A scar. Crescent shaped. A perfect little moon just below the thumb.
Milo had that same mark. A birthmark from Sofia. A genetic echo.
This was not coincidence. This was a door to a past he had not known existed.
“Milo,” he said quietly. “Come closer.”
Milo leaned against him. Augustine’s thoughts spun like wheels on black ice. A syndicate. Illegal adoption rings rumored in the city. Babies taken, families lied to, money exchanged.
Augustine had always dismissed those headlines as sensationalism. Now they stared back at him in the form of two shivering children with his wife’s chin and his son’s eyes.
He called an ambulance. The paramedics wrapped the boys in blankets and asked questions. They recognized Augustine. Everyone did. He signed papers. He told them to bill him for anything and everything. He rode with the children to St. Loretta’s Regional Hospital.
The doctors ran tests. Bloodwork. DNA analysis. The results arrived the next morning. Augustine read them twice. Then a third time.
The boys were his sons. Milo’s brothers. Triplets, just as Sofia had believed she carried. He had been robbed of them. They had been robbed of him.