When I arrived at Mom’s nursing home, I was hit with a bombshell: she’d been discharged a week ago. But I never signed her out.
The name they gave me? Lauren — my estranged sister, who vanished a decade ago after a brutal fight with Mom. Now, suddenly, she’d reappeared and taken her—with forged papers and no warning.
Frantic, I searched everywhere. Then I found it: Lauren’s Instagram, The Sunrise Caregiver. There was Mom, looking confused, beside a beaming Lauren. The caption read, “Caring for the woman who gave me life. #FamilyFirst.” A donation link sat below. She had raised over $1,000.
Lauren was rewriting history—turning herself into a saint while erasing me completely.
But I’m not staying silent. Not about Mom. Not anymore.
I crept out of bed, grabbing my laptop. I spent an hour scrolling through my cloud storage, digging back years into the “Early Us” folders. I finally found the photo—a candid shot I’d taken of Elias at a flea market three years ago, before we were even serious.
He was standing next to a woman whose face was turned away from the camera. She was wearing a familiar sundress, but it wasn’t the dress that stopped my heart. Resting on the table in front of her was a velvet box. Inside that box was the same gold ring.
The ring didn’t belong to a family member or a vintage shop. The ring belonged to Sarah.
Sarah was Elias’s “one who got away.” Or so he told me. He said she had moved to Europe overnight four years ago, ghosting everyone she knew, including him. He’d played the part of the heartbroken survivor for the first year of our relationship.
I zoomed in on the photo. In the background, behind the happy couple, was a local newspaper on a stand. The headline was visible: “Local Teacher Missing: Search Enters Third Week.” The dates didn’t line up. He told me she moved away after they broke up. But the photo was taken during the height of the police search. He was smiling, buying her a ring while the world was looking for her body.
A floorboard creaked in the hallway. I froze, my laptop screen casting a cold blue light over my shaking hands.
“You’re up late, honey,” Elias’s voice drifted from the doorway. He wasn’t sleepy. He sounded perfectly, terrifyingly awake.
I looked down at the ring. Now that I knew where it came from, I noticed something I hadn’t seen in the candlelight of the proposal. There was a tiny, microscopic scratch near the setting—the kind made by a fingernail desperately clawing at something.
“I was just looking at old photos,” I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Of us.”
Elias walked into the room, his shadow stretching long across the floor. He didn’t look at me; he looked at the ring on my finger.
“It looks better on you anyway,” he said softly. “Sarah never did appreciate the value of ‘forever’.”
