Arthur looked sick.
“My mother gave him away.”
The room spun around me.
“What?”
“She said my father couldn’t afford two babies. She arranged a private adoption through a relative.”
I couldn’t even process what I was hearing.
“He was alive this whole time?”
Arthur nodded slowly.
“But there’s more.”
He swallowed hard.
“The DNA test revealed something else.”
I felt my chest tighten.
“What else?”
Arthur looked at me with tears in his eyes.
“The genetic profile in our son… partially matches mine, but it also strongly matches the missing twin.”
I frowned.
“I don’t understand.”
He whispered the words like they physically hurt him.
“Because biologically… my twin and I were identical enough that the reproductive cells I carry may actually belong to him.”
The doctor later explained it in simpler terms.
Arthur was technically a chimera.
Part of his body carried his twin brother’s DNA.
Which meant our son appeared, genetically, as if he belonged to another man.
But that “other man” was actually the brother Arthur absorbed before birth.
Or so we thought.
Until Naomi called me two weeks later.
Crying.
“Maribel… he’s alive.”
—
The missing twin had never died.
And he had never been adopted legally.
Mrs. Rachel had secretly given him to a distant cousin in Texas.
His name was Gabriel.
He was forty-three years old.
And he looked exactly like Arthur.
When we finally met him, I thought I was hallucinating.
Same height.
Same voice.
Same gray eyes.
Even the same nervous habit of rubbing his jaw when anxious.
Arthur couldn’t stop staring at him.
Neither could I.
Gabriel had grown up believing his biological parents abandoned him because they didn’t want him.
He had spent decades searching for answers.
And all along, Mrs. Rachel had lied to everyone.
Including her own husband.
When Arthur confronted his mother, she finally broke.
“I was overwhelmed!” she screamed. “I had no money! No help! I did what I had to do!”
“You stole someone’s entire life,” Naomi shouted back.
Gabriel said nothing.
He just stood there quietly, tears running down his face while looking at the family he never got to have.
—
Months passed.
Arthur changed after that.
Completely.
The arrogant, suspicious man who accused me in the operating room disappeared.
In his place was someone broken by guilt.
