I Ended My Pregnancy in College—Years Later, Two Little Girls Appeared at My Window Every Night Crying, “Mom, Why Didn’t You Let Us Live?”

Chapter  5

Six years passed like water through my fingers.

Julia and Junia grew into the most beautiful little girls in our neighborhood—bright-eyed, quick to laugh, with dimples that made strangers stop and coo. They were peaceful children. Sometimes they cried when they were hungry or uncomfortable, but that was all. No cold wind in the bedroom. No faces at the window. No whispers in the dark.

David’s mother came by almost every day, helping with laundry and food, doting on her granddaughters. David, who had once looked at me like a stranger, slowly became my husband again. He laughed with me. He held me at night. The shadow that had hung over our marriage began to lift.

On Sundays, we filled three pews in church—David, his mother, and our two little girls in their matching white dresses. Julia would sing loudly and slightly off-key, and Junia would tug at my sleeve to ask when the sermon would be over. Other mothers smiled at us with envy. “You are so blessed, Elizabeth,” they would say. “Two beautiful girls at once.” I would smile and nod, and for a few hours at a time, I let myself believe I was the woman they saw.

One evening, while I was rocking Julia to sleep, David leaned against the doorframe and smiled. “Elizabeth, you see your life now? You almost ran mad in this house because of your bad thoughts. Look at these children—are they not human beings? They are so sweet and peaceful.”

I sighed with relief and kissed the top of Julia’s head. “Thank God, David. Maybe it was truly just my imagination. The past is gone.”

I truly believed that.

Then they turned six.

The morning of their sixth birthday, I set up a small party with cake and balloons, and the twins blew out their candles and clapped their hands. Everyone cheered. Everyone laughed.

But when the guests had gone and the candles were snuffed out, I noticed something strange in their eyes.

They stopped smiling.

Not in an angry way. Not in a sad way. It was something colder—something I could not put words to. Their eyes looked older than their faces. As if someone else was looking out of them.

I told myself I was imagining things. I had imagined so much before.

But the phone calls started the very next week.

“Mrs. David? This is the school. You need to come immediately.”

The first time, Julia had pushed a classmate down the stairs. Just pushed her, the teacher said, and watched her tumble, and did not cry when the girl screamed.

When I knelt beside the little girl in the sickbay, pressing a cold cloth to her swollen ankle, Julia stood in the doorway and watched with her hands behind her back. She did not look sorry. She looked curious—like a scientist studying something interesting that happened to be a child crying in pain. When I asked her why she did it, she tilted her head and said, “She was in my way.” Just that. Six years old, and my daughter had spoken like a stranger wearing my child’s skin.

The second time, Junia had locked a little boy in the school storeroom and hidden the key. The boy had screamed for two hours before a cleaner heard him.

The third time, they both covered a girl’s hair with glue in the middle of class, and when the girl cried, the twins clapped their hands and laughed.

Every two days, I was inside the principal’s office, begging, crying, pleading. “Please, Ma, forgive them. They are just children. They will change.”

The principal, a strict woman with glasses that caught the light like mirrors, would sigh heavily and shake her head. “Mrs. David, we have tried for your sake. But your children are dangerous to other students. I am sorry, but we cannot keep them here anymore.”

And then came the final straw.

“What did they do this time?” I asked, my voice shaking.

The principal stood up, and her face was red with anger. “Your daughters went to the bushes behind the school yard. They gathered dangerous devil beans—the highly scratchy plants. While their class teacher, Mrs. Blessing, went to the restroom, these little children poured devil beans inside her jacket!”

I felt the floor tilt beneath me.

“Mrs. Blessing is in the hospital right now!” the principal continued, her voice rising. “She tore all her clothes off in the middle of the staff room, screaming and scratching her skin until she bled. She looked like a complete mad person! And your children—your children stood in the corner, laughing and clapping their hands! Take your twins and leave my school right now!”

I drove home in a daze, with Julia and Junia sitting quietly in the back seat, their hands folded in their laps, not a single tear on their faces.

I looked at them in the rearview mirror. Two beautiful little girls with their mother’s dimples and their father’s eyes.

And I understood, with a cold certainty that settled into my bones, that something had finally woken up inside them.

That night, I stood at their bedroom door and watched them sleep—innocent as angels, peaceful as lambs.

And I could not stop the question from rising in my chest: *If their faces are the faces of the girls I wronged, and their cruelty is the cruelty of the punishment I was promised, then what are my daughters truly growing up to become?*