I Found a Photo in My Late Mother’s Album—And Discovered a Sister I Never Knew Existed
I didn’t go looking for the truth. It found me.
The photograph slipped from the back of my mother’s old album and landed face down on the living room floor. I almost put it back without looking. Then I turned it over—and everything I believed about my life fractured in an instant.
There were two little girls in the picture.
One of them was unmistakably me at around two years old. The other stood beside me, slightly taller. Same eyes. Same smile. Same face.
Not similar.
Identical.
My name is Nadia. I was fifty years old when I saw that photograph. My mother had died just weeks earlier at eighty-five, and I was alone in her house, sorting through a lifetime she never fully explained. It had always been just the two of us. My father died when I was very young, and after that, my mother became my entire world.
She worked constantly. She kept our life quiet and controlled. And she never talked about the past.
After the funeral, I stayed behind while my husband and children went home. I needed silence. I needed time. I moved slowly through her belongings—closets, drawers, boxes—each object heavy with memory.
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