My heart began pounding.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked.
Before I could answer, my parents appeared behind her.
My mother covered her mouth.
My father’s face turned white.
I looked at them and forced a cold smile.
“Do you regret throwing me away now?”
The young woman suddenly grabbed my mother’s hand.
“Grandma,” she whispered, staring at me, “is this my real mother?”
The world seemed to stop.
“What did she call you?” I asked.
My mother broke down.
Her knees gave way, and she collapsed into a chair.
My father tried to tell her to be quiet, but she screamed at him.
“No! We have hidden this long enough!”
Then she told me the truth.
The second baby had not died.
My parents had followed me after learning where I was living. My mother had wanted to bring me home, but my father refused. When they discovered I had given birth to twins, he bribed a clinic employee to report that one baby had died.
They took my daughter while I was unconscious.
My father believed they could raise her without anyone learning that she was the child of their “disgraced” teenage daughter. They told the town the baby belonged to a distant relative who had died.
They named her Sofia.
My mother had spent twenty years calling herself Sofia’s grandmother inside the house and her mother in public.
I could barely breathe.
“You stole my child,” I whispered.
My father looked down.
“We gave her a good life,” he said.
“A good life?” I shouted. “You let me bury an empty coffin in my heart for twenty years!”
Sofia began to cry.
She told me she had always sensed something was wrong. My mother had finally admitted that she was not her biological mother, but she had refused to reveal who was.
I called Valentina.
When she arrived, the moment the sisters saw each other, they both froze.
It was like watching two missing pieces of the same soul finally meet.
They had the same smile. The same nervous habit of twisting a ring around one finger. Even their voices sounded alike.
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