Last week, a Facebook post reunited an Iowa woman with the niece she thought she'd never see again.
But here's the twist: The woman's niece turned out to be her friend of several years.
Abbey Donohoe met Paula O'Brien at a party in 2009 where many people told them they looked like they could be sisters.
Donohoe grew up with a loving foster family, while O'Brien remembered vividly the loss of a baby girl her older brother put up for adoption 29 years ago.
“It stayed with me all my life,” O’Brien told the Quad-City Times. “I just always had this sense that she was out there. We’ve always observed her birthday, always had plans to find her. I wondered, ‘Does she look like me?’”
To commemorate the day that the little girl was given to her new family, O'Brien shared the story on Facebook. "Hope you can take a moment to read this and be thankful for the selfless sacrifice of adoption," she posted on her Facebook wall, along with her would-be niece's birthdate.
Upon seeing that the birthday was the same as her own, Donohoe was struck by the possibility that she could be the niece O'Brien had never met. "Did I really just accidentally find my birth family?" she says of the moment she made the connection.
According to KWQC, Donohoe messaged O'Brien, and after comparing notes they were able to confirm that they were, in fact, aunt and niece.
Donohoe now has plans to meet her birth parents and the rest of O'Brien's family. The O'Briens couldn't be happier.
“It feels like I got a little sister. This is not a niece, we’re closer than that. The beauty about it, too, is that we are so alike and get along so well. It’s a huge blessing.”