…”the same necklace as yours, Mommy. The one with the little silver moon. She says hers is the other half.”
My hand went to my throat. I had worn that half-moon pendant my entire life. My mother told me it came from the adoption agency when I was a baby, a gift from my birth mother. I’d never known there was another half.
The detective, Sergeant Hale, took the phone gently and asked Lucy to describe anything she could see out the window. She said there was a water tower painted like a hot air balloon. Every police officer in the room recognized it. It was in Millbrook, forty minutes away.
While officers drove there, Sergeant Hale started making calls. Within half an hour, she knew more about my birth than I had learned in thirty-five years. I was born a twin. My sister and I were separated when we were three months old: I was adopted by my parents, but she was placed in foster care because of a heart condition that made adoption difficult. Her name was Nora. Nobody had ever told me.
Officers found Lucy at a small house in Millbrook, sitting at a kitchen table eating grilled cheese. She was unharmed. Nora was calm and cooperative. In a back room, the officers found the walls covered in my pictures, printed from social media, along with newspaper clippings of my wedding and my daughter’s birth announcement.
I met my twin sister for the first time in an interview room. It was like looking into a mirror that had lived a harder life. She cried the moment she saw me. She told me she’d found me two years ago through a DNA website but was too afraid I’d reject her. She’d been watching my life online, imagining she was part of it. When she lost her job and her apartment last month, something in her broke. She said she only wanted one afternoon to be Lucy’s aunt.
“You could have knocked on my door,” I said.
“I know,” she whispered. “I didn’t think anyone would open it.”
What she did was wrong and frightening, and the court treated it seriously. Nora was charged, but the judge agreed to a mental health program instead of prison, along with a strict order to stay away from Lucy’s school. The school changed its pickup rules the same week, which they should have done long ago.
It took me almost a year to agree to see Nora again. We met with her therapist present. She brought me the other half of the moon pendant, and the two pieces fit perfectly.
Lucy has asked about her “Aunt Nora” many times. Last month, for the first time, we all had lunch together in a public park. Nora didn’t try to hug her. She just waved. Lucy waved back and asked, very seriously, which one of us was older. Nora said, “Your mom, by four minutes.” Lucy grinned. “Then she’s in charge.”
