I drank some of the lychee tea and braced myself. Caro must’ve gotten the photos from our father. The envelope held more than two dozen prints, a collection of four-by-sixes and five-by-sevens, with a pair of larger portraits mixed in. There were a couple of Teddy on his own, and one of Caro with her son playing on a golden beach, but most of the images were much older. She’d included a photo of our parents on their wedding day, standing in front of a Belfast church I couldn’t remember the name of. Our mother looked beautiful, her face gentle and serene. Our father appeared smug, clearly proud of tricking this sweet woman into marrying him. I’d literally chopped him out of the one old photo I had, but I didn’t have it in me to reach for the scissors after a funeral.

I keep thinking of Mom, and how you never believe you’re going to end up like one of your parents, until you do.

There was a portrait of our mother as a teenager, and one of seven-year-old me in my first gi at the Higashi School of Karate. There were birthdays and Christmases, ending with the one when I was fifteen. After that, there were no photos of me. That was no surprise. For a stretch of almost four years, my mother was the only family member I spoke to—or more accurately, the only one who spoke to me. The surprise was that there was a lone shot of Caro that had to be from those years of radio silence. In it, she stood on a staircase wearing a short dress of pale-pink lace, her arm around a man who was clearly not her husband. He was tall and blond and ruggedly handsome. I would’ve guessed he was Caro’s prom date, except he looked like he was in his thirties. On the back of that print, in my sister’s elegant script, were the words With Ben, at the Clarkson/Northcutt house in High Falls, New York. There was no explanation, and I wondered if Caro had mixed it in by mistake.

After spreading all the photos on the futon, I realized Theo wasn’t in any of them. It was as if Caro had written her husband out of her life. I knew he was away a lot for work, and Caro never seemed to care. But his absence suddenly felt all wrong.

If you’re reading this, I’m already dead.