Simon. Benjamin. Victoria.
She was not a person who panicked. She had learned that a long time ago, that panic was a luxury people without safety nets could not really afford. When her mother got sick, she had not panicked. When her mother died, she had cried privately and then stood up and figured out what came next. When jobs ended and money ran short and the world proved itself once again to be indifferent, she had simply steadied herself and taken the next step forward.
But this was different from all of those things.
Those had been losses, things taken away.
This was something else, something arriving, something enormous coming toward her from a direction she had never thought to look.
She needed to be sure.
1 name in a photograph proved nothing by itself. Her mother’s name was not the rarest name in the world. People had the same names all the time. And the boy in the middle of that photograph, the 1 called Simon, she was reading his face through the lens of everything she already feared. She knew that was not a reliable way to look at anything.
She needed to be sure.
That evening, after she had said good night and the gate had closed behind her, she walked to the bus stop at a slower pace than usual. The overcast sky had cleared during the afternoon, and now the evening was clean and pale, the sun going down somewhere behind the buildings in long orange stripes.
People moved around her on the pavement, heading home, carrying things, talking into their phones, the ordinary world doing its ordinary things completely unaware that a young woman was walking through it with something enormous sitting quietly in the center of her chest.
She sat on the bus and thought.
She was good at thinking carefully. It was 1 of the things she had trained herself to do. Not to react immediately. Not to say the first thing that came to her. To sit with something until she understood its shape.
So what did she actually know?
She knew that her mother’s name was Victoria.
She knew that her mother had once been in a relationship with a man named Simon.
She knew that this man had left when her mother became pregnant.
She knew that her mother had raised her alone and had died when she was 16 without ever telling her the full story.
She knew that her employer’s name was Simon Caleb, that he was the right age, old enough to have been young 30 years ago, that there was a photograph in his study showing a young man named Simon alongside a young woman named Victoria who had the same face as her mother.
She knew that when she had first walked through his front door 3 weeks ago, something had tightened in her chest that she had not been able to explain.
She knew that he had asked for her birth certificate, that he had been alone with it in the kitchen for a long time that morning.
She knew that when he had come out of his study after reading it, he had been very quiet, quieter than usual, a different kind of quiet, not his usual contained working silence, but something heavier, something that sat behind his eyes differently.
She pressed her forehead lightly against the cool glass of the bus window.
These were things she knew.
What she did not know was what to do with them.
She did not sleep well that night. She lay in the dark and listened to the building sounds—the television, the plumbing, the occasional footstep above her—and let herself, for the first time, ask the question out loud in her own mind.
Is he my father?
