Chapter 496 – Beginning with a Daring Encounter

“Do you have a picture of her? I would like to see what she looks like if you don’t mind,” Celsie said, and Aaron gave her a nod as he rose from his seat.

“Although she looks completely different now, but there is an old picture of her in Harry’s bedroom. Hold on while I get it,” Aaron said as he walked away to get the photo frame.

As Celsie waited for him to return, she thought about Benne and how this news would affect him knowing how much he loved and cared for Harry. How would this affect Harry’s blossoming relationship with Jade? She wondered, and raised her head when Aaron returned with the photo frame and handed it to her.

“That’s Sara,” Aaron said, and Celsie’s heart skipped a beat when she looked down at the photo and saw the familiar face of Harry’s mother.

If there was one memory Celsie could remember clearly from her childhood, it was that one time she and Lucas had gone up to the attic in search of some old books they needed for a school project, and had stumbled upon an old photo album which was hidden away in one of the drawers of an old chest.

Old books temporarily forgotten, they had sat on the dusty floor and flipped page after page of the photo album looking at pictures of people they couldn’t recognize apart from their grandparents whose photos their mom had shown them before, and photos of their parents when they were youths.

While Lucas had gathered the old books they needed and taken them down with him, Celsie had taken the photo album along with her, curious to find out why most of the photos in her mother’s family album had a face and body cut out of it.

“Mom, why is there a hole in all these photographs?” Ten years old Celsie had asked as she walked into the kitchen where her mother was preparing dinner.

Janet had been quite upset by the question, especially when she saw that Celsie had brought the photo album from the attic with her, “I thought you went up there to get old books. What are you doing with that?” She asked with displeasure.

“They can always take it back after having a look,” Andrew had said as he joined them, and Celsie smiled at him.

“Do you know why there are holes in the album, dad?” Celsie had asked just as Lucas joined them after dropping off the books.

“I cut the holes in there,” Janet had said dismissively, but ten years old Celsie hadn’t been deterred by her mother’s cold response.

“Why? Whose picture did you cut out?” She had asked, and Lucas had seemed equally curious to know as he looked up from the album to their mother’s unsmiling face.

Janet had turned to her husband, but Andrew only gave her a shrug since he saw no reason not to tell the kids about their aunty who had run away from home a long time ago thereby breaking the hearts of everyone.

“My twin sister’s,” Janet responded after a while, and both Celsie and Lucas had looked at her with even more interest.

“You have a twin sister?” Celsie had asked with delight.

“She just said so,” Lucas had pointed out Celsie’s dumb question.

“Did something happen to her? Where is she? Why haven’t we seen her? Why did you cut out her photos?” Lucas had asked, and Janet sighed.

“We were triplets. Our brother died at birth so it was just the two of us. Fifteen years ago she stole our father’s money and ran away from home so we cut her off. And since she didn’t want to be a part of our family and told the world that she was an orphan I cut her out of our lives too,” Janet said, and their faces fell.

“She isn’t a nice person,” Celsie had murmured in disappointment.

“Yes, she isn’t. It’s best you don’t know her. Speaking about her upsets me, so you shouldn’t speak of her anymore,” Janet had said, and both kids had nodded.

“Mom’s hair looks different here,” Celsie observed as they continued to look at the photos and Lucas looked into their mother’s face. While her hair was a jet black, the person in the photo had curly gold hair.

“That is your aunty not your mom,” Andrew had informed them after he peered over their shoulder to see the photo they were talking about.

On hearing that both kids took a closer look at the photo and then at their mother. Truly it wasn’t their mother. Although the similarities were there, but they weren’t exactly identical twins.

“How did that get in there?” Janet had asked angrily as she snatched the album from them and turned accusing eyes on Andrew.

“I found it while I was helping you pack your mum’s belongings. She kept it hidden in a book so you wouldn’t cut it too,” Andrew had said apologetically and Sara had immediately taken the photo out of the album and walked away from there.

Celsie and Lucas had exchanged a look as they silently made up their mind not to upset their mother by talking about their bad aunty who had run away from home after stealing their grandfather’s money.

Now looking into the face of a woman that closely resembled her mother’s face with those same gold curls she remembered, Celsie felt her stomach clench with unease.

This wasn’t her mother’s twin sister, was she? Was it possible that the person in this photo was her aunty? Was it possible that the wicked woman who had hurt Aaron so much and had made him cry like a baby in his sleep was her aunty? Celsie wondered.

“Are you okay?” Aaron asked when he noticed the sudden change in her disposition, and Celsie glanced up from the photo frame into his face and forced a smile.

“Yeah. She looks beautiful,” Celsie said, not knowing what else to say.

“Unfortunately for her, beauty is only skin deep. No matter how beautiful she is externally, she is a very horrible person,” Aaron said with a shake of his head.

“Can I ask how you met her? Did you both really get married?” Celsie asked, and they both left the dining and walked over to the living room where they sat down comfortably on the couch and Aaron told Celsie all about how Sara had come into his life and how she deceived him.

“She was a twin?” Celsie asked, when Aaron mentioned what Sara had said about losing her twin sister and parents in an autocrash.

“A triplet. She said they lost their brother at birth. Although I no longer believe anything she said,” Aaron said, but on hearing that piece of information Celsie’s heart skipped a beat.

Listening to him, Celsie tried to put the pieces together and see if it would fit. Her mother had been born a triplet and had lost her brother. Her twin sister had run away from home thirty years ago after stealing some money, and Sara had come into Aaron’s life around that same period after she was duped of her money. She had abandoned them immediately after Harry’s birth, that was twenty-eight years ago.

What she didn’t know was the name of her mother’s twin sister. That she would need to find out from her mother, but she was becoming more convinced that this Sara lady was her mother’s lost twin sister. She needed to speak with her mother no matter how difficult or upsetting the conversation was going to be. She needed to be sure that this Sara person wasn’t her aunt, and even if she found out that Sara was he aunt, she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to say anything to Aaron about knowing who Sara was. He had made it clear that he had no interest in knowing about Sara’s family, so there was no probably no need.

There was absolutely no way all of this could be a coincident, was there? If it happened that Sara was indeed her aunty, then what did that make her and Harry? Cousins? Unbelievable!

From the looks of things, she was now more involved in this than she had planned to. What was she going to do?

After everything she had just learned about Sara, if there was one thing she didn’t buy, it was the fact that she had lost the baby at birth and had buried the baby before Aaron got there. Something didn’t add up to her, especially after hearing that Sara had gone to a different hospital to have their child in his absence.

She suspected a foul play. What she needed to do right now was to find out why Jade had wanted that picture of Harry’s mother, and who Jade had been telling Aaron about.

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