I had turned twenty-two two days earlier, yet my chest felt like a child waiting to be claimed by its mother. In my leather jacket, I carried two cassette tapes that the nurse pressed into my hand before I left, instructing me to give them to her.
She claimed they held the truth, but I didn’t ask what she meant. I just wanted to see Mom for the first time.
The door opened.
A man stood there, my age.
He stared at me, his mouth parting. “What the hell?”
I blinked hard and rubbed my eyes, convinced exhaustion was playing tricks on me. When I looked again, he was still there. I felt like staring into a mirror. We had the same face, the same body, but we were two different people.
He laughed under his breath and stepped closer. His fingers touched my cheek as he smiled.
“Fuck me standing,” he said. “Am I dreaming?”
I shook my head.
He circled me slowly, studying every angle.
“How is this even possible?”
“Can I come in?” I asked, stopping him as he passed.
“Yeah.” He stepped back and pulled the door open wider.
Inside, the house opened up more than it looked from the street. A hallway stretched ahead with a staircase climbing upward. To the left, there was a living room with a fireplace. To the right, there was a kitchen. I didn’t need to see upstairs to know bedrooms were on the next floor.
He led me into the living room and gestured to a white sofa. I sat. He lowered himself into a cushioned chair across from me, never taking his eyes off my face.
“Is Lena Cermer Morrell here?” I asked.
I pulled a yellow envelope from my leather jacket and held it out.
He shook his head.
“She died last year. Car accident.”
My lips twitched. Nothing inside me shifted. No grief came. Whatever I was supposed to feel didn’t come, and I didn’t know how to explain it, so I chose the words that fit the moment.
“I am sorry for your loss.”
He nodded once. His face stayed still—no grief there either. We sat across from each other, our faces too identical for this to be a coincidence.
“Our father, Alistar Cermer Morrell, left this just before he died,” I said.
I placed the yellow envelope on the table that looked like a wooden chest with a flat top. He grabbed the envelope almost as soon as I set it down, then pulled out two cassette tapes.
One had a tape from the year 1981.The other read 1998.
“What’s on them?” he asked.
He didn’t ask who I was. He didn’t ask how I had found him, or why we shared the same face. It felt like he already knew the truth and was waiting to hear which version I created.
“I didn’t listen,” I said, lifting one shoulder.
He stood and walked to the bookshelf. Beside a framed family photo sat a voice recorder.
“Dad gave me this just before Mom, and I moved to the UK,” he said. “I never saw him again.”
