When I was five, my twin sister Ella vanished into the woods behind our house. The police told my parents she was dead, but I never saw a body, a grave, or any proof. From that day, my life became a shadowed half, growing up with a family who never spoke her name and a grief I couldn’t voice. I was Dorothy, now 73, carrying a lifelong hole shaped like my lost twin.
Decades passed. I built a life, raised children, and became a grandmother, but a quiet ache lingered—a missing piece I could never reclaim. Then, by chance, I encountered a woman at a café whose voice, posture, and features mirrored my own. Her name was Margaret. At first, I thought I had found Ella, but Margaret revealed she had been adopted, her birth records hidden and lost.
Investigating my parents’ old papers later, I discovered the truth: my mother had been forced to give up a daughter before me, Ella had died tragically in the woods, and the police report had covered a grief layered with family secrets. Margaret and I took a DNA test, confirming we were full sisters.
Meeting Margaret didn’t bring Ella back, but it unlocked the long-closed room in my heart. I finally understood my mother’s silence and found fragments of the sister I’d lost in the family I had finally discovered.