My name is Emily Dawson, I am thirty six years old, and twenty years ago my parents threw me out of the house because I got pregnant when I was in tenth grade at sixteen years old. It was a cold November night with steady rain, I stood on the porch with one suitcase while my mother pointed at the door and told me I was dead to them.
That same night they signed legal papers cutting me off completely, erasing me and any child I might ever have from the family forever. I kept those papers all these years, and for two decades I lived like a ghost while they told everyone I had moved overseas and built their reputation on the lie that I no longer existed.
Last week they showed up at my door smiling like nothing had happened, asking to meet their grandson and offering me two hundred fifty thousand dollars for three hours of pretending. What they did not know was that the grandson they had been bragging about did not exist, and what they found instead was something that would unravel everything they had built over fifty years.