Victoria yelled, but then her eyes caught a specific detail on the silver metal

“Security!” Victoria yelled, but then her eyes caught a specific detail on the silver metal. Her breath hitched. Her grip on Maya’s shoulder instantly went slack.

Without another word, Victoria seized the hairpiece from the ground, grabbed Maya by the wrist, and marched her through the glass doors, down a long corridor, and into a secluded, cedar-lined library. She slammed the door behind them, shutting out the murmurs of the staff.

Breathing heavily, Victoria walked over to a heavy iron safe hidden behind a mahogany desk. Her hands shook violently as she spun the dial. She pulled out a small, faded leather box and opened it on the desk.

Maya’s heart stopped.

Resting on a bed of white silk was an identical opal hair comb.
“This is a sick joke,” Maya whispered, stepping backward.

Victoria didn’t shout. She didn’t call for the police. Instead, she collapsed into the leather desk chair, looking at the two pieces side by side. They were not just identical; they were perfectly mirrored. Maya’s comb swept to the left, Victoria’s to the right. Together, they formed a pair of butterfly wings.
“There are no copies,” Victoria said, her voice entirely hollowed out. “They were cast from a single mold in Kyoto. I kept the right wing. The left wing was pinned to the blanket of my infant daughter.”

The library felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of it.
“What are you talking about?” Maya choked out, her hands trembling.

Victoria looked up, tears finally spilling over her eyelashes, washing away decades of hardened grief. “Twenty-four years ago, my baby was taken from a stroller on the private beach just down those cliffs. The coast guard searched the waters for weeks. We assumed she was swept away by the tide. We buried an empty casket.”

The room spun. Maya grabbed the edge of a bookshelf to steady herself. “No. That’s impossible. I grew up in a landlocked town in Nevada. I know who I am. My parents loved me. They told me they bought this at an antique fair…”
“Did they?” Victoria stood up slowly, stepping around the desk. She didn’t look at the opals anymore. She looked at the bridge of Maya’s nose, the exact shade of her dark eyes, the familiar curve of her jawline.

“Tell me, Maya,” Victoria whispered, reaching out a trembling hand but stopping just shy of touching the girl’s cheek. “If you lived a normal, happy life in Nevada… what do you remember before your fifth birthday?”

Maya opened her mouth, desperate to shout out a memory. A birthday cake. A tricycle. The wallpaper in her childhood bedroom.
But there was absolutely nothing.
Just a suffocating, terrifying void. A black canvas where a foundation should have been. As the distant sound of the ocean waves crashed against the cliffs outside, Maya looked down at the two opal wings finally reunited on the desk, realizing with a cold, shattering certainty that her entire life was a stolen story.