Whatever this meant, Jon couldn't wait any longer. He picked the stone back up: "I wish..." even Jon wasn't entirely sure what the next words to come out of his mouth would be... "that I had a stack of photographs on my bed where each one was a picture of Gillian DeVries at a different age, starting from birth and ending at present day."
He let out a very tense breath. Jon wasn't sure what he would learn from some pictures, but it was also a safe wish, and he would certainly learn something.
Jon stood up and found, right in the middle of his bed, a stack of photos that seemed to match his request. He had only seen Athena's mom on a few occasions, but the picture on the top of the stack seemed to match pretty closely to his memory of her. Tall and slender, wavy dark hair that she kept around shoulder-length. Professionally-dressed. The next handful of pictures down the stack fit this image, as well. Certainly, if one paid close attention, they would notice some subtle signs of age being reversed as Jon descended the stack, but a dozen pictures in there wasn't anything to warrant surprise.
The baker's dozenth, however, was a picture of a man. Late-20's. Same dark hair, although in a crew cut. A close goatee. Professional, if masculine, attire. And all down the stack, until he was holding a picture of an infant boy, Jon found only picture after picture of this mysterious man.
Jon laid all the pictures across his bed, kept examining each one from the first to the last, but he kept coming back to number twelve and number thirteen. Had Gillian DeVries only been Gillian DeVries for the last twelve years? If so, then where had Athena come from? Questions kept mounting in Jon's head, and all he could bring himself to do was keep looking at the sequence of images before him, until, with some amount of surprise, he was interrupted by a knock at his bedroom door.
A knock at his open bedroom door.
"Jon, honey, I think tonight's going to be leftovers. Do you want me to heat up the lasagna, or the--" Jon's mom, Linda, stopped mid-sentence as she took a step into the room. "Where did you get those pictures?"
"Do you know who this is?" Jon asked without answering.
"That-- that's Athena's mom, you've met her right?" There was a nervousness in Linda's voice.
"These ones are Athena's mom," Jon indicated the first twelve pictures, then shifted his attention to the remainder. "Do you know who this is?"
"Jon," Linda spoke very carefully, "I really need you to tell me where you got those pictures from."
