MY SISTER SPENT EIGHT YEARS TRYING TO BECOME A MOTHER

Nora reached for my hand. “That’s why they want an independent test. But Claire…”

She lowered her head.

“I think Ellie might be the daughter you were told had died.”

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I couldn’t speak.

And one horrifying question filled my mind.

If Ellie really was my Lucy — who had told me my baby was dead, and how had she ended up adopted by my own sister, five years later?

Chapter 2: Lucy

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Five years earlier, I’d given birth to a premature baby girl.

I named her Lucy.

The delivery was frightening, and the doctors rushed her to intensive care almost immediately.

I saw her for only a few seconds.

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I remember her tiny hand moving beside her face.

I remember asking the nurse if I could hold her, and the nurse saying, gently, “Not yet. We need to stabilize her first.”

I spent the night praying.The next morning, a doctor came in and told me Lucy hadn’t survived.

I went home without my daughter.

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All I had left were a few hospital keepsakes and a little identification bracelet with her name printed on it.

For five years, I kept that bracelet in a box beside my bed, and sometimes I opened it and imagined the girl Lucy might have become.

Would she have my curls? My smile? The tiny dimple in my left cheek?

I never found the courage to try for another baby.

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So when Nora introduced me to Ellie, I struggled to breathe.

Because the little girl in front of me had dark, thick curls.

Large, expressive eyes.

And when she smiled, a tiny dimple appeared in her left cheek — exactly where mine had been as a child.

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Nora laughed. “Claire, isn’t she adorable? She even looks like she belongs in our family.”

I forced a smile. “She certainly does.”

Later, alone in my car, I cried, because Ellie was exactly the age Lucy would have been, and she looked exactly like the daughter I’d spent five years imagining.

But I never let my grief touch Nora’s happiness.

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I visited often. I brought little gifts. And soon Ellie was running to the door shouting “Auntie Claire!” and dragging out her hair ribbons.

“Can you do my hair? Two pigtails. Not one! And don’t make them too tight!“Yes, ma’am,” I’d laugh.

Those small moments became precious to me.