The woman froze when she saw me.
Not shocked like a stranger. Worse. Like somebody who already knew exactly who I was.
She grabbed the little girl’s hand so hard the child cried out.
“Ma’am,” I said, “please. I just need to ask you something.”
Then the girl looked between us and whispered, “Mommy, why are you crying?”
My knees almost gave out.
Because the woman standing there was Lily.
Older. Thinner. Different hair. But my daughter.
Alive.
Hospital security started moving toward us because monitors were still going off in the room, nurses rushing around us, but I couldn’t stop staring at her face.
Lily kept shaking her head. “You weren’t supposed to see her,” she whispered.
Turns out the man who kidnapped her when she was ten died three years ago. She’d spent half her life believing we stopped looking for her because that’s what he told her over and over.
The little girl on the bed was her daughter.
My granddaughter.
And the reason Lily finally came to the hospital that night was because her child needed a blood transfusion immediately.
Mine was the only match