He nodded.
“Rebecca was pregnant with twins.”
I covered my mouth.
In all the years I had known Daniel and Rebecca, neither of them had ever mentioned another baby.
Not once.
Daniel looked down.
“For years, we believed there was nothing left to discover. We accepted what we were told. But when Lily found that photograph, she began asking questions we couldn’t answer.”
I looked at Ethan.
He was watching me carefully, as though afraid of what I might say next.
“Mom,” he whispered, “we don’t know if our suspicions are true.”
“What suspicions?”
He reached for my hand.
“That Lily and I might be related in a way nobody ever told us.”
I shook my head slowly.
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re brother and sister.”
“We understand that,” Daniel said. “We need proper verification before drawing any conclusions. We don’t want to turn a possibility into a fact without evidence.”
His caution made sense.
But something inside me had begun to unravel.
Because I remembered more about that night than I had admitted.
I remembered waiting for hours after Ethan was born.
I remembered a doctor asking whether someone from my family could come to the hospital.
And I remembered my mother arriving.
After that, my memories became blurred by exhaustion and the medical care I was receiving.
Daniel gently pushed the envelope closer.
“We still don’t fully understand what these documents mean,” he said. “But Rebecca asked me to tell you something before you open them.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“The night Ethan was born, your mother came to speak with Rebecca.”
I froze.
“My mother?”
Daniel nodded.
“And according to Rebecca, she gave her something that was supposed to reach you one day.”
My heartbeat quickened.
“What did she give her?”
Daniel glanced at the envelope.
“A letter.”
For a moment, I felt as though the walls were closing in.
My mother had died five years earlier.
She had never mentioned Rebecca.
She had never told me about speaking to another mother in the hospital.
And she certainly had never told me she had left a letter with someone else.
Slowly, I reached across the desk.
The envelope was old, its edges slightly yellowed.
But the handwriting was unmistakable.
I recognized it immediately.
It was my mother’s handwriting.
The same careful letters she had used in birthday cards, handwritten recipes, and little notes she used to leave on the kitchen table when I was a child.
My hands began to tremble.
Across the front of the envelope, she had written:
