Page 86 of What Goes Around

Guests fawned and applauded, showering her with praise she accepted with practiced modesty.

And me?

I’d been sidelined, overshadowed, and humiliated.

Not in this life.

A few weeks after submitting the request, I finally received a copy of my mother’s death certificate. My real mother.

I already knew the cause of death, homicide, but seeing it printed in black ink beside her name still punched the air out of me.

The document gave me her birthdate and the small French town where she’d been born. But not her parents’ names.

A dead end.

And the marriage license I managed to obtain wasn’t much better. Nothing useful. Nothing that told me who she had been before she became a tragedy.

I sat there staring at the papers, feeling the familiar frustration coil tight in my chest, when my mind drifted back to the moment everything had shifted.

A few months ago, Amy had handed me a phone.

“Look,” she’d said.

I had asked her to hack into Apple’s phone, yes. But I’d expected something small. A backup. A few files. Maybe access to her messages if we were lucky.

I hadn’t expected this.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw on the screen.

Every photo.

Every message.

Every call recording.

Apple’s entire life.

Right there. In my hands.

I stared at the device.

“Where did you get this? Is this—Apple’s phone?”

“It’s a copy,” Amy said. “A clone.”

I stared at her. “How is that even possible?”

She explained it calmly, like she was discussing homework.

“iPhones back up everything to iCloud when they’re charging on Wi-Fi. When your sister’s phone connects, it exchanges a secure session token with Apple’s servers. I cloned that token and fed it into this phone. So the servers think this—” she tapped the device in my hand “—is her phone.”

I stared at the screen, trying to comprehend the scale of what she’d done.

“Wouldn’t she get a ‘new login’ alert? Or something?”

Amy gave me a look that said please don’t insult me.

“Of course not. The server thinks it’s the same device syncing. No alerts. No warnings. As far as they know, your sister just… syncs a little more often.”