“You and Daniel weren’t twins. There were three of us.”
I put down the coffee cup.
“There’s something about the fire that you’ve never been told.”
“Our parents kept you and Daniel,” Ben added. “And they placed me with another family when I was three weeks old.”
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“That’s not possible.”
“I only found out last week, Regina. And when I did, I came straight here.”
Ben took a breath and started explaining.
His adoptive parents had passed away earlier this year, within months of each other. When Ben went through their belongings, he found a sealed folder at the back of a filing cabinet.
He looked at me and said the one thing I wasn’t prepared to hear.
Inside were the original adoption documents, along with two names listed as his biological siblings under the same family name: Regina and Daniel.
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Ben looked them up online that same night and found the old newspaper article about the fire. The one with a photograph of Daniel, taken from our school picture that year.
Ben had stared at it for a long time because the boy in the photograph looked exactly the way Ben had looked at 14.
Inside were the original adoption documents.
“I kept thinking I was imagining it,” he explained. “Same face. Same features. Except Daniel was gone, and I was still here.”
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