The old towels had been kept for eighteen years, folded away as a reminder of the day everything changed. They were faded, worn at the edges, and ordinary to anyone else. But when Emily and Grace placed them on the kitchen table on their eighteenth birthday, their father immediately knew they had not brought them out for sentimental reasons.
Those towels were the same ones he had found wrapped around two newborn babies on a beach nearly two decades earlier. He had raised the girls as his own, believing they had been abandoned and that fate had brought them into his life at the lowest moment he had ever known.
Then one of the girls placed a small metal tag beside the towels. Four numbers were engraved on it. A second item followed: an old photograph, creased and handled many times.
It showed the two newborns lying together. But they were not on a beach. Standing beside them was a woman he recognized instantly.