I stumbled through the door, half a bottle of vodka sloshing around in my stomach. Somehow I managed to make it past the living room, past the same photographs that had been hanging on the wall since I’d moved into the house, and into my cramped bathroom to remove my contacts.

But as I bent over the toilet, pushing back my glasses to keep them from plopping into the water, I realized something. Those pictures. I hung them myself. Took some of them myself. Looked at them every single day after work (or late nights at the bar) to remind myself of the family I rarely got to see.

After wiping the vomit from my purple painted lips, I retreated to the living room, just to prove that I’d been seeing things, that the alcohol had been messing with my mind. But no… When I looked at the twenty-year old family portrait, one of my mom and dad and me, I saw an extra face hovering in between my parents. A face that didn’t belong there.

He looked like he was around the same age as my dad, with the same red hair and overload of freckles. The same round glasses and the same suit. Even their facial expressions matched. They were completely identical…