Jon—Janine now—was still seated at the living room table, one hand resting on the photo album and the other pressed absently against her chest as though the new weight there might vanish if she concentrated hard enough. Every glossy page she turned over showed lives that were familiar and alien in the same breath: people she knew, but different, shifted. The more she looked, the more she felt the unease creep into her bones.
Across the room, Zoe—now a boy of maybe nine years old—was rummaging through the pockets of his jeans. He tugged out a thin wallet, scuffed and mostly empty except for a crumpled bus ticket, a few coins, and a laminated school ID card. He stared at it for a long moment, brow furrowing.
“Uh… Janine?” His voice cracked slightly, high-pitched and uncertain.
She didn’t answer at first—too wrapped up in staring at an old family wedding photo, tracing her finger along the edges of a face that had once been her grandfather’s but now belonged to a woman.
“Janine!” the boy said again, more insistent this time.
The name hit her like a pinprick. She looked up. “What?”
Zoe—no, not Zoe anymore—held up the card. “I’ve… got a name now. Apparently.” He swallowed. “It says Zack. Zack Carmichael. That’s me.”
Janine blinked, then tried to smile, though it came out more as a grimace. “Zack, huh? Bit plain, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t get to choose it,” he muttered, then pulled out the second object he’d found: a small phone with a cracked case. He thumbed it on, the lock screen blooming to life with an image that made him blink hard. It was him—or rather, the boy version of him—smiling with two other kids his age, arms wrapped around each other in the kind of careless joy only children seemed capable of.
The phone buzzed gently under his hand, and almost without thinking he tapped the fingerprint lock. The screen unlocked instantly. “Weird,” Zack muttered. “Guess it knows me.”
He started scrolling through contacts until one caught his eye. A familiar icon: Mom. Curious, he tapped it. A photo expanded across the screen.
For a moment, he couldn’t place it—just a professional-looking woman in a neat skirt suit, her hair done up, smiling for the camera. Then he looked closer. The face. The eyes. The shape of her mouth.
His stomach lurched. “Oh… no way…”
“Janine,” he whispered. “You need to see this.”
She was still half-lost in the photo album, but something in his tone made her glance over. He held the phone up toward her. The glow of the screen caught her face.
At first, she frowned, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Then, recognition crashed through her like a wave. The picture wasn’t some stranger—it was her. The woman in the mirror. The woman she’d become. Listed plainly under Mom.
Her throat went dry. She looked from the phone to Zack’s small, worried face, and back again. The realization settled in with sickening clarity.
She wasn’t just Janine Carmichael. She was his mother.
Her hand flew to her mouth. The room tilted. “Oh, God…” was all she managed before her knees buckled and the world went black.
Zack caught the phone before it slipped from her hand, staring down at her collapsed form on the carpet. His stomach knotted with dread. “Great,” he muttered. “First day as Zack, and I’ve already made my own mom faint.”
