Chapter 38: Keanna's son

Keanna had always known that she was considered to be a very good-looking woman. Although she wasn’t conceited over it—it was a simple matter of genetics, after all, and it was only through sheer luck that she had won the equivalent of the genetic lottery. Most of her striking good looks came from her mother, anyway. Then as if God or fate or somebody had decided such beauty was enough luck for one person’s lifetime, her mother had died when Keanna was only a baby, struck down by a huge falling limb from a tree as she walked home from work one day. Keanna knew her only from a picture hanging on the wall in her childhood bedroom.

Her father had remarried when she was only five years old. The new wife didn’t want reminders of his former wife hanging around the house, so she had put all the pictures away, except for the one picture in Keanna's room taken not long before his mother’s death.

She wasn’t smiling in the image. In fact, she was looking off camera over the shoulder of the per