What do you say to someone who should have been part of your entire life?
How do you explain nearly seven decades of missed birthdays, holidays, family gatherings and ordinary afternoons?
We couldn’t recover those years.
Neither of us pretended we could.
But we could begin now.
Margaret sent me photographs.
I sent her pictures of my children and grandchildren.
We compared our hands.
Our smiles.
Our expressions.
Sometimes we would laugh because one of us would make a gesture that the other recognized immediately.
We began noticing similarities in small things.
The way we tilted our heads.
The way we reacted when surprised.
Certain expressions.
Little habits neither of us knew we shared.
It was both comforting and heartbreaking.
Ella Was Still Missing
Finding Margaret did not solve everything.
Ella was still gone.
The mystery surrounding her death remained.
There were still questions I might never be able to answer.
I still sometimes wondered exactly what happened in those woods.
I still thought about the red ball.
I still wished I could go back to that day and stop myself from falling asleep.
But something inside me had changed.
For years, I had been looking for Ella in the past.
I had imagined her growing older.
I had wondered what her face would look like.
I had searched for her in my own reflection.
After meeting Margaret, I realized I didn’t have to search the woods for every piece of the sister I lost.
Some parts of my family’s story were still alive.
Not in the way I had expected.
Not as a reunion with my missing twin.
But as a sister who had been separated from us before I was even born.
Margaret couldn’t replace Ella.
Nobody could.
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