The Girl in the Photograph — Gabrielle Donnelly

Stand-up comic and semi-lapsed Catholic Allegra O'Riordan now has another identity: orphan Motherless since age three, she has just buried her father as well -- fearing that with this loss, she's also forfeited any hope of knowing the history of her tight-lipped Irish family. Resigned, she sifts through her father's belongings...and finds a picture that will change her life. In this picture, her mother -- until now just a dim memory of a solemn, melancholy woman -- is someone she barely recognizes. She is younger, of course -- but there is something else. The bathing suit. The bold, seductive smile. And the mysterious inscription: "darling Ted"...Yearning to know more, Allegra begins to seek out distant relatives, strangers, old friends of her mother. She wants to understand who this flirtatious young beauty really was -- and what it was that changed her.

But looking too closely at the girl in the photograph may forever alter the way she sees the girl in the mirror...