Hunter continues leafing through the photos until he gets to the bottom, the last picture. Trying to take all this in. It is a picture of Blake and Annie. “Son of a bitch.”

David comes back and hands Hunter the photo of a woman holding a baby. “Who’s this?” Hunter asks.

Chuckling, David says, “Told you. That’s you and your mother at the hospital before you went home.”

Hunter is lost. The woman holding him is different from the woman he remembers from his childhood. What little he could remember is different from the photos his father had kept for him.

“You sure this is my mother?”

“Yeah, I remember them dating and getting married. I was there when you were born.”

“I’ve never seen this lady before.”

“What? Didn’t your dad have wedding pictures or birth pictures?”

“Come to think of it, no. I mean, growing up, there was a woman who I was told was my mother. There were pictures of them together, but no birth pictures. And none of this woman here.”

This is too much to take in. Hunter’s father dying in a mysterious house fire. Dating or seeing a woman no one knew anything about. This box of pictures, and now Hunter doesn’t even know who his mother was. But he has these pictures of people. People he can hunt down. Speak with. Start putting names and faces together—figure out who his father really was. What he’d been hiding all these years.

“Hunter, I’m sorry,” his uncle says. “You know I was absent for a few years out on the Louisiana fishing line. Gone for long stretches pulling in those red snappers and speckled trout. Not sure what your father was up to. This is crazy.”

Later, phoning Olivia, he tells her what he’s discovered and that it will be a while before he comes back home. It seems he has a bigger journey ahead of him: finding his real mother and whoever killed his father.

JACK

JACK

A man with three days of stubble and an AK-47 leads Jack from his room, down a stone-floored hallway, through a sunroom full of exotic plantings, to the courtyard he saw earlier from his window. Now he stands before a feast. A table big enough to play Ping-Pong on is laden with grilled steaks, sausage on a bed of white rice and black beans topped with fried eggs. Sliced avocados, fried plantain with sweet cream, cornmeal flatbread. A mound of buñuelos—ball-shaped fritters of cassava and white cheese. Sliced wagyu roast. Candied sweet potatoes, fresh strawberries, papaya, and cherimoya. Red wine. Everything Jack loves to eat lies spread out before him.

At the other end of the table sits the bronze-skinned man with wavy black hair who hunted him down and brought him here. A man Jack doesn’t know.