The Shadow and the Missing Son

In Farsi, Sayeh means shadow. Her father gave her the name so she’d always follow him, always stay close, and never leave. She has during her whole life trying know to live up to it, without ever asking what it might cost her.
Then, on an ordinary afternoon in her own backyard, thirteen-years-old Sayeh falls through a hole she can’t explain and lands in a bazaar in Tehran (Iran), seventy-six years in the past. She’s taken in by a king who already knows her name before she says it, a palace
full of people who won’t answer her questions, and a boy from a gas station who turns out to be a prince and none of them will tell her
why she’s really there. Decades in the future, a woman named Khanom Joon will spend the rest of her life searching for a son who vanished without a trace. No note. No wreckage. No explanation. And somehow out falls to a thirteen-year-old girl who doesn’t even belong in this century to find out what happened to him, before the trail disappears completely. She’s the last one who can still change how the story ends. If she’s brave enough to find out how.
A short story inspired by true events in the author’s own family