Two longtime friends—who were often mistaken for each other—found out they are actually biological sisters.

CNN reports that 32-year-old Cassandra Madison and 31-year-old Julia Tinetti would joke about being sisters after they first met in 2013, when they both worked at a restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut. Upon meeting, they found out they were both adopted from the Dominican Republic and had Dominican flag tattoos.

“We hit it off right away. There was no trying to force a friendship or anything,” Madison told CNN. “Our personalities are very similar, so it was very easy for us to just start hanging out.”

They even looked at their adoption forms to see if they might really be related, but the papers said they had different mothers. “So we said, ‘OK, never mind, forget it, then we’re not,’ and we just moved on with our lives,” Madison said. “But we still played into us being sisters even though we knew that we weren’t. Well, we thought we weren’t.”

Madison moved to Virginia in 2015 and the two stayed in touch over Facebook. She still wanted to meet her biological parents, so her adoptive mother gave her a DNA test kit in 2018. Though her biological mom had died in 2015, she reconnected with her dad and found out she had seven siblings.

Last year, when Madison and Tinetti reunited, they found out that Tinetti’s adoption papers were wrong. They had been switched with Tinetti’s best friend, Molly, who was also adopted from the Dominican Republic on the same day. The mother was listed as the same on Molly’s forms and Madison’s forms, but Madison’s DNA results revealed that they were cousins. That’s when Madison’s biological dad said they had given up another daughter for adoption.

Madison had Tinetti take a DNA test, which confirmed they were sisters. “I was like, ‘This is it,’ and I waited for probably like 10 minutes before I even opened it, because I was trying to prepare myself for what was going to be there,” Tinetti said.

Tinetti recently connected with her biological father and siblings. “It was like seeing myself in these people,” she said. “It’s like, ‘OK, well, now I know where I come from,’ you know what I mean? It has always been a mystery for me.”