30 Years Gone

The Smiths adopted Xander and for years treated him as their own. That ended when Hayden, the biological son, came home. Hayden set him up more than once, injuring himself badly enough to damage his own legs and letting the blame fall on Xander, and the family turned. Xander volunteered for the Time Capsule Project his eldest sister was running, which was short of participants, and arranged to donate his corneas so his second sister, who is blind, could see. He thought of it as paying back the years of shelter, and he wanted to go back to the day he was adopted and choose differently. He had three days left in the house. Hayden kept at him the whole time, the rest of the family joined in, his pet rabbit was killed, and his eighteenth birthday came and went without anyone remembering. He marked it by himself and then went to the laboratory. What the family found out afterward was that Xander had been their real son all along. They waited outside the laboratory for thirty years.