New Year Second Chance

My lips curve into a smile. This box was my mother’s?

Too bad this picture was torn. It would have looked good in a frame. My mom looks so happy and pretty in it, even though she’s sporting a huge belly. But at least my mom kept it. Who knows? What with all the new technology available, maybe I can have it restored to its original glory.

Excited, I go through the rest of the items inside the box. A pair of pink mittens with the letter J knitted on them. A positive pregnancy test. She kept that? A baby ultrasound picture. And more photos of my mother, photos from when she was younger, probably before she met my dad because I don’t see him in any of them. In fact, she’s alone in all of these photos.

Or so I think until I get to the bottom of the pile and see the one with her and another man. A man who… looks like Dax?

His hair is brown, not black, but it’s thick and wavy like Dax’s. His eyes are ebony like Dax’s. And there’s something about his smile that reminds me of Dax.

Whoever it is, he and my mom must have been close, judging from the way he has his arm around her. She has her arm around his waist, too. And he’s shirtless, displaying a tattoo of roses on his chest. My mom’s wearing a shirt that says I love London.

London? My mom went to London? She never told me that. She told me about her trip to France when she was a kid, and her trip to India with friends when she was in college, but she never said anything about London.

I set the photo aside. There are two more things left in the box – a small red telephone booth that tells me she definitely went to London and a ring studded with diamonds and rubies.

I hold the latter up to the light. The gems dazzle. Stunning. Could it have been given by the man in the photo? Is that why I never saw her wear it? He must have been special, though, or she wouldn’t have kept the ring. She must have been special to him, too, or he wouldn’t have given her a ring like this. It must have cost a fortune. Was it an engagement ring? It has diamonds. But why the rubies, too?

Rubies. Just like the ones Chloe wore on her ears. The ones Dax said his father gives to all the women he sleeps with.

His father.

I look at the picture of my mother and the man again. Could this be Dax’s father? He lives in London, right?

My eyebrows go up. Wait a minute. My mom went out with Dax’s father. And she slept with him? Whoa. When did all that happen?

I take a closer look at the picture and see a date stamp on the bottom left corner.

02 July 1993

What? Weren’t my mom and dad married five years before that? My mom had an affair? Also, that’s a year before I was born.

Before I was born.

My eyes grow wide. No way.

I hold my breath as I pick up the ultrasound picture. The date on it confirms that it’s me five months before I was born. It was my first picture, a special one. So what is it doing here in a box in the attic? Why isn’t it part of the photo album downstairs? Come to think of it, the pictures in the first pages of that album were taken when I was a toddler. There were none earlier. Did I even live in this house when I was a baby? Or was I somewhere else?

I pick up the picture of my pregnant mother. Now I know why this one’s torn. Maybe my mother tore it out of frustration when she realized she had made the mistake of getting pregnant with another man’s child.

I drop the pictures on the floor and clutch my chest, which suddenly feels tight.

Does my dad know? I mean Arthur Holt. I guess he isn’t really my dad even though I always thought he was.

He said he and my mother weren’t a perfect couple. Was he talking about this? Well, if he did know about my mother’s affair and he still took her back, he must have really loved her. I can only imagine how hard that was. Even harder to love a child that wasn’t his own.

But what if he doesn’t know? What if Mom never told him? What if he never saw this box?

I don’t know what’s worse – the fact that my mother had an affair that my father didn’t know of, or the shocking possibility that Dax’s father could be my father, too.

~

“No way.” Emily shakes her head adamantly after I tell her in her office. “There’s no way your mother had an affair.”