My parents always seemed unusually quiet and sad around my birthday. I thought maybe it was just the stress of throwing a party or reminiscing about how quickly I was growing up. I brushed it off until my 18th birthday, when my mom handed me an old, worn photo album.
I flipped through the pages and froze when I saw a picture of me as a baby—except it wasn’t just me. There was another baby next to me. My parents explained that I had a twin sister who had passed away from an illness when we were infants. They had kept it a secret because they didn’t want me growing up feeling like something was missing.
