When I was five, my twin sister walked into the woods behind our house and never came back. My parents said the police found her body. I never saw a coffin, never visited a grave—just decades of silence.
I grew up with a hole shaped like Ella.
Any time I asked questions, my parents shut down. She died. Let it go. So I did what children do. I carried the not-knowing into adulthood, into marriage, into motherhood, into old age.
I’m 73 now.
Last year, while visiting my granddaughter at college, I stood in a café line and heard a voice that sounded like mine. When the woman turned, I felt the world tilt.
She had my face.
We sat together, trembling. She told me she was adopted, born in a small Midwestern town. The dates didn’t match Ella.
But something did.
When I went home, I searched through my parents’ papers. At the bottom of a box, I found an adoption record—five years before I was born.
And a note from my mother.
She’d been forced to give up a daughter in shame. She never forgot her.
I sent it to the woman from the café.
We took a DNA test.
Full sisters.
I lost one sister in the woods.
And, after a lifetime of silence, I found another.