She came from somewhere else, she knew, not just a physical place but an unfamiliar world populated with rich and powerful people. But what good was that knowledge? It destroyed something and built little in its place. The court case in Texas, as Judith understood it, had ended mysteriously. She couldn’t figure out why exactly she’d lost, why the blood-test results that would’ve revealed the truth had never come back. In any case, M. A. Wright’s money was gone, most of it to Wright’s second wife and his daughter by his first marriage. By the mid-1990s, Judith was, irrespective of her lineage, a struggling single mom with another young son to raise: Ryan, who had been born in 1993. Another marriage came and went, but she kept the man’s last name, Patterson. She worked as a telemarketer and then sold cosmetics. There wasn’t much time to dwell on what the money might have meant for her and Ryan. But if Judith’s newly discovered birthright hadn’t brought her a fortune, her mother’s reappearance had brought her a new family.
