I remembered that when I was investigating my dad, the evidence had actually pointed to him many times.
But why had I only been willing to face reality at the very end? Because he was my dad.
I had always used coincidence and my own feelings to rule him out as a suspect.
A year had passed, and I had been through so much in that time. Now I was facing the exact same situation again.
And this time, it was even more obvious than it had been with my dad.
I couldn't keep deceiving myself.
I had to face reality.
If it really was my mom and I didn't stop her, she would hurt more people, and those people were all Seventh Master's brothers.
How could I face Seventh Master?
The questions Seventh Master had just asked me had cut straight to the heart of the matter, and so had the answers.
My mom had been married to my dad for so many years, and they had raised me together for eleven of them. Yet in all that time, my dad had never met a single relative on my mom's side.
That wasn't normal.
Whether my eldest uncle and my third aunt even existed was still an open question.
Seventh Master fell silent for a long time. He patted my shoulder and opened his mouth, but didn't know what to say.
"Without conclusive evidence, we shouldn't jump to conclusions."
Seventh Master spoke to me calmly. "Sometimes things really are coincidences. There are plenty of people who don't get along with their families and never have any contact with them."
"Now let's suppose-and this is only a supposition-that your mom really is the woman we're looking for."
"Then there's only one possibility. She was part of the organization all along,