“Thomas… where did you get this?”
The boy swallowed.
“The woman gave it to me yesterday.”
“Who?”
Thomas looked toward the street.
“I don’t know her real name.”
Victoria’s heart stopped.
“What did she tell you?”
Thomas reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, faded photograph.
It showed Victoria twenty years earlier.
She was holding a newborn baby.
Thomas pointed at the baby.
“That’s me, right?”
Victoria covered her mouth.
“Yes…”
Thomas’s voice trembled.
“She told me you didn’t abandon me.”
Victoria froze.
“She said…”
He hesitated.
“She said your mother did.”
Victoria’s eyes widened.
“My mother?”
Thomas nodded.
“She said Grandma paid someone to take me from the hospital.”
Emily stepped closer.
“Grandma?”
Victoria suddenly remembered.
The night Thomas was born, her mother had insisted on handling everything.
The paperwork.
The hospital records.
Even the ambulance transfer.
Victoria had been told her newborn son died from complications before she could even hold him.
But Thomas was standing in front of her now.
Alive.
Ten years old.
And carrying the proof.
Then Thomas pulled out one final piece of paper.
Victoria unfolded it.
It was an old hospital document.
At the bottom was a signature.
Her mother’s signature.
But there was something else.
A second name.
The name of the person who had taken Thomas.
Victoria recognized it instantly.
Her own mother’s closest friend.
The woman who had visited their house every Christmas for ten years.
The woman who had comforted Victoria at the funeral.
The woman who had repeatedly told her:
“You have to let your dead son go.”
Victoria began crying.
Then her phone rang.
The caller ID appeared.
MOTHER.
She answered.
“Mom?”
Silence.
Then an elderly woman’s trembling voice whispered:
“Victoria… where is Thomas?”
Victoria’s blood ran cold.
“How do you know he’s here?”
Another silence.
Then her mother said:
“Because I know who found him.”
Victoria looked at Thomas.
“Who?”
Her mother’s voice broke.
“Victoria… don’t trust the woman who gave him the bracelet.”
The call suddenly disconnected.
Thomas’s face went pale.
Emily whispered:
“Mom… what’s wrong?”
Victoria looked at the hospital bracelet again.
There was a tiny number engraved on the back.
A number she had never seen before.
Thomas stared at it and whispered:
“She told me that number would lead me to my real father.”
Victoria stopped breathing.
Because she knew that number.
It belonged to a private hospital.
The same hospital where Thomas had supposedly died.
And the records from that night had been sealed for twenty years.
But someone had just opened them.
