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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I take a deep breath and pass the photos to my dad. I suppose part of him knew when Ingrid wouldn’t meet his gaze the story the pictures would tell.

He looks at each one, taking a heavier breath with each shuffle.

“I’m sorry,” Ingrid says. “I almost wish we hadn’t found them.”

I am looking at my dad when it hits me. If my mom had an affair with this man, then he could be the same man she had an affair with before I was born.

The guy in the photos.

He could be my dad.

I snag one of the photos back. I was too preoccupied with the idea of the two kissing that I failed to look closely at the gentlemen.

It is a profile picture of the man, his lips pressed to my mother’s, but there is no mistaking it.

The man wasn’t a congressman.

He was a senator.

Senator David Sullivan.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“What?” Ingrid asks.

I think back to David Sullivan’s picture. His gray-blue eyes, the same gray-blue eyes his son had. The same gray-blue eyes I had.

President Sullivan and I might be brothers.

:15

Ingrid and my father are both looking at me. Waiting for me to explain my outburst.

I look at my father. What am I supposed to tell him? Am I supposed to say, “Listen, I know you just found out your wife was having an affair, and I think now would be a great time to also divulge that you are not my biological father”?

I couldn’t do it.

Instead, I say, “The man in the pictures, do you know who he is?”

Ingrid shakes her head. “Billy and I tried to match him up with our list of congressmen, but we couldn’t.”

“That’s because he wasn’t a congressman. He was a senator. It’s David Sullivan. The President’s father.”

“The President’s father?” Ingrid blurts, then picks up one of the pictures. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” I say. “He and my mother were working together on the Sleep Control Program.”

I give a small summary of his career, abduction, election to senator, then his untimely death in the World Trade Center.

“If they worked together,” my dad says, “then they might have had an affair the entire time we were married.”

“I suppose,” I say, though I was nearly certain this was true. Perhaps even before they were married.

“Do you think the President knows?” Ingrid asks.

“I don’t know, but it would explain why he had you looking into the murder. Maybe his dad told him. Confided in him.”

“What? That they were being blackmailed by some little girl and they kidnapped her, tortured her, and then killed her?”

My dad takes a deep breath and says, “After Jennifer’s murder, David Sullivan stayed with his family, but your mother left.”