“Whatever happens between us, whatever you decide about us, this is yours because you are mine. It belongs to you regardless.”
Rebecca looked down at the folder.
She thought about her small apartment, the 4 flights of stairs, the lift that worked 3 days out of 7, the patch of damp in the corner of the ceiling. She thought about the years of small jobs, stretched money, the careful independent life she had built from what had been available to her. She thought about what her mother had worked for at that table by the window, what her mother had given up so that she could have something more.
She put her hand on the folder.
“I will think about it,” she said. “I’m not saying yes yet. I need to think.”
“That is all I ask,” he said.
She stood. She picked up her bag. Then she did something she had not planned, something that surprised her as she did it.
She reached out and picked up the folder from the table. Not to read it that night, just to take it with her, to let it come home with her and sit on her table and be a thing she could look at in her own space, on her own time.
Mr. Caleb watched her pick it up. Something moved across his face that he did not try to hide.
“Good night,” she said.
“Good night, Rebecca,” he said.
For the first time, the word felt different in his mouth. Not Rebecca the maid. Not Rebecca who started last week, Grace recommended her. Just Rebecca.
She walked to the door.
She did not come to work the following Monday or Tuesday.Generated image
Mr. Caleb did not call her. He had promised her time, and he intended to keep that promise, even as the house felt the particular emptiness of waiting. He made his own breakfast. He left his own dishes in the sink. He ate lunch standing in the kitchen and dinner alone at the dining table.
On Tuesday evening, he sat in the sitting room with the lamp on and a book he was not reading and thought about how quiet a house could be when you had spent 30 years filling the silence with work and had suddenly run out of ways to do that.
He thought about calling Benjamin. He decided against it. This was not ready to be talked about yet, not in the easy, anecdotal way Benjamin talked about things. This was still too new, too tender.
He went to bed early and lay there looking at the ceiling.
On Wednesday morning, just after 8:00, the gate bell rang.
He went to the window.
Rebecca was standing at the gate.
She was not wearing her work clothes. She had on a simple blue dress, the kind of thing a person wears for herself, not for a job. Her bag was over her shoulder. Her face was calm.
He went downstairs and opened the gate.
She looked at him.
“I would like to accept the offer,” she said. “The company, the training.” She paused. “I want to learn it properly from the beginning.”
He looked at her for a moment.
“Good,” he said simply and warmly. “Good.”
She came through the gate.
He made breakfast that morning himself. Not perfectly. The eggs were slightly more done than they should have been. The toast was a shade too dark. He put it on the table and looked at it critically.
“It’s fine,” Rebecca said, sitting down.
