Linda stepped out of the bedroom wearing the emerald-green dress, smiling.
But the moment she saw the photograph in my hand, she stopped.
Her smile vanished instantly.
From the look on her face, I knew she understood exactly what I had found.
“Jason…”
“What is this?”
Linda didn’t answer.
I raised the photograph.
“Why do you have a childhood photo of me hidden in your couch?”
Her face went pale.
I turned the photograph over again.
“And why is my full name written on the back?”
Linda slowly sat down in the chair across from me.
“I was going to tell you.”
That sentence made everything worse.
“Tell me what?”
She closed her eyes.
“That our meeting wasn’t entirely accidental.”
For a few seconds, I didn’t even understand what she meant.
“Tinder wasn’t an accident?”
She shook her head.
“No.”
I laughed, but there was nothing amused about the sound.
“So you were specifically looking for me?”
Linda said nothing.
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
I put the photograph on the table.
My father, Mark, had died when I was eight years old.
My mother had always told me it was an accident.
After his death, we rarely spoke about him at home.
A few years later, my mother remarried.
When I was twenty, she passed away too.
I had always believed my parents’ past was a chapter that had closed long ago.
But the handwriting on the back of that photograph belonged to my father.
I recognized it.
I still had several old cards he had written tucked away at home.
“You knew my father?”
Linda slowly nodded.
“I worked for him.”
I had never heard that before.
“Where?”
“At his company. I was an assistant in the accounting department.”
Linda had only been twenty-two at the time.
My father owned a small auto-parts business. I didn’t remember much about it because I had been a child.
Linda told me that several weeks before his death, my father had noticed something wrong with the company’s finances.
Money was disappearing from the business accounts.
At first, he thought it was an accounting mistake.
Then he discovered several falsified documents.
They were connected to his business partner.
I expected Linda to say the name of some stranger.
Instead, she said,
“That man was your father’s brother, Richard.”
I froze.
Uncle Richard.
The man who had helped our family for years after my father’s death.
He brought me birthday and Christmas gifts.
He took me to baseball games.
My mother always said he had been the one person who stood by us after my father died.
“You’re telling me my father suspected him?”
“He didn’t just suspect him. He had documents.”
Linda stood up and walked into her home office.
She returned carrying a small metal box.
“You’ve had this the entire time?”
