The Perfect Daughter's Secret

“My mother, a medical examiner, sees death every day. Yet, for ten years, she never truly saw me, not after my father' s tragic death, which she relentlessly blamed on me. Instead, all her love was lavished upon Chloe, the perfect daughter, my shining replacement. On my 21st birthday, Chloe sent men to abduct me. With a phone pressed to my ear, a hiss on the other end commanded me to beg my mother for a birthday meeting. Liv' s response was a chilling dismissal, a final accusation regarding my father' s death, and then echoing silence. Soon after, I became a Jane Doe, dismembered and stuffed into a duffel bag, delivered directly to my mother' s morgue. I watched, an unseen ghost, as her meticulous, gloved hands pieced together my violated body. She didn't flinch, my own mother, just saw a case, a victim, nothing more. Anguish, a useless emotion for a ghost, consumed me. As Liv worked, I relived Chloe' s whispered taunts: "He always liked you best, Sarah. Even dead, he liked you best." Chloe, the one who orchestrated my father's boating 'accident' and then meticulously murdered me, went home to my mother' s continued praise and love. Meanwhile, I lay in pieces on a cold steel table, under my mother' s unseeing eyes. But a small, silver dolphin pendant, my father' s last gift, sent back to my mother with a severed hand and a lock of shocking pink hair, ultimately ripped through her carefully constructed blindness. It was a macabre gift, a final, undeniable piece of a monstrous truth linking her perfect daughter, my father' s death, and my own brutal end. The story wasn' t over; it was just beginning.”