When Goldie saw her daughter, she struggled to sit up. "Quick! Go to the Shaw family. They believed me. They believed me because I'm dying. Gloria, you have to remember, when you're in the Shaw family residence, find a way to secretly get some of your brother's hair, o r even Mrs. Shaw’s hair."
Gloria sobbed as she asked her mother, "Why would I need their hair?"
"In case they want to conduct a paternity test. You're your father's daughter, but you're not Mrs. Shaw's daughter. You can only join the Shaw family if you're Mrs. Shaw's daughter. Otherwise, they won't acknowledge you." 1
"Mommy, I don't want to join the Shaw family..."
"Be a good girl, Gloria. Now, they won’t hate you anymore. They think you're their dead daughter, so Mrs. Shaw won't hate you anymore either.”
Gloria cried and said to her mother, "Mommy, they won’t acknowledge us. We can never join the Shaw family because the man whom you call my father, all h e did was provide you with one of his sperm! To them, we'll always be strangers. Do you understand, Mommy!"
Her mother did nothing except cry. She kept shooing her away. "Don't worry about me. Go back to the Shaw
family!”
Seeing as her mother was so insistent, Gloria said to her, "Mommy, let's do it this way. If, in the near future, they come here in search of me, I'll go with them. If they don’t, I can't go back to them, even if I wanted to."
Goldie cried till her vision was filled with nothing but tears. Maybe it was the endless sense of guilt she felt toward her daughter, or maybe it was because her body was at its limit. A week later, Goldie passed away. Before she died, as Gloria predicted, none of the Shaw family members came again.
"Sigh, you poor child. Come on in." The elderly couple led Gloria into their house. Like her, they were poverty-stricken too, losing their only child to an illness. To treat their child’s illness, the couple was riddled with debt. That was why Gloria could not sit around and rely on their charity.
More than a month later, she started work at a nearby factory. More than a month later, her birthday passed and she was finally 18 years old. 18-year-old Gloria Shaw changed her name to Amelia - Amelia Yale.
After working at the factory for two years, she had some savings, around 10,000 to 20,000 dollars. One day, she wanted to buy some good food for her foster parents as a celebration. However, by the time she bought all the ingredients and headed home, she realized her home was swarming with police.
Later, Amelia found out that the couple’s teenaged daughter was raped and killed by a prominent and influential man in the village. They were furious. They only had one daughter, so they murdered him in revenge. Then, the couple fled from their village and escaped to this little farming village, hiding their identities and planting vegetables for ten years.
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