It was a bustling Monday morning. 29-year-old Caleb was sitting in his office, looking through his company’s annual report on his laptop. Suddenly, a janitor, a woman likely in her late 50s, walked in with cleaning supplies.

“Excuse me, Sir…I’m extremely sorry…I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ll just mop up the floor in five minutes,” she said as Caleb looked up and experienced the massive shock of his life — The woman standing in front of him bore an uncanny resemblance to his late mother, who had died 28 years ago…

“Oh my God…it’s unbelievable,” Caleb gasped. “It’s okay…please come in,” he said, his gaze stalking the woman as she marched across the office. “Uh, I don’t think I’ve seen you around before…but your face looks so familiar.”

The woman smiled and turned around. “My name is Michelle, Sir. I started working here only recently. This town is quite small…maybe you would’ve seen me somewhere. But I moved here just two weeks ago.”

“I’m Caleb,” he said as his brows furrowed with suspicion. “Michelle, I don’t understand why I get this strange feeling when I see your face…but maybe you’re right,” he added as he reached for his cup of coffee, only to accidentally spill it on his laptop.

“Damn…not again!” Caleb leaped back.

“Don’t worry, Sir…I’ll clean it up for you,” Michelle dropped the mop and hurried to Caleb’s table to clean the mess. She rolled up her sleeves and started wiping the laptop with a cloth. That’s when Caleb’s eyes fell on a peculiar scar on her left arm.

“There you go…your laptop is clean!” Michelle said as she turned to Caleb.

“This scar…Ha—how did you get it?” He asked.

“Oh, this scar…? Well, you may find it strange. But I don’t remember anything that happened to me over 20 years ago. I have amnesia…I don’t even remember my name. When I saw the name ‘Michelle’ on a billboard, I adopted it as my own…and I have no memory of how I got this scar.”

Caleb’s heart started to race. “And what about your relatives…and friends?” He asked Michelle while simultaneously looking at her left arm bearing the oval-shaped burn mark.

“I don’t have anybody!” Michelle disappointedly said. “Nobody came for me all these years…Not even when I was in the hospital. I lived a gypsy life and finally found a job here in this town.”

A strange sensation crawled up Caleb’s gut. He knew his mind was dealing with a bizarre theory. But Michelle’s scar and striking resemblance to his dead mother left him reeling. “Michelle, you won’t believe this. But you look a lot like my late mother, who I had only seen in an old photograph,” he revealed.

“What? I resemble your late mother? Oh dear…really?” Michelle stopped in her tracks.

“Yes…you look a lot like my mother…she died 28 years ago, according to my Dad,” replied Caleb. “She had the exact same scar like this. I know this is gonna sound crazy. But can we go to the hospital and take a DNA test together? I don’t know why I’m even saying this…but something is bothering me. Something doesn’t seem right…And I want to find out if there are any odds….”
Michelle pondered for a few seconds. Like Caleb, even she was curious to find out if they were related and agreed to take the test with him.

As they drove in Caleb’s car to the City Hospital, nothing but a deadly, grim silence prevailed between them. On the one hand, Caleb was unsettled about getting a positive result. He knew he would have to sort out a lot of things and connect so many dots if Michelle turned out to be his biological mother.

“But what if I’m just assuming things?” Caleb thought. “What if it’s just a coincidence…what if my mother is really dead…and Michelle is not my biological mother and just her lookalike?”

As Caleb drove across the bustling road and pulled over in the middle of thick traffic, he stared at Michelle in the rearview mirror, and her eyes looked eerily familiar.

Something about those eyes of hers forced Caleb to plunge into his memories. He sat back behind the wheel, recalling the fateful day he made a heartbreaking discovery about his mother while fixing the roof with his Dad, William…
12 years ago, when Caleb was 17 years old…

“And…like this! See! You just twist the claw hammer and pull out the rotten plank!” Caleb’s Dad, William, was teaching him how to get rid of old, rotting wooden planks. They were doing minor home repairs together that Saturday afternoon.

“That was a good plank…can be used as firewood!” William said as he gathered all the worn-out planks on the lawn. Caleb was bored of these never-ending fixes his Dad taught him every weekend.

“Dad, why can’t we just hire some carpenters?” he smirked. “…and pay them to do all this stuff? It’s so tiring…and boring.”
William chuckled as he plucked another plank out. “Champ, if we pay others money for the simple things we can do on our own, then we’ll go to rags like your Uncle Dexter. Moreover, we’ll become very lazy…again, like your Uncle Dexter! Now get back to work…And start pulling out the planks from the floor in the attic. We must replace them as well.”

“Yeah…whatever!” Caleb squared his shoulders. He climbed up the attic, and just as he removed one of the planks on the floor, he noticed a weathered piece of paper under it.

Curiosity got the better of Caleb as he picked it up. It was an old crumpled photograph of an unknown woman with a baby cradled in her arms.

“Weird…who is this woman in this picture? I haven’t seen her before…” wondered Caleb as he flipped the photograph and saw a signature on the back with the words: “Baby Caleb with Mommy. Happy Birthday, Sweetheart :)”

“Caleb with Mommy??” Caleb grew unsettled.

He was stunned by those words. It made no sense why his name was mentioned on the back of a stranger’s picture because, first of all, the woman in the photo did not look like his mother, Olivia. And then, she had a weird oval-shaped scar on her left arm Caleb had never seen on his mother Olivia’s arm.

Haunted by the unknown, Caleb took the photo and climbed down the attic, making his way to his Dad to find out.
“Dad, what is this? Who is she?” Caleb approached William, who was busy making pencil marks on the new wooden planks.

“What…?” William turned around with a start.

“I found this while removing the plank in the attic…Who is she?”

Anxiety surged into William’s eyes, and his face grew ashen…as though he had seen a ghost. “Wh—Where did you get that from?” He asked, uneasiness etched all over his face.

“Dad…I asked you what this is. Who is this woman…And what does it mean by ‘Caleb with Mommy’ written on the back of this photo? Is that baby in her arms…me?” Caleb retorted.
Willam was beyond shocked as he grabbed the picture from Caleb’s grip. He stared at it again…and again. Uneasiness cloaked his face, and William knew he could no longer hide the truth from his son.

“Come with me,” he dropped the hammer and marched to the kitchen.

Caleb hastily followed his Dad. William grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge and sat down at the dining table, anxiously tapping his fingers on the glass as he looked up at his son.

“Caleb, trust me when I say this,” William chugged a drink and said, his tone heavy with agony. “All my life…I only wished you nothing but good. I…I wanted you to be happy…wanted you to grow up into a successful man…achieve great things. I…and my wife, Olivia, we always wanted the best for you.”

Caleb was desperate to suppress the flood of tears. But his eyes betrayed him. “Your wife, Olivia? That means Olivia is not my mother?” He sadly asked.

William solemnly bowed his head. His silence answered Caleb’s question. But William found himself obliged to confess the truth that struck Caleb like a thunderbolt. “Yes, dear…Olivia is not your real mother. Your birth mother died 28 years ago…I…I’m sorry, son. I didn’t mean to—”

Caleb was paralyzed with shock by the revelation, and the truth seemed to have upturned everything he thought he knew about his mother. “How did she die?” He broke William’s silence, desperate to know more about his mother’s fate.

“A car accident…” William replied, his voice choked with grief. “It was nobody’s fault. Fate betrayed us…and your mother was destined to leave us that day. It was an unfortunate dark day in my life…one that I can never forget. You were just a baby. You needed a mother. I moved on with Olivia not because I wanted a wife. I wanted to bring you a mother.”

Caleb was shaken. But after hearing his Dad out, he took the news like a grown boy.
“Dad…I understand that you wanted the best for me. That you didn’t want me to go through that pain of losing my mother,” he said, placing his hand on William’s shoulder. “But you should’ve told me earlier…And I would’ve understood everything.”

William clutched Caleb’s hand tight, unable to hold back his tears.

“It’s okay, Dad. Can you take me to her grave? I would like to go there,” Caleb said.

“Why, of course, dear!” William agreed with a smile. “We will go there tomorrow, alright?”

“Sure!” Caleb said and walked away as William gulped his beer and sat back.
Caleb and his Dad arrived at the cemetery the following afternoon. The silence of the graves was haunting as the boy marched behind his Dad on the dilapidated sidewalk. Suddenly, William stopped before an overgrown tomb with the epitaph — Sarah J. — engraved on the crumbled tombstone.

“Well, hello, Sarah,” William said as he lit a cigarette. “Our son is here…he has come to visit you!”

Caleb knew there was no use in suppressing his emotions. So he let them pour out of his eyes. He fell to his knees and bitterly sobbed as he gingerly brushed his hands on the overgrown tombstone.

William walked away to his car, leaving his son alone at the grave. An hour passed, and Caleb still sat beside his mother’s tomb, talking to her about all things good and bad that had happened in his life in her absence.

“Goodbye, Mom,” he rose to leave. “I’m sorry again. Dad just told me about you. I’m still shocked…I’ll visit often. I promise.”
A loud honk of a car behind his SUV jolted Caleb to the moment. The traffic had cleared, and Michelle leaned forward from the backseat to see if everything was alright.