When You Know

16 - "Hi, Bree. This is Sadie."

I know I said I wasn't afraid anymore, but that didn't stop me from feeling a little anxious while I watched Mum search the internet for a while trying to find Bree.

When she left me with Mum, Bree stopped answering her phone when Mum or any of my family called, and she had blocked everyone on social media so they couldn't find her. She just vanished, and the only contact we had from her was when a parcel would arrive in the mail addressed to Mum on the outside, and me on the inside, containing a present and some money for my birthday or Christmas. There was never a card or a message beyond a note that said 'For Madden.'

When I was six, we stopped getting those packages. I don't know why. They had continued to be delivered to Nanny Mary's house the whole time because Bree wouldn't have known Mum and I had moved out on our own, but Nanny Mary would just bring it along with her when she came over for my birthday dinners. Mum was always very up front about who they were from, though I probably only started understanding it when I was four or five. I remember she used to say, 'This is a present from your mother, Bree. She's away travelling somewhere at the moment so she couldn't make it back for your birthday this year, Madden; but she sent this for me to give you instead.' It seemed a little ironic that now we were the ones wanting to travel somewhere, and we actually needed her here for once in order to do it.

Mum didn't even bother trying to call her old number because she already knew that it had been disconnected considering she had tried so many times when Bree first left. She had even called it from different phone numbers just in case Bree would pick up from an unknown number instead of Mum's. She didn't, and eventually it just stopped ringing through altogether.

So, Mum started looking on Facebook instead. She found nothing under Bree Carter, nor her actual name Aubrey Carter. She then started searching through the friends list of people Bree used to know when she was a kid, but still couldn't find anything.

"Sadie, even if she changed her name, if she blocked you on her account way back then, chances are you might still be, meaning you won't be able to see anything she's posted or been tagged in. Why don't you search from my account instead, because she doesn't know me to have blocked me? You might have a better chance that way," suggested Jet when Mum continued to grow progressively more frustrated by her failing search.

Sure enough, Jet's suggestion was an excellent one, and Mum was able to find her almost straight away. She felt stupid that she hadn't thought of that, but was grateful for Jet's help in pointing it out. "Trust a teenager to know how to use social media more effectively than an old woman," she said with a laugh.

Mum brushed off Jet's claims that she wasn't even that old, and went by the same theory of looking at Bree's old friends' profiles, coming across an Aubrey Greene who looked very similar to the young girl I had seen in photos.

Mum confirmed that it was her, but stalked her account a little to try to find out where she was and what she had been doing with the last eleven years of her life. She still lived in Melbourne, just a lot closer to the city than we did. It said she owned and worked as a make-up artist at a salon that did both hair and beauty things, and there were pictures of her with so much make-up on I wondered what she actually looked like underneath all that crap on her face.

People had always assumed that I was Mum's biological child, not my aunt, because we actually look so similar in our features and personality. I loved when people said that about us. The woman in these photos and I look nothing alike, and I found myself wondering whether they had all lied to me my whole life about her being my mother, because I saw no resemblance at all, except for our hair. Bree's hair was a slightly lighter brown like my own, though mine did form ringlets at the ends like Mum's, only hers were much curlier from root to tip and a rich chestnut colour. Everything else was completely different. Blue eyes, brown eyes. Pale and freckled, tanned (though admittedly, that looked like it could be fake). Round face, skinny face. Fuller nose, thin nose.