Her mother had raised her alone from the very beginning. Rebecca had grown up knowing only 1 parent, 1 pair of hands that braided her hair in the mornings, 1 voice that said her name at night, 1 person who showed up every single time.
Victoria had worked as a seamstress, taking in clothes to mend and alter from people in the neighborhood. She worked from a small table near the window, her needle moving fast and steady, her reading glasses sliding down her nose. They did not have much, but they had enough. Victoria made sure Rebecca always felt it.
She bought Rebecca books. She helped her with homework even when she was exhausted. She made sure Rebecca went to church every Sunday in a clean dress, even if the hem had been mended. On Rebecca’s birthdays, she baked a small cake, nothing fancy, just simple vanilla with a little icing, and sang in a soft, slightly off-key voice that Rebecca had loved completely.
Rebecca had been happy in the simple, uncomplicated way children are happy when they feel safe and loved. But there had always been 1 question sitting quietly at the back of everything. Where is my father?
She had asked it for the first time when she was about 6 years old. She had come home from school, where a teacher had asked the class to draw a picture of their family. Rebecca had drawn herself and her mother, then looked at the empty space beside them and not known what to put there.
Victoria had been quiet for a long time after that question. She was mending a blue dress, and she kept her eyes on the needle when she finally answered.
“His name was Simon,” she said. Her voice was flat and careful, like someone walking on a floor they were not sure would hold them. “We were young. Things did not work out.”
“But where is he?” Rebecca pressed. “Does he know about me?”
A pause. The needle went in and out of the fabric. “He knew,” Victoria said very quietly. “He chose not to stay.”
Rebecca had not fully understood it then. She was 6. But she had understood the feeling. The way her mother’s shoulders dropped slightly when she said those words. The way she set the dress down for a moment and pressed her lips together before picking it up again.
She understood it better as she got older.
And when she was 16, her mother became sick.
It came quickly. That was the thing about it. One week Victoria had a cough. The next week she was tired in a way sleep did not fix. By the third week, she could not get out of bed.
A neighbor took them to the hospital, and the doctor spoke in a low voice that Rebecca was not supposed to hear, but did. She sat outside the ward on a hard plastic chair and stared at the floor and felt the world rearranging itself around her into a shape she did not want.
Her mother died on a quiet Tuesday morning.
The ward was bright with morning sun. A nurse had opened the window. There was a bird singing outside, a loud, cheerful, completely inappropriate bird. Victoria had looked at Rebecca and held her hand and said her name once, softly, like a full sentence. Then she was gone.
Rebecca was 16 years old. She was alone. And she had a question that now had no one left to answer it.
She finished school on a scholarship for children who had lost parents. She worked small jobs, helping at a grocery store, washing clothes for neighbors, running errands for a nearby pharmacy. She learned to stretch money the way her mother had taught her, carefully, without waste. She built a small life, quiet, independent, dignified.
But she had never been able to stop wondering, not in a loud, angry way. Rebecca was not an angry person. It was a still, deep wondering, the kind that lives at the bottom of you, that you carry around without noticing until something bumps into it and reminds you it is there.
Who was he? Was he still alive? Did he ever think about her? Did he ever wonder what happened to the child he had walked away from? Did he even remember?
She never spoke those questions out loud to anyone. They felt too private, too raw, like showing someone a bruise you had learned to protect. She simply carried them, the way she carried everything: quietly and without complaint.
Grace’s message had come the evening before, just after Rebecca had finished eating. Can you come tomorrow morning? I have something to talk to you about. I think it might be good news for you.
