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She froze. Then her eyes flashed: fear, guilt, hesitation. And then she whispered something that chilled my blood:
“Richard… my name is not Anna.”
The room fell silent. My heart pounded.
“What… what do you mean?”
He looked down, trembling.
“Anna was my sister.”
I staggered back. My mind raced. Was the girl I remembered, the one whose smile I’d kept for forty years, gone?
“She died,” the woman whispered through her tears. “She died young. Our parents buried her quietly. But everyone said I looked like her… that I talked like her… that I was her shadow. When you found me on Facebook, I… I couldn’t resist. You thought I was her. And for the first time in my life, someone looked at me the way they looked at Anna. I didn’t want to lose that.”
I felt the ground shake beneath my feet. My “first love” had died. The woman in front of me wasn’t her: she was a mirror, a ghost clothed in Anna’s memories.
I wanted to scream, to curse, to demand that she lie to me. But seeing her, trembling and fragile, I realized she wasn’t just a liar: she was a woman who had lived her entire life in someone’s shadow, invisible, unloved.
Tears burned my eyes. My chest ached with pain: for Anna, for the stolen years, for fate’s cruel trick.
I whispered in a hoarse voice:
“And who are you really?”
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