I looked up.

She looked exactly like me.

Same face. Same posture. Same eyes.

We stared at each other in shock.

I whispered, “Ella?”

She said her name was Margaret—and told me she was adopted. She’d always felt something was missing from her story.

We talked. Compared details. Birth years. Locations.

We weren’t twins.

But we were sisters.

Back home, I searched through my parents’ old documents. At the bottom of a box, I found an adoption file—dated five years before I was born. My mother was listed as the birth parent.

There was a handwritten note from her.

She wrote that she had been young, unmarried, and forced to give up her first daughter. She was never allowed to hold the baby. She was told to forget and never speak of it again.