Jack looked around the dusty attic, wondering whether it was even worthwhile taking out all of the junk that had accumulated over the years. Suddenly, he noticed a shoebox that was stuffed so full that it had a tear alongside one of the corners, and he felt an urge to see what exactly it contained. It looked out of place, too - an early twenty-first-century shoebox placed on top of dusty old suitcases that he and Teri hadn't used since Kim had been little. Picking it up, he left the attic and wondered just what he expected to find.
Placing the box on the kitchen table, he almost grabbed it back again as he remembered an old superstition that his grandmother staunchly believed in, that you should never put new shoes on a table. Of course, he quickly remembered that the box probably didn't contain shoes of any age. Chuckling to himself as he sat down, he examined the box closer before carefully lifting the lid to ensure he didn't have a paper and dust avalanche in his kitchen.
The papers he found within the box seemed to be of no importance and of little interest to him, and he was considering just pushing them all back in and taking the box back to the attic to continue its dusty existence. Picking up a handful of papers, he was looking at the top one when a photograph slipped out from the pile and landed upside down on the floor. Intrigued, he noticed that there were no notes on the back to give him a clue as to when the photo had been taken or what the subject was. Guessing that it was some old picture from a family vacation back when Kim was just a small child, he picked up the photo and turned it around. He stared at it for what seemed like an eternity, as he struggled to decide whether or not he even recognised the couple staring out at him with their relaxed smiles.
Dropping the photo onto the table, he felt a growing urge to either burn it or just rip it up and throw the pieces in the trash, but something stopped him from doing that. Instead, he looked into the eyes of the couple in the picture - hers were wide with a metallic grey-green colour whilst his were narrower and were ocean-coloured - as if to try and understand where they had gone and why they had disappeared. He simply did not recognise the Jack and Nina of all those years before.
He pulled back from the eyes and took in the rest of the photograph as he tried to work out where and when it had been taken. In the background was a beach and the weather looked sunny, but that didn't really narrow it down when they had never been outside of Southern California together. At least, not as a couple, anyway. He looked at his hand and didn't see a ring, which meant that it wasn't too early on in their relationship as he had been reluctant to take it off. Suddenly, he remembered - it had been taken maybe two or three months into the affair when they had gone for a drive up the coast and stopped overnight in a sleepy little coastal town. In the morning, before they had gone back to Los Angeles, they had asked someone to take a picture of themselves there. The reason why was long forgotten now, but all of the memories of that trip he had were positive and he wondered if it had been the high point of their brief relationship. It had been clear, to him at least, that the affair was never going to last and it was only a few months later that he was moving back in with Teri and Nina had started a relationship with Tony Almeida. Soon enough came that awful day when everything had just fallen apart and his life as he had known it came to an end. Not only had he lost Teri, his true love and mother of his daughter, but he had also lost Nina. The couple in the photograph stopped existing that day and his once closest friend and ally had become his most bitter enemy.
Deciding that he didn't need to relive those days again, he took hold of the picture and was about to just tear it into as many pieces as he could, but instead, he stopped just as he made the first rip that almost made it past their heads. For a moment, he looked once more into their eyes, before he stuffed the photo back into the box along with the papers and pushed the lid back down. Soon enough, it was back in the attic and Jack was back in the present.