Jason
“Can you come over for Christmas this year, please?” My mother invited me, wanting me to attend Christmas with her and Grandma at their mansion in Chicago.
“I’ll probably be full of work, so don’t count on me,” I said, without much emotion, still looking at the computer screen.
“For God’s sake! Who works at Christmas?” She looked stunned.
“I’m preserving the legacy Grandpa left me,” I accused her indirectly since the entire Davies fortune came from my mother’s family, so since I had to carry on my grandfather’s legacy, here I was trying to give mine better.
“Your grandfather must be turning over in his grave right now, he certainly wouldn’t want his only grandson to be holed up in the office working like a convict even at Christmastime,” she said, disapproving of my action.
“So you should have thought about that and had another child when there was time, Lady Rosanne, but no, you could only have one child, and now that child has responsibilities tied to that specific goddamn hole,” I commented and gave a skeptical laugh.
The woman sighed. “This is all just your excuses just because you don’t want to spend Christmas with your mother and grandmother, Jas. Oh, how I miss Laura, she always managed to take you to these family gatherings. How I miss my dear daughter–in–law!” she lamented, and she went to massage my shoulder behind me.
“Laura was truly exceptional,” I said, also missing that time.
“She was the light of our family, so graceful, simple, kind, and legible, and yet you left her, and now I will have to spend Christmas alone with my nagging mother, who can only blame me for everything–for my marriage not working and even because you lost your wife!” She slapped my shoulder, making me wince in pain, and then went back to massaging.
“You’re the only one to blame for marrying my idiot father,” I accused her.
“You’re unscrupulous, ser, Jason!” She made a disapproving face. “Oh! What a beautiful girl. Who is she?” She asked, staring at my computer screen.
“What?”
“Co back further, the photo is from behind,” she asked with gestures toward my computer screen. I did what she asked and went back to the photos I was looking at “Yes, that one! Stop right there. How cute!”
“Do you know this girl?” I asked, looking at her as she observed my computer screen with a passionate smile.
“No, but she has such a familiar face… She reminds me of you when you were younger,” she said, pointing to the girl’s photo on the computer screen.
“Oh, Mom. You’re so emotional, now every child with blue eyes will remind you of me?” I criticized her and then sighed.
“But that’s not all! She looks like a little female version of you,” she continued to insist. “You do not believe me?”
“Mom, I’m thirty–five years old. I don’t want to be insensitive, but I think you’ve forgotten the exact shape of my face when I was a baby.” I commented, chuckling to ease it.
But my mother felt challenged and took out her cell phone. “Do you think I don’t remember what your face looked like when you were a child? I remember it very well, and I even recorded it!” She said this, starting to look at her cell phone, and I
sighed, passing my hand over my face. My mother was like that, she took trivial
things very seriously sometimes.
“Mom, there’s no need…”
“Ha! Here, I found it!” She said this excitedly and brought her cell phone closer to the computer screen so I could see and compare the two photos. “Tell me now if they
don’t look alike!”
The photo on my mother’s cell phone was an old photo from when I was a child
where I appeared smiling at the camera with my baby teeth missing; meanwhile, the
photo on my computer screen was a good photo of a beautiful girl looking innocent
to the camera, that was probably a child model participating in a photo shoot for a Nemesis advertising campaign.
I frowned when I realized my mother was right when she said I looked like that girl. The two children in the photo looked so similar that you could almost mistake ther fe: being the same
“What does it mean?” I babbled without understanding much.
“Didn’t I say you two look alike? You’re surprised now, and you can’t deny that your don’t look like that child. Who is she? Your daughter?” My mother asked excitedly, and I frowned.
“I don’t have kids, Mom,” I reminded her.
She grumbled, retracting her arm and putting her cell phone in her bag. “For God’s sake, what a life this is. My only son can’t give me even one grandchild. At least if I had a grandchild, I would be a happy old lady, but no, everyone abandoned me. Your father doesn’t care about me because I’m too old for him; you only think about your work and brood over your ex–wife, whom you sadly lost; you can’t even give me a grandchild. For God’s sake, I must have thrown a stone at the cross!” She
complained, slinging her bag back onto her shoulders. “You’re being an ungrateful. son, Jas. Okay, it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to come to spend Christmas with
After that, the woman left frustrated, and I sighed, still sitting in my chair. I was thinking about the girl who looked like me and wondering. That photo came from
the file that I had gotten from Quagmire, the file that belonged to the work related to
the Nemesis advertisements made by Laura.
There were other child models, but what were the chances of there being a child
model so similar to me on Laura’s team? Curious, I picked up my cell phone and called Quagmire.
“Hello, boss. How are you doing?” Quagmire asked as soon as he answered the call.
“I’m great. Are you at Nemesis now?” I asked, looking to see if there were any more.
photos of the girl in the file, but there was only that one. As if someone had
forgotten it there.
“Yes, sir. We are running out of time due to low production and high demand for our clothes, as the advertisements were a huge success thanks to our partnership with Hextec. Haha!” He laughed with satisfaction Laura had performed a miracle on Nemesis
“Do your best, Quagmire Changing the subject, I’m sending you a photo of one of the models that worked with Laura. Could you identify the model for me?”
“Of course, sit. I just received it!” He said that, and I heard his fingers clicking the mouse, already working. “Oh yes, I opened the email. This little girl?”
“Yes. She has blue eyes. Where is she from?”
“Oh well, we don’t have much information about her, but… Walt a minute, this girl is not one of our models, she’s not even a model. She is Laura Thompson’s daughter. It seems there was a mistake, the girl was just coming to visit her mother at work, and a trainee photographer took these photos of her. I remember her mother being very angry and ordering all the photos to be deleted. Haha, it was funny!”
I was no longer listening to anything the man was saying. Was this girl Laura’s daughter? What does it mean? Why would Laura have a daughter who looked so
much like me?