Sienna stared at her family with utter disappointment. Any lingering shred of affection she had for them was officially dead.
"I guess so. If I wasn't a ghost, how else would I get to see my own mother crying for me?"
"You're not dead?" Beatrice blurted out.
Sienna held her mother's gaze, her eyes cold. "Were you desperately hoping I was?"
"No, of course not! How could you say that?" Beatrice stammered, adamantly refusing to confess.
"If you didn't want me dead, then why did you unplug my oxygen last night?"
"And my IV drip-you shut that off too, didn't you?"
When Sienna woke up earlier that morning, Karla had immediately pulled up the security footage for her to watch.
She honestly hadn't expected her own mother to be that ruthless.
Beatrice's eyes darted nervously around the room. "Zoe, what on earth are you talking about?"
"I have no idea what you mean."
"Exactly, Zoe. Your mother just wanted to take care of you, but she felt sick last night
and had to leave. She would never do something like that."
"She doesn't even know what an oxygen tube looks like."
Thomas chimed in quickly from the side to run damage control.
Hunter was silently cursing Sienna's sheer luck for surviving, but he plastered on a sickeningly sweet smile.
"Sienna, Mom and Dad rushed to the hospital first thing this morning to check on you. We were all praying for you to wake up!"
"More like you were praying for me to die, and came to check if my corpse was cold yet, right?"
The entire Darwin family froze in awkward silence.
It was exactly what they had been thinking, but hearing it said out loud was a completely different story.
"Zoe, that's just cruel. Your father, your brother, and I..."
Beatrice tried to defend herself, but Sienna cut her off. "Mom, did you know my
room is equipped with security cameras?"
*What?*
Beatrice was dumbfounded.
She had heard of security cameras before.
She knew they recorded everything people did, playing it back like a movie on a
screen.
Instinctively, she looked to her husband and son for help.
Thomas clearly hadn't anticipated the cameras either.
His face instantly drained of color.
Hunter's eyes shifted in panic. If there were cameras, that meant everything his mother did last night was caught on tape.
"Cameras? What's that?" Beatrice desperately tried to play dumb.
Karla didn't waste another second. She pulled out the tablet and played the
undeniable video evidence right in front of them.
Beatrice opened her mouth to argue, but Karla was entirely done playing games with these parasites.
"The evidence is right here. You have two choices: pack your bags, go back to your hometown, and never contact Sienna again."
"Or, I hand this over to the police."
"Attempted murder comes with serious prison time. I'm sure you know that."
Beatrice's face went completely ashen. "I didn't... I wasn't... Zoe, I swear I never wanted to hurt you."
Sienna lowered her gaze, her voice exhausted. "Mom, am I even your biological daughter?"
*Why would you treat me like this?*
"Of course you are! When I gave birth to you, it was pouring rain, and we couldn't even get a midwife..."
Sienna had heard that exact guilt trip a thousand times.
Watching from the sidelines, Claire suddenly understood exactly why Beatrice was
so vicious toward her own flesh and blood.
It was simply because Sienna wasn't born a boy, and the difficult labor had supposedly caused Beatrice to struggle with infertility for years before having a son.
Because of that, she despised Sienna.
Trapped in a deeply patriarchal community, she had failed to produce a son early
on.
That failure had led to years of suffering under her in-laws' cruelty.
Too weak and cowardly to fight back against her husband or his mother, she had channeled all her toxic resentment and fury onto hep
daughter instead.
fo FindNovel.net
In her twisted mind, she genuinely blamed Sienna for every hardship in her life.
She truly hated her own child.
Claire felt zero sympathy for a woman like that; her heart only ached for Sienna.
Even though Claire had been
switched at birth and had suffered
Octavia's neglect and coldness, her
situation was still a thousand times
better than Sienna's living.
hightmare