The Girl He Sold Returned As The King’s Mate Chapter 06
Daniel stumbled away from his seat and came to stand before me.
He stared at my face, his voice trembling.
“Are you… are you really Evelyn?”
I had Maeve bring over an old cloth bag.
Inside were no jewels or heirlooms.
Only the insoles from a pair of a nine-year-old girl’s shoes.
In tiny, hidden stitches between the layers of fabric were the words:
*For Evelyn. May you always know who you are.*
My mother had made them by hand before she died.
She worried that anything valuable would make a child a target for thieves, so she hid my name inside the most ordinary object imaginable.
The night I was sold, the carnival staff took my coat and everything else I had.
The insoles were caked with mud. They threw them aside without a second look.
I had kept one all this time.
The other was still inside the shoe that Adrian had turned over to Riverbend security six months later—the so-called relic of my drowning.
The Royal Justice Office brought in the shoe from the cold case evidence vault.
A technician carefully cut open the sole, revealing the matching stitches. When the two insoles were placed side by side, the patterns formed a sprig of lily of the valley—my mother’s favorite flower.
The moment he saw the way the final stitch was hidden, Daniel’s legs gave out beneath him.