A Child’s Sketch and a Forgotten Past
I had always known I was adopted. My parents, Martha and Greg, never hid that fact from me. They told me that I was chosen, loved, and meant to be theirs. But they never spoke about my biological parents, and I never asked.
At 28, I worked as an elementary school teacher. It was a job I loved, full of small surprises—like the way kids saw the world. But nothing could have prepared me for the moment that changed my life forever.
That afternoon, I was grading assignments when little Tommy approached me, holding a crumpled sheet of paper. “Miss Elena, look! I drew a house from my dreams.”
I smiled and took the paper, but the moment my eyes fell on it, my breath caught. It was an old, wooden house, surrounded by tall pine trees. There was something eerily familiar about it—the uneven roof, the broken fence, even the large tree in the yard.
“Tommy, this is a great drawing,” I said carefully. “Where did you see this house?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I just always see it in my dreams. It feels like… home.”
My heart pounded. I had seen this house before. Not just seen it—I had drawn this exact picture when I was a child. My mother had kept my old sketchbooks, and I remembered flipping through them years ago, seeing this same house over and over. But I had never been there. Had I?
That night, I rummaged through the boxes in my parents’ attic. And there it was—my childhood drawing, identical to Tommy’s. Same house, same tree, even the same cracks on the roof.
I felt dizzy. What did this mean?
The next day, I spoke to Tommy’s mother, a kind woman named Sarah. “Has Tommy ever been to a house like this?” I asked, showing her both drawings.
She gasped. “Oh my God. This… this is my grandfather’s old house. He lived there before he passed. We never took Tommy there, but we have a few pictures. How did you—”
I barely heard the rest. My hands were shaking. “Where is this house?”
Sarah told me it was in a small town three hours away. I knew then that I had to go.
When I arrived, the sight of the house sent chills down my spine. I had been here before. Memories flooded back—flashes of running through the yard, laughter, the scent of pine. And then… a woman’s face. My mother?
A neighbor, an elderly woman, saw me and gasped. “Lena?” she whispered.
I froze. “My name is Elena.”
Tears filled her eyes. “You were taken from here as a baby. Your mother—she searched for you for years.”
My world tilted. I had lived here. Tommy’s dreams, my sketches—they weren’t just coincidences. They were pieces of a past I had long forgotten.
And now, I had to uncover the truth.
