Outside, the last of the orange light disappeared from the sky.
“She wrote me a letter,” he said, “before she left. I found it last week in a box I hadn’t opened in 30 years.”
He looked at Rebecca.
“In that letter, she told me she was keeping the baby, that she would raise the child alone, that she would make herself enough.”
Rebecca felt something move through her, a wave of something warm and painful at the same time. Her mother’s words, spoken in this man’s voice, in this room. She had not known about the letter, but she recognized it. She recognized the voice of it, the quiet, dignified determination, the refusal to collapse, the way her mother had always said hard things simply and then got on with living.
She pressed her hands together in her lap.
“Your name was Simon,” she said.
It was the first thing she had said since she sat down. Her voice was steady. Somewhere in the last 24 hours she had decided that if this moment came, she would not perform anything. She would not perform shock or distress or forgiveness or anything else. She would simply be honest.
Mr. Caleb looked at her.
Something in his face shifted, a small, painful movement, as if something that had been held rigid for a long time had released all at once.
“Yes,” he said. “Simon Caleb. I stopped using Simon a long time ago. I don’t remember exactly when.” He paused. “Perhaps because it was the name she knew me by.”
Rebecca looked at this man, this neat, controlled, silver-haired man sitting on the edge of his leather chair with his hands loosely clasped and the remnants of a 30-year-old guilt sitting plainly on his face, and tried to find words for what she was feeling.
She could not.
There were too many things at once. Too many layers. Too many years. Too many mornings.
“I saw the photograph,” she said at last. “In the study. The 3 of you. You and Benjamin and my mother. Her name was written on the back.”
He nodded. He did not seem surprised. “I thought you might have.”
“Is that why you asked for my documents?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I asked for your documents,” he said carefully, “because I needed to be sure. Because I am a man who has spent his whole life dealing in certainties, and I could not let myself believe something this…” He paused, searching for the word. “This large without being certain.”
“And are you?” Rebecca asked. “Certain?”
He looked at her directly, fully, without flinching.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
The word landed between them and stayed there.
Rebecca looked at the floor.
