Maybe the keys had been in one of my old boxes, and Ethan found them by accident. Maybe it was just a coincidence. I needed to let it go.
When I opened the door to our house, I heard laughter from the nursery. Lily was sitting on the floor, helping Ethan build a tower out of blocks. She looked up and smiled.
“Oh, Claire! I’m so glad you found my keys,” she said cheerfully. I stopped cold.
“Your keys?”
“Yes,” she said, holding them up: the wooden heart and silver key dangling from her fingers. “I saw them on the table earlier. I didn’t even realize I’d dropped them yesterday.”
“Where did you get those?”
Lily shrugged.
“I’m not sure, honestly. I’ve had them since I was little. I lost my memory as a child.
My adoptive parents said they found me by a riverbank, and these were the only things I had with me.”
Tears welled up before I could stop them. “By a river?”
She nodded, confused. “Yes.
Why?”
My voice shook. “Lily… could you show me your shoulder?”
She blinked in surprise but slowly pulled her sleeve aside. There it was, a small, faded birthmark, the exact shape I’d seen hundreds of times before.
“Anna,” I breathed. She frowned. “What?”
“Your name,” I said.
“Your real name is Anna.”
Lily laughed nervously. “That can’t be right.”
But I was already walking to the living room. My hands shook as I pulled an old photo album from the shelf and flipped through the pages until I found it.
A picture of two little girls in matching dresses, one of them holding the same wooden heart keychain. I handed it to her. “That’s you.
That’s us. Twenty years ago, my sister disappeared during a school trip. I made that keychain for her.”
Lily’s eyes filled with tears as she stared at the photo, then at me.
“I… I don’t understand.”
I reached for her hand. “You don’t have to. You’re home now.”
For a moment, she just looked at me, then threw her arms around me, sobbing into my shoulder.
After twenty years, I’d finally found the part of me I thought was gone forever. My sister. My Anna.
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