AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We spend a little longer examining the space overall before narrowing down our search to a bunch of boxes.
My belief is that even if we can’t find what that man was looking for, we could still find something of interest.
A clue. Something.
What makes this house so interesting again?
We don’t know… yet.
He goes through one of the boxes while I lift the lid and dig into another one. I feel bad for sifting through other people’s stuff, especially the sentimental kind that brings up memories.
More so since this is Raven’s family.
I wish I didn’t have to do this.
I wish for many things, but sadly they can’t happen.
“Found anything?” I ask, sitting cross-legged on the floor, with Grayson standing, examining a photograph.
“Do you know this man?” he asks.
He hands me an old photograph from before this kind of stuff only got stored in a digital form.
I recognize my father and Raven’s father. Major Wilson. I’ve seen his pictures in my father’s house.
The third man, though. No. I don’t think so. It’s hard to say how he looks.
Frankly, they all look the same at a glance, when wearing their uniforms, gloves, and military hats.
I check the back of the picture. No name, no date. This must’ve been their graduation date, so he was someone my father had met at the US military academy.
I pull up my phone and take a picture of the photograph before giving it back to him.
He spends the next half an hour going over old documents and photographs that ultimately amount to nothing, providing no additional information.
At the same time, I check a stack of family photos dated back to when Raven’s father was a little boy.
The photographs are heavy with nostalgia, coming from a time when people wanted to preserve their memories in paper form and had fewer pictures than today.
And then I also find myself stalling, lingering too much on Raven’s pictures from when she was younger.
She was a cute little girl and a weird teen with piercing eyes, a pout that reeked of determination, and two braided pigtails.
The way she looks at the camera, refusing to smile, makes me grin. I don’t know who pissed her off that day, but the younger version of her surely reminds me of the woman she’s become.
I love this woman…
I love this woman… Why do I lie to her then?
I should be here with her and Grayson, not entering her place without her knowledge. Not going through her things like a scoundrel.
Why do I lie to her?
Because I’m afraid of what I might find.
I have to know the truth before telling her everything.
I wish I could find recent pictures of her. I wish I could carry a picture of her too.
