And underneath that question, barely a breath behind it, another 1:
If he is, what then?
She thought about her mother, about the way Victoria had once said his name—Simon—quietly, with her eyes on the floor, about the letter she must have written, about the years she had worked at a small table by the window, needle moving fast and steady, raising a daughter alone and never complaining about it, never making Rebecca feel like a burden, never letting the absence of a father become the loudest thing in the room.
Her mother had protected her from so much, but she had not been able to protect her from the wondering.
Rebecca looked at the dark ceiling and felt something she rarely let herself feel.
A slow-rising anger.
Not loud anger. Just a deep, quiet heat, the kind that has been kept carefully banked for years and has never quite gone out.
She thought about Father’s Day, every year without fail: the banners in the shops, the cards in the windows, the pastor asking fathers to stand. She had sat in those pews as a child and looked at the floor and told herself it did not matter.
She thought about the school drawing, herself and her mother and the empty space beside them that she had not known how to fill.
She thought about every time someone had asked casually, the way children do, “Where’s your dad?” and how she had learned over time to shrug it off so smoothly that people stopped asking.
She had told herself all her life that she was fine, that she and her mother had been enough, that the absence of a father was simply the shape of her particular life, and she had made peace with it.
Now, staring at the dark ceiling, she wondered how much of that had been true and how much had been something she told herself because the alternative—the real feeling, the full size of it—was simply too large to carry and still get up in the morning.
She turned onto her side. On the shelf across the room, her mother’s photograph was just a dark rectangle in the darkness. She could not see it, but she knew it was there.
She had never seen the letter, had never known the words, but somewhere without knowing it, she had been shaped by them all her life.
She closed her eyes.
She would go to work tomorrow. She would be calm. She would do her job. She would watch and she would think.
And when she was sure, truly sure, she would decide what to do.
Friday morning was bright and clear, the kind of morning that seems almost unreasonably cheerful when your mind is heavy.
Rebecca arrived at 6:55 as always. She let herself in through the gate—Mr. Caleb had given her a key at the end of her first week—and went to the kitchen to start the morning.
She moved through her routine: kettle on, breakfast prepared, table set, everything in its right place.
She was cracking the eggs when she heard Mr. Caleb come downstairs. His tread on the stairs was familiar to her now. She could tell the difference between his morning steps and his midday steps, between the pace he used when he was going somewhere with purpose and the slightly slower one he used when something was on his mind.
That morning his steps were slow.
He came to the kitchen doorway and stopped.
