“You swore you gave birth to me. I asked you—how many times did I ask you?—if I was adopted. You said no.”
“Because that’s what your father insisted I tell you. Because he said it was better for all of us that way.”
“Because he knew the truth.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“You do know. Stop lying to me.”
Piece by piece, the truth slowly emerged: Beth and her husband had been trying unsuccessfully for years to have children of their own; one day Tim had come home with the news that he’d arranged for the private adoption of a toddler, an adoption that could come through at any time; they were living in Portugal when the adoption was supposedly finalized; her husband had immediately flown to the States to pick up their little girl, a child whose mother had purportedly abandoned her.
Lili was incredulous. “You weren’t even a little suspicious? A mother just happens to abandon her two-year-old daughter at the exact same time another two-year-old mysteriously vanishes from her crib in Mexico? The timing doesn’t seem more than a little convenient? You actually believed it was a coincidence?”
“I didn’t know anything about what happened in Mexico.”
“It was all over the media. All over the world. How could you not know?”
“We were living in Portugal. I didn’t speak Portuguese. I didn’t read the international papers. We didn’t even own a TV. I was pretty isolated. Your father brought home this beautiful little girl and assured me everything was legal. I had no reason to doubt him. He had all the necessary documents…”
“But at some point, you had to become suspicious,” Greg Fisher had said from his seat at the kitchen table, his voice stopping just short of a sneer.
“I guess I knew something wasn’t right,” Beth admitted reluctantly. “But it’s amazing how you can fool yourself when you want to. I wanted to believe that my husband wasn’t lying, so I did. I wanted to believe that he hadn’t…”
“…stolen me from my crib in Mexico?”
“He didn’t do that,” Beth said with unexpected vehemence. “He was never in Mexico.”
“Then he was working with someone who was,” Greg Fisher said matter-of-factly. “Can you tell us who that might have been?”
Caroline’s body tensed as Hunter leaned forward in his chair.
“I have no idea. Tim knew a lot of people…through his business. I’m ashamed to say they weren’t all reputable.”
“So at some point you did suspect I might be Samantha?” Lili interjected.
“Not until much later. We were living in Italy. I saw a newscast. I think it was the five-year anniversary of the kidnapping. They showed pictures of Samantha. It was pretty obvious. I panicked. I confronted your father, begged him to tell me the truth. He told me I was being ridiculous and to stop talking crazy, that talk like that would only arouse unfounded suspicions and we could end up losing you, even though he swore up and down you weren’t Samantha. What choice did I have but to believe him?”
“Of course, since your husband passed away last year, we have only your word for all of this,” the agent said. “Very convenient for you, under the circumstances, being able to put all the blame on a man who’s no longer here to defend himself.”
A muffled sob could be heard on the other end of the line.
“What made you return to the States?” Fisher asked.
“A combination of things. Tim’s business…the boys…”
“You had two sons by then.”
“Yes. Once we had Lili, I had no problem at all getting pregnant. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure the fact that ten years had passed was also a factor in your decision to come back. You assumed you were safe.”
“I assumed my husband was telling me the truth.”
“Is that why we moved to Canada?” Lili broke in, her voice an accusation. “Is that why we were homeschooled? Is that why we didn’t have a computer, why our access to television was limited, why we moved every time we started making friends? Because you assumed Dad was telling the truth?”
“We arranged our whole lives around you. We did everything we could to protect you.”
“To protect yourselves, you mean.”
It was at this point that Caroline intervened in the questioning. “Why come to San Diego? You knew we’d gone for DNA testing. You knew what the results would show. Why would you keep insisting…?”
“Because believe it or not, I was still clinging to the hope that Lili wasn’t Samantha. And I thought if I could just get her to come home with me, she would put this silliness aside, and that even if the tests showed she was your biological child that it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t be enough to undo the fifteen years I spent raising her, loving her…I love you so much, Lili.”
There was a second of silence.
“My name is Samantha.”