Page 70 of Deacon

Jade picked up the first one.

Her mother stared back at her from another life.

Lila looked somewhere around Jade’s age, maybe a little older, with longer hair and an open smile Jade had rarely seen in photographs. Uncle Matty stood beside her wearing the same crooked grin he still used whenever he thought he was charming.

A dark-haired boy stood beside him.

Jade had never seen him before.

He had one arm slung around Matty’s shoulders, and both boys were laughing at whoever held the camera while Lila stood beside them trying to look annoyed and failing completely. Something about the stranger snagged Jade’s attention long enough that she reached for another photograph.

This one had been taken beside a football field.

Matty and the same boy stood in uniform, grass-stained and sweaty, helmets hanging from their hands. Matty faced the camera.

The other boy looked at Lila.

Jade’s attention shifted to her mother.

Lila was looking back at him.

The expression between them had nothing to do with friendship.

Jade reached for another picture, then another, finding the same three faces threaded through years. They were younger near the lake in one, Matty and the dark-haired boy shoving at each other while Lila laughed nearby. In another, her mother sat in the grass with a book while the boy looked back at her over his shoulder.

The pictures changed as they grew older, and the way they looked at each other changed with them. Childhood familiarity gave way to something heavier in each photograph, their attention drifting toward each other even when the camera was pointed somewhere else. Jade’s pulse picked up as she moved through the stack, then her fingers stopped on the first picture of a motorcycle.

The same boy sat astride a bike, older now, one boot planted on the ground. Lila sat behind him with her arms wrapped around his waist and her cheek close to his shoulder.

Jade stared at her mother’s face.

She had seen Lila happy thousands of times. Her mother laughed with Matty, sang badly while cooking, smiled at Jade across school auditoriums and birthday tables.

This smile belonged to somebody else, open and unguarded in a way Jade had never seen before. Lila looked young and completely in love, and when Jade brought the photograph closer, her attention shifted to the man beside her. Dark hair, strong brow, straight nose, the beginning of a smirk at his mouth. Then she caught the angle of his jaw and the shape of his cheekbones, and recognition settled in slowly enough to hurt.

She turned toward the dark bedroom window and caught her own reflection in the glass, then looked back at the photograph.

Her breath left her.

“Oh.”

The sound barely made it past her lips.

She could see herself.

The resemblance wasn’t perfect or dramatic enough to belong in some movie reveal. It was smaller than that and somehow more convincing. The shape around the eyes. A familiar angle through the lower half of the face. Pieces Jade had spent her whole life assuming belonged only to her.

Her vision blurred.

She blinked, but the tears came anyway.

This had to be him.

Her father had never been some faceless mistake or passing stranger. He had been there through her mother’s childhood. Through Uncle Matty’s. He had filled summers and football games and afternoons at the lake.

There were years inside this box.

And her mother had kept every one of them.