If my mother was taking the photograph, then someone else had been holding the newborn in the picture I had assumed showed my mother.
Someone who looked enough like her that none of us had questioned it.
Douglas stared at me.
And suddenly I remembered something I hadn’t thought about since childhood.
A locked cedar box in my mother’s bedroom.
A photograph I had once found inside it when I was eight.
Two teenage girls standing beside each other.
Identical faces.
I had asked my mother who the other girl was.
She had snatched the photograph from my hand.
Then she told me something I had completely forgotten until this moment.
“That was my sister.”
My mother’s sister.
A woman no one in our family ever mentioned.
A woman I had been told died before I was born.
I slowly lowered the phone.
Douglas saw the answer on my face.
