When I Was 5, Police Told My Parents My Twin Had Died – 68 Years Later, I Met a Woman Who Looked Exactly Like Me

When I was five, my twin sister walked into the woods behind our house and never came back. My parents said the police found her body. I never saw a coffin, never visited a grave—just decades of silence.

I grew up with a hole shaped like Ella.

Any time I asked questions, my parents shut down. She died. Let it go. So I did what children do. I carried the not-knowing into adulthood, into marriage, into motherhood, into old age.

I’m 73 now.

Last year, while visiting my granddaughter at college, I stood in a café line and heard a voice that sounded like mine. When the woman turned, I felt the world tilt.

She had my face.

We sat together, trembling. She told me she was adopted, born in a small Midwestern town. The dates didn’t match Ella.

But something did.

When I went home, I searched through my parents’ papers. At the bottom of a box, I found an adoption record—five years before I was born.

And a note from my mother.

She’d been forced to give up a daughter in shame. She never forgot her.

I sent it to the woman from the café.

We took a DNA test.

Full sisters.

I lost one sister in the woods.

And, after a lifetime of silence, I found another.