The rain whispered against my window like a secret I wasn't meant to keep.
I'd tried to sleep, but the darkness had other plans. It kept showing me faces — hers, and the one who'd brought her to us.
Mara.
And the woman who gave her life.
And the man who ruined mine.
It had been a long time ago. I was nine, still small enough to believe that my parents' love was unbreakable. My mother used to call me her miracle baby. The one who lived when the doctors said she couldn't. The one she'd bled and prayed for.
We were happy. Or so I thought.
Then one afternoon, a woman came to our house.
She was pale, fragile, her scarf too bright for her tired eyes. Mother had called her a family friend, but even then, I'd seen the way Father flinched when she said her name.
She sat in the living room, clutching a small girl's hand — a girl who looked like sunlight caught in a mirror.
I remember staring. Because she looked like me.
Same hair. Same small, stubborn chin. Even the same tiny scar above her eyebrow, like some cruel trick of fate had copy-pasted us.
And then the woman said it.
"I'm dying," she whispered. "I didn't want her to be alone."
Mother went very still. "What do you mean?"
The woman's eyes flicked to Father. "You know exactly what I mean."
The silence after that could've frozen the world.
I didn't understand it all then. But I remember the sound of Mother's glass shattering against the floor. I remember the way her voice broke when she asked, "How long, Daniel?"
And I remember Father's answer, small and cowardly: "Twelve years."
That night, I heard my mother crying in her room. I pressed my ear to the door, heart pounding. Words bled through the wood like smoke.
"How could you?"
"I didn't know how to tell you."
"You lied to me for twelve years, Daniel! For twelve years while I… while I buried our children before they even breathed!"
I didn't know what miscarriages meant then. But I knew pain when I heard it.
When the door finally opened, I saw her — my mother, eyes red, face streaked with tears. Behind her, that little girl stood awkwardly in the hall, clutching a small stuffed bear.
Mother looked at her for a long time. Then, slowly, she knelt.
"What's your name?"
"M-Mara," the girl said.
Something in my mother's face broke and healed at the same time.
"You look just like my Ayla."
And then she did something I'll never forget. She reached forward, brushed a strand of hair from Mara's face, and said,
"You can stay here as long as you need, sweetheart."
The days that followed were a blur.
Mother barely spoke to Father. The house felt cold, heavy. But Mara — she was like a heartbeat in the silence.
She tried to help in small ways — setting the table, folding laundry, bringing Mother tea she never drank.
She was gentle. Too gentle for the storm she'd walked into.
One night, I asked her why she never cried. She said, "If I start, I won't stop."
I didn't know then that I'd love her for the same reason I pitied her — because she carried pain the way others carried air.
That was the month everything changed.
Mother eventually stopped asking Father questions. Stopped yelling. Stopped… everything.
And one morning, she told me, "Ayla, we're going to help her. We're going to make sure she's not alone."
By the end of that week, papers were signed.
And Mara — my father's daughter — became my sister.
Back in my bed now, in this other life, the tears came without permission.
Because even after everything — the betrayal, the fire, the death — part of me still believed that we were meant to find each other again.
No matter how many lives it took.