The hallway was a blur of noise and movement as students rushed between classes, lockers clanged shut, and teachers called out reminders no one seemed to hear. She moved through it all with the weary impatience of someone who had already lived a long morning before the day had even begun. When a small boy bumped into her side, she barely spared him a glance, nudging him away with an irritated sigh as she adjusted the papers in her arms.
But then his sleeve slipped.
Just a fraction.
Just enough.
Her breath caught as a perfect, crescent-shaped birthmark came into view on his wrist—an unmistakable curve she knew more intimately than her own reflection. Time slowed. Her vision tunneled. The stack of papers sagged in her hands as her knees nearly gave out beneath her.
It was impossible.
It was the exact mirror of the birthmark she had traced on her newborn’s fragile skin the night he came into the world. The same birthmark she had kissed through tears before a doctor placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and told her he had slipped away hours later. The same mark she had mourned for eight long years.
Her hand flew to her mouth as she stared, wide-eyed and trembling. The hallway noise dissolved into a distant hum. The boy looked up at her, confused by her reaction, his wide brown eyes shining with innocence. “Are you okay, miss?” he asked softly, tilting his head with a gentle curiosity that hit her like a physical blow.
She crouched down slowly, unable to tear her gaze away from his wrist—or from his face. Now that she saw him clearly, she took in the familiar slope of his nose, the delicate angle of his jaw, the softness around his eyes. Features she had seen only in a single photograph tucked away in her nightstand drawer. Her heart pounded painfully against her ribs.
This wasn’t resemblance. This wasn’t coincidence.
It was him.
A teacher rounded the corner then, calling the boy’s name, and the sound felt like a crack splitting through her world. The boy hesitated, then looked back at her with a strange, searching expression. “Do I… know you?” he asked in a small voice, as if the question had flickered in his mind long before he spoke it.
Her throat tightened. She wanted to answer, but the truth was too big, too heavy, too impossible to fit into words. Yet every instinct in her body whispered that the life she had been grieving might not have been lost at all—and whatever had really happened eight years ago was finally beginning to surface.
And nothing, absolutely nothing, would ever be the same again.
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