My sister and I were separated in an orphanage. Thirty-two years later, I saw the bracelet I had made for a little girl.

“I’m not going,” I said. “Not without her.”
“You have no choice,” she replied softly. “You have to be brave.”
That word, brave, meant doing what you were told.
The day they took me away, Mia wrapped herself around my waist and screamed,
“Don’t go, Lena! Please! I’ll behave, I promise!”
I was holding her so tightly that a staff member had to snatch her from my arms.
“I’ll find you,” I kept whispering. “I promise.”
He kept calling me as they were putting me in the car.
That sound stuck with me for decades.
My adoptive family lived in another state. They weren’t cruel. They gave me food, clothes, and a bed of my own. They called me lucky.
They also hated talking about my past.
“You don’t have to think about the orphanage anymore,” my adoptive mother told me. “We’re your family now.”
So I learned not to mention Mia’s name out loud anymore.
But in my mind it never disappeared.
When I turned eighteen, I returned to the orphanage. New staff. New children. Same peeling walls.
I gave them my old name, my new name, my sister’s name. A woman returned with a thin folder.
“She was adopted shortly after you,” he said. “Her name has been changed. Her file is classified.”