My life felt cursed. Every person I ever loved had walked away from me—first my dad, who died when I was little, and then my mom, who disappeared without a trace and never looked back. My Nana raised me, but the pain of being abandoned stayed with me into adulthood. Just when I thought things were finally changing for the better, I met a man who seemed perfect… until he found out I was pregnant. Then he left too, just like everyone else. I thought nothing could hurt more than that, but I was wrong.

One afternoon, while doing laundry at a local laundromat, something caught my eye: a tiny child’s sweater in the next machine. I picked it up without thinking, and the moment I saw the embroidered pattern on the tag, my breath caught in my throat. It was my sweater—the one my mother had sewn for me when I was a toddler. I hadn’t seen it in twenty years. My hands started to shake. How could this possibly be here? My mother was gone. She had to be.

As I stood there frozen, trying to make sense of the impossible, I suddenly heard a soft woman’s voice behind me. My knees nearly gave out. I knew that voice. Slowly, terrified, I turned around—hoping, fearing, desperate to understand what was happening. And when my eyes met hers, everything inside me broke open at once.

The woman standing there was my mother—older, thinner, eyes full of a kind of sorrow that made my heart ache. I didn’t know whether to scream, cry, or collapse. All I knew was that the past I thought was dead… had just walked back into my life, wearing a familiar sweater that had been waiting for me all these years.