The winter air outside cut through her coat like glass. Mara wrapped her arms around herself, but nothing could ease the hollowness where her son had been. She had left the agency with no photograph, no birth certificate, not even a name to whisper into the dark. Just absence—vast, echoing, and merciless.
In the days that followed, she moved on instinct, working double shifts at the diner, dragging herself home to tiny apartments that all smelled of dust and damp. She let the years stack up in gray layers, one on top of another, until she could hardly remember what life had been like before that day. The necklace was gone, and with it, the last tether to a part of herself she had surrendered.
But memories had their own way of haunting. Some nights she dreamed of a tiny hand clutching a silver chain, of a blue stone glinting in sunlight. The dream would blur as morning came, slipping from her grasp like mist, but it always left her chest aching. As time passed, even those visions grew dimmer, until she convinced herself they were only her imagination.
And then, all at once, the news had ripped the wound open again. The necklace was real, alive in the world, and with it came the ghost of the promise she had whispered eighteen years earlier.
Good story if it lets me connect to the rest of it.