Jess thought she knew the whole story of why Tessa vanished and left her twin boys behind. For eighteen years, she raised Stefan and Noah as her own, until graduation day, when one son stepped up to the microphone with a letter that changed everything.
The kitchen smelled like the lemon polish I had used that afternoon, and the table was covered in photographs I had not touched in years. Eighteen years of birthdays, scraped knees, gap-toothed smiles, and graduation gowns waiting in the closet for tomorrow morning. I sorted them slowly, one shoebox at a time, the way other women might thumb through a prayer book.
Stefan wandered in barefoot, hair still wet from the shower.
He laughed and dropped into the chair across from me.
“You’re really doing this tonight, Mom? The night before?”
“I wanted to pick a few for the frame,” I said. “Something for the living room.”
He picked up a picture of himself at six, holding a plastic dinosaur taller than his head.
“Please not this one. I look like I lost a fight with a couch.”
“That’s exactly why I love it.”
He laughed and dropped into the chair across from me. I watched him a moment, this boy I had walked the floor with at three in the morning, now broad-shouldered and almost a stranger in his man’s body.
I had grown up in the same orphanage as Tessa.
“Mom,” he said, softer. “Do you ever think about her? My bio mom?”
I had grown up in the same orphanage as Tessa. We had braided each other’s hair in narrow metal beds, walked to college together, signed the same apartment lease the year we graduated. When she married, I cried at the wedding. When her husband died in that car accident, I held her on the bathroom floor and brought her soup she would not eat.
“I think about her sometimes,” I said carefully. “Mostly I wonder how a person walks away from two babies and never looks back.”
“Do you think she’s okay?”
“I hope so, sweetheart. I really do.”
