My Mom Who Passed 3 Years Ago Called At 2AM Saying «Open The Door, I’m Cold» – So I…

I don’t know how long I sat there on the floor. It could have been thirty seconds or five minutes. Time had stopped making sense.

All I could hear was my own breathing, and the blood rushing in my ears. The words she had spoken kept echoing in my head, playing on a loop I couldn’t stop. She knew.

She knew the one thing nobody else in the world could possibly know. I got to my feet slowly, using the wall for support. My legs felt weak and unsteady, like I had just run a marathon.

I walked to the door and stood in front of it, staring at the locks my mother had installed years ago. Two deadbolts and a chain. She always said you could never be too careful.

I wondered what she would think if she could see me now, standing here in the middle of the night, about to open the door for someone who might be her ghost. My hands moved before my brain could talk me out of it. I turned the first deadbolt, then the second.

I slid the chain out of its track and let it hang loose against the frame, and then I turned the handle and pulled the door open. She was standing right there, just a few feet away from me. The porch light from the neighbor’s house cast a soft glow across her face, and I could see every detail.

The fine lines around her eyes. The small scar on her chin from a cooking accident when I was ten. The way her gray hair curled slightly at the ends, because she never could get it to lie flat.

She looked exactly like my mother. Exactly.

«Hi, sweetheart,» she said softly.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I just stood there in the doorway, staring at this impossible woman who wore my mother’s face like it belonged to her.

The cold February air rushed past her and into the house, but I barely felt it.

«You’re not real,» I finally managed to whisper. «You can’t be real. I watched her die.»

«I held her hand while she took her last breath. I picked out the dress she was buried in.»

The woman’s eyes filled with tears, and something about that broke me even more. Ghosts weren’t supposed to cry. Hallucinations weren’t supposed to look so heartbroken.

«I’m real,» she said. «I’m just not who you think I am. Can I come inside? Please. I’ll explain everything.»

I stepped back without saying anything, and she walked past me into the house. She moved carefully, looking around at the walls and the furniture like she was seeing it all for the first time. Her fingers brushed against the back of the couch, and she paused in front of the mantle where I kept my mother’s photograph.

«She was beautiful,» she said quietly. «I always wondered what she looked like.»

I closed the door behind her and leaned against it. «Who are you?»

She turned to face me, and I could see the resemblance even more clearly now. Same height, same build, same way of holding her hands clasped in front of her body. But there were differences too.

Tiny things I hadn’t noticed through the peephole. Her eyebrows were slightly thinner. Her posture was a little straighter.

She carried herself like someone who had lived a different life.

«My name is Marlena,» she said. «Marlena Davis. And I’m your mother’s twin sister.»

The words hit me like a punch to the chest. I shook my head, refusing to accept what she was saying.

«That’s impossible. My mother didn’t have a twin. She didn’t have any siblings except Aunt Delia.»

«She didn’t know about me,» Marlena said. «Neither of us knew. We were separated at birth.»

«Different adoptions. Different families. Different states. I grew up in Vermont with parents who loved me.»

«And I never knew I had a sister until six months ago.»

She reached into her cardigan pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She unfolded it slowly and held it out to me. It was a DNA test result from one of those ancestry websites.

I’d seen commercials for them a hundred times. The paper showed a match. A 99.98% probability of a full sibling relationship with someone named Renata Monroe.

«I found her too late,» Marlena continued, her voice breaking. «By the time I tracked her down, she was already gone. I missed her by three years.»

«Three years, Sadie. I had a sister my whole life and I never got to meet her.»

I took the paper from her hands and stared at it. The numbers blurred as tears filled my eyes. This woman wasn’t a ghost.

She wasn’t a hallucination or a scam artist or some cruel trick. She was my mother’s other half. The piece of her that had been missing all along.

«The phone number,» I said. «How did you get her phone number?»

Marlena wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. «I contacted the phone company. I told them I was settling her estate and needed the number reactivated for records purposes.»

«They believed me. I just wanted something that connected me to her. I never meant to scare you.»

«I’ve been watching you for weeks, trying to find the courage to introduce myself. Tonight I saw your lights go off and I panicked. I called before I could stop myself. I’m so sorry.»

I looked at her face again, searching for my mother in her features. She was there. She was everywhere.

The sound of sirens broke the silence between us. Red and blue lights flashed through the front window, painting the walls in alternating colors. A few seconds later, there was a loud knock at the door, and I heard Aunt Delia’s voice calling my name.

I opened the door to find her standing there with two police officers behind her, her face pale and terrified.

«Sadie, are you okay? What’s going on? Who’s in there with you?»

I stepped aside so she could see Marlena standing in the living room. Delia froze in the doorway, her mouth falling open. She grabbed the doorframe to steady herself, and I watched the color drain from her face completely.

She looked like she had just seen a ghost, which I suppose she thought she had.

«Oh my God,» she whispered. «Renata?»

«No,» I said quietly. «Her name is Marlena. She’s Mom’s twin sister.»

What followed was the longest night of my life. The police officers took statements from all of us while Delia sat on the couch in stunned silence. Marlena explained everything again, showing the DNA results and the photograph she carried in her wallet.

It was an old picture, faded and worn at the edges. Two baby girls in matching yellow onesies, lying side by side in a hospital bassinet. On the back, someone had written in careful handwriting that I recognized immediately as my grandmother’s: Renata and Marlena. Together, always.

Delia couldn’t stop crying. She kept saying she had no idea, that their mother had never mentioned anything about a twin, that she couldn’t believe this secret had been buried for so long. I sat beside her and held her hand while she processed the shock.

I understood exactly how she felt because I was feeling it too. The officers left around four in the morning after determining that no crime had been committed, just a family reunion that had gone about it in the strangest possible way. Marlena apologized again for scaring me, and this time, I believed her.

I could see the regret in her eyes, the desperate loneliness of someone who had spent her whole life feeling incomplete without knowing why. In the days that followed, Marlena and I began the slow and careful work of getting to know each other. She told me about her life in Vermont, where she had worked as an elementary school teacher for 30 years before retiring.

She had been married once to a man named Richard, who died of a heart attack eight years ago. They never had children, something she said she always regretted. She showed me pictures of her house, her garden, her two cats named Pepper and Sage.