The Unfinished Puzzle

Ethan Bennett had always enjoyed challenges. He used to find comfort in assembling complex visuals and seeing the pieces come together. He was young. But life turned him away from such basic pleasures as he grew older.

At thirty-two, his existence consisted only of long hours at the company, business meetings, and empty evenings spent skimming his phone, and he experienced a sense of incomprehensible emptiness.

Why he felt as though something was lacking eluded him. Until the letter arrived.

This is a basic envelope without a return address. Inside, there is one note: “It’s time to finish the puzzle.”

No signature, no justification was evident. Those seven words were softly familiar but disturbing.

A memory pulled at him: the attic of his grandmother, an ancient wooden box, a half-finished puzzle.

Why had he omitted to mention it? And why was someone pushing him to finish it years later?

His appetite for knowledge bit him. He grabbed his keys that evening as rain tapped on his window and headed back to his grandmother’s house.

Ethan walked into the house and it was quiet and chilly. The furniture was covered in dust; the air smelled of old wood and lost time.

Heart pumping with every creak, he ascended the attic stairs. He had no idea what he was expecting—maybe the puzzle would have solved itself or the box would have disappeared.

But precisely where he had left it years ago was there.

An ancient wooden box with a slightly ajar carved lid.

He brought it downstairs and laid it gently on the table. Deeply breathing, he raised the lid.

Inside, the half-completed puzzle pieces lay undisturbed, still in their half-finished configuration.

It first appeared to be just another typical scene: a house, a shadowy road, a hazy figure standing close to a car.

Something about it, though, felt improper.

As he took up a piece and put it in place, his fingers shook.

There was an odd chill down his back.

And memories long buried started to ruckle.

Every piece he set enhanced a sense of familiarity. Why did the house in the puzzle seem so personal?

He snapped in still another fragment. The hazy figure becomes more definite.

a little boy.

His stomach whirled.

That lad stood in for him.

With shaking hands, he put in still another piece. An automobile emerged, the road illuminated by headlights.

still another article.

A man tensely standing next to the car had a shadow on his face.

Furthermore.

A woman yelling from the porch of the house stretches out.

Ethan’s breathing seized in his throat.

He knew this spot.

But this was not a recollection he had ever been informed about.

According to his parents, he vanished into the forest once a little boy and was discovered hours later by an unknown man returning him home.

Still, this was not a haphazard occurrence.

This riddle was exposing another item. Something covert.

Something his mind had lost.

Alternatively, something it had been compelled to ignore.

Ethan felt a chilly sweat cover his body.

That evening he was not lost.

He was picked up.

His mind was inundated with fractured images—flashes of a strange house, the aroma of heated cinnamon, and the sound of a kind voice guiding him to sleep.

He could not identify the voice but still knew.

The woman solving the riddle was not alien.

The true mother of him was she.

His father had not pulled him out. He had stolen him.

The riddle transcended mere recollection.

It was a confessing statement.

Ethan sat still while his pulse hammered in his ears.

He had spent his whole life thinking lies were OK.

According to his father, his biological mother had dropped him off. That she wanted nothing of him.

If so, then, why was she in the riddle?

Why was she grabbing for him, pleading with him to remain?

His breath stopped as he went again over the puzzle box. His fingertips followed the wood, then he sensed something buried behind a loose panel.

He pipped it open to see a yellowed picture.

Turning it over, his hand shook.

Looking back at him, a woman identified as the same one from the jigsaw.

Her face was younger, her hair shorter, but her eyes were just the same.

And in exquisite handwriting on the rear of the picture, was a note: “Ethan, I shall always adore you. I never stopped peering.

Tears blazed in his eyes.

His father had lie-through. His whole existence rested on a stolen childhood.

Now he had to know the truth.

Ethan searched for signs of a past he never knew existed by poring days into old records.

Following many dead ends, he at last discovered it—a name.

Whitemore, Sarah.

a mom who over thirty years ago reported her missing kid.

A woman who never came across him.

An expectant woman waiting for him.

His hands shook as he entered the number indicated.

It resounded.

once again.

Twice here.

Clicked.

There was a quiet, reluctant reply.

“Hello?”

Ethan stopped momentarily unable to talk.

Then, in a fractured voice, he spoke the one word that transformed everything.

“Mom??”

In silence.

Then a choked weep.

And via the phone, a voice he had only heard in dreams at last said the words he had yearned for his entire life.

“My child… is it you?”

Ethan had tears running down his face.

Indeed, he said in a whisper. It is me.

Ethan stood at a little white house on the brink of a peaceful town days later. His heart thumping, the door creaked open.

And she was there as well.

The puzzling woman. The woman is captured in the picture. The lady who never ceased looking for him.

The actual mother of him.

Neither of them moved for a little instant. She then started to reach out.

Ethan also entered the arms of his mother, the first in more than thirty years.

At last, the jigsaw was finished.

And he was hence as well.

Ethan faced his father, but no apology could turn the past around.

Finding his mother, however, provided him the truth—something he had never known before.

Some riddles will take a lifetime to figure out. Years pass while some components remain absent.

Still, the truth always makes a comeback.

And occasionally, it takes an incomplete jigsaw to fit everything together.