Because the last time he had seen that scar, it was on the wrist of his missing granddaughter.

The baby everyone was told had died with her mother.

The baby whose body he was never allowed to see.

His knees almost gave out in the middle of the street.

The elegant woman stepped back, her hand shaking around the ring.

“No… no, that’s impossible…”

But the young woman was already crying harder.

“My mother said if anyone ever recognized this ring, it meant they were the people who destroyed her life.”

The crowd went silent.

Even the horns faded into the background.

Then the older man whispered the dead woman’s name.

The young woman froze.

Because that was the same name her mother had spoken every night before she died.

The little sister looked up in panic and asked,

“So my sister wasn’t abandoned?”

The old man broke.

Tears filled his eyes as the truth hit him all at once.

His granddaughter had never died.

She had been stolen.

Raised in poverty.

And the woman who ripped the ring from her hand had recognized it immediately…

because she had been there the night the coffin was closed.