All Chapters of The Crescent Birthmark Secret I Almost Married my Twin : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The baby was still warm in her arms when they took her.Lucy Donalds would replay that night a thousand times in the years that followed, searching for the exact second it all went wrong. The moment she should have screamed louder. Held tighter. Not let the drug pull her under.She never found it. That night moved too fast, and she had been too happy to see it coming.~ ~ ~It was 7:48 p.m. on a Saturday in Portland.Outside Cascadia General Hospital, rain hit the windows like it had somewhere urgent to be. Inside, Lucy was twenty years old, completely alone, and crying before the ambulance doors even opened, not just from the pain, but from the particular terror of going through something this enormous with nobody beside her.She gripped the bed rail. She breathed. She screamed when the contractions came and breathed again when they passed. The nurses moved around her with calm, steady voices, telling her she was going to be fine.She didn't know yet that the fine was already gone. T

Angela made the call at 5:47 in the morning.The kettle was on. The house was still dark. She stood at the kitchen window with her back to the stairs and dialed the number before she could change her mind again.It rang twice.Sarah picked up on the second ring, which meant she hadn't been sleeping either.For a moment, neither of them spoke.Just two women breathing on opposite sides of a line that hadn't been used in years. The silence between them felt heavy. The kind of silence shared by people who know too much about each other to pretend."Angela." Sarah's voice was low. Careful. Like she was testing the air before stepping into a room."You saw it," Angela said.Not a question.A pause."I saw it."Another silence. Longer this time."Does she..""No," Angela said quietly. "She doesn't know anything."Angela heard Sarah slowly breathe out on the other end. The kind of breath that carried more than relief."Angela." Her voice dropped even lower. "If it's…""Don't." Angela pressed

The drive from Seattle to Portland was three hours and forty minutes.Mariah knew this because she had looked it up four times in the past week. Not because she had forgotten, but because checking it again made the whole thing feel more real.She left at nine in the morning with a bag she had packed and repacked twice, Zara's voice still in her ear from the night before."Call me the second anything happens.""Nothing's going to happen.""Mariah. You're driving three hours to meet a boy you've only heard through a phone screen. Everything is going to happen."She laughed then.She wasn’t laughing now.She was somewhere on I-5. Rain had started tapping lightly against the windshield. Her hands were steady on the wheel.Her heart was doing something completely different.She stopped at a gas station just outside Portland.The kind of place people only passed through. One pump. A tired cashier. A shelf of snacks nobody planned to buy until they were already holding them.She grabbed a dr