from her mind to protect the "Stone" reputation. Luvia’s overthinking, her coldness, her obsession with control—it was all a subconscious reaction to the piece of her soul that had been ripped away when she was barely more than a child herself.

And now, twenty years later, that "piece" had walked back into her office. They had fallen in love. They had shared a bed.

Eliza looked at the silver 'S' necklace in her hand. It wasn't just a piece of jewelry. It was a marker. A way for someone, somewhere, to know who she was.

"She doesn't know," Eliza whispered, the horror of it finally fully sinking in. "She’s waiting for me at the apartment. She’s planning a mountain trip. She’s looking at me and seeing a lover, while the whole time... the whole time..."

Eliza couldn't finish the sentence. She stood up, her legs feeling like lead. She looked at the newspaper, then at the DNA report, and then at the necklace. The "Sweet and Good" revenge she had planned had turned into a poison that was currently flowing through her veins.

"What are you going to do?" Teliny asked, her voice small and full of fear.

Eliza looked toward the door. She could almost hear the sound of Luvia’s car pulling into the driveway. She could almost feel the warmth of the woman who was her boss, her lover, and—God help them—her mother.

"I can't see her," Eliza said, her voice turning cold and sharp. "Not tonight. Not ever again like that."

She grabbed her coat, the mystery now a heavy, suffocating shroud. The "Stone" legacy wasn't an empire of money; it was an empire of secrets and ghosts. And Eliza was the biggest ghost of them all.