“Ignore me,” Benjamin said again, lighter this time. “Pass the salt.”
In the kitchen, Rebecca stood very still. The dish cover was in her hands. The afternoon sun was coming through the window. The clock above the shelf was ticking.
Victoria. She looks like her.
She breathed out slowly through her nose, set the dish cover down, and picked up the water jug that needed refilling. She had a job to do. She would do her job.
She walked back into the dining room with the water jug and refilled both glasses with a steady hand and a calm face, and neither man could have known that their conversation had just landed somewhere inside her like a seed falling into soil, quietly, without fanfare, not yet ready to grow.
That night, long after Benjamin had said his warm goodbyes and driven away in his loud car, Mr. Caleb sat alone in his study. He had not turned on the main light, only the small lamp on the corner of his desk, which threw a warm circle onto the papers in front of him.
He was not reading the papers.
He was sitting back in his chair with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes on something that was not in the room.
She looks like her. Victoria. Around the eyes, especially.Generated image
He had not thought about Victoria in he could not even say how long. Years. Many years. He had been very deliberate about not thinking about her. He was a disciplined man. When he decided not to think about something, he did not think about it.
But Benjamin’s words had slipped past all that discipline the way smoke slips under a closed door. There was nothing to grab onto and push back. They were just words, casually said by an old friend who had probably already forgotten he said them.
And yet here he was, sitting in the dark with the lamp on, not reading.
He thought about a girl with warm eyes and hair tied up loosely in a garden somewhere, laughing. He thought about the day she had come to him, nervous, very young, speaking quietly, and what she had told him. He thought about what he had said back.
He pressed the tips of his fingers against his forehead and closed his eyes.
He had been 29 years old. He had been afraid. He had been building something, just beginning to build something, and a child had felt like the end of everything he was trying to create. That was what he had told himself. That was how he had explained it then.
It sounded different now, sitting in a quiet house at 61 years old in a room full of everything money had ever bought him.
He opened his eyes.
Through the study doorway, the hallway was dark. The house was silent. Rebecca had long gone home.
He thought about her face.
“Stop it,” he told himself.
He turned back to his papers. But sleep, when it finally came that night, took a long time in arriving.
He woke at 2:00 in the morning, not slowly, the way you sometimes drift out of sleep, but suddenly, completely, as if something had reached into his chest and pulled him upright.
He lay in the dark for a moment, staring at the ceiling, and knew immediately that sleep was not coming back. He got up.
He did not turn on any lights. He knew the house well enough to move through it in the dark, every doorway, every step, every corner. He went to the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and drank it standing at the sink, looking out at the back garden where the mango tree was just a dark shape against the sky.
Benjamin’s voice kept coming back to him.
She looks like her. Victoria. Around the eyes, especially.
He set the glass down. He told himself again that it was nothing. Rebecca was a young woman who happened to have a face that reminded a tired, jet-lagged man of someone from 30 years ago. Benjamin had always had a flair for the dramatic. It was nothing.
He went back to bed. He lay there for 20 minutes looking at the ceiling. Then he got up again.
The storage room was at the far end of the upstairs hallway, a narrow room he used for old files and things he did not need often enough to keep in the study but could not quite bring himself to throw away. He had not been inside it in at least a year, maybe longer.
He turned on the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and looked at the shelves.
He was not entirely sure what he was looking for. He told himself he was not looking for anything, just moving, just doing something with his hands and body so his mind would quiet down. He pulled out an old folder, looked at it, put it back. He shifted a box of archived contracts. He moved a stack of old magazines he kept meaning to sort through.
Then, on the bottom shelf, pushed to the back behind everything else, he saw it.
A cardboard box. Brown. Slightly soft at the corners from age. No label on the outside.
He looked at it for a long moment.
