THE BOX UNDER HIS APPLE TREE
PART 2
For several seconds, I couldn’t breathe.
Inside the rusty metal box were dozens of photographs.
Not random photographs.
Photographs of me.
I picked up the first one with trembling fingers.
It showed me standing outside my childhood home.
I was only six years old.
I turned over another photograph.
There I was at eight.
Then twelve.
Then sixteen.
There were pictures of me at school, walking home, riding my bicycle, even sitting on the front steps of the house where I grew up.
My hands began shaking violently.
Why had Mr. Whitmore been photographing me for decades?
Then I noticed something underneath the photographs.
A small hospital bracelet.
My name was written across it.
The date was forty years earlier.
I stared at it.
That date was impossible.
I wasn’t even born yet.
Then I found a second envelope.
My name was written on the front.
I opened it with trembling hands.
Inside was a single sentence.
“Your parents were not your biological parents.”
My entire body went numb.
I read it again.
And again.
Then I found another photograph.
This one showed a young woman holding a newborn baby.
The baby had a tiny bracelet around her wrist.
The same bracelet I had just found.
The woman was crying.
Standing beside her was a much younger Mr. Whitmore.
I recognized the woman immediately.
It was my mother.
But the baby wasn’t my younger sibling.
It was me.
I sat down hard in the dirt.
My entire childhood suddenly felt like a carefully constructed lie.
I remembered all the strange things my mother had said whenever I asked about my birth.
Why there were no baby photographs of me.
Why she always became nervous whenever I asked which hospital I was born in.
Why she never allowed me to see certain old family documents.
And why Mr. Whitmore had always looked at me with an expression I could never understand.
I searched through the box again.
At the very bottom was a handwritten journal.
The first page contained only one sentence.
“I promised your mother I would protect you, even if you hated me for it.”
I turned the page.
The truth was worse than I could have imagined.
Forty years earlier, my mother had been involved in an accident.
She had been driving home from the hospital with me as an infant when another vehicle struck her car.
She survived.
But the driver of the other vehicle did not.
Mr. Whitmore had witnessed everything.
And according to his journal, that accident had not been an accident.
Someone had deliberately caused it.
Someone who wanted me dead before I was old enough to know who I really was.
My heart pounded.
I kept reading.
Then I reached the final entry.
“I never told you because the person responsible remained close to you for all these years.”
My fingers went cold.
I looked toward my house.
My husband was inside.
My children were inside.
And suddenly I understood why Mr. Whitmore had written:
“Don’t tell anyone about this.”
Because whoever had caused that accident might still be watching me.
Then I noticed one final photograph at the bottom of the box.
It showed Mr. Whitmore standing beside my mother.
And between them stood another person.
A person I had seen almost every day for the last fifteen years.
I dropped the photograph.
Because the person standing beside them…
was my husband.