Part 2
Morning came whether he was ready for it or not. It always did.
Mr. Caleb showered, dressed, and went downstairs at his usual time. He made his own coffee, something he rarely did, but he needed something to do with his hands before Rebecca arrived. He stood at the kitchen counter and drank it slowly, looking at nothing in particular.
He had put the box back in the storage room before the sun came up. He had put the letter back in the envelope, the envelope back in the box, and the box on the bottom shelf where it had always been. He had turned off the lamp in his study and straightened the chair and made everything look exactly as it always looked.
But the letter was still inside him. The words were still there, heavy and permanent, the way words are when they have been waiting 30 years to be read.
I raised our child to be better than the fear that made you run away.
He heard the gate bell at 6:55.
He set down his coffee cup, straightened his shirt, walked to the front door, and opened it.
Rebecca was standing on the path in the morning light, her bag over her shoulder, her face calm and unhurried. She looked at him and said, exactly as she said it every morning, “Good morning, sir.”
He looked at her face. He looked at her eyes.
“Good morning, Rebecca,” he said.
He stepped aside to let her in, went back to his study, and closed the door.
Through the closed study door, he could hear the quiet sounds of the house beginning its day: the kettle, the soft click of cabinet doors, footsteps light and measured moving between the kitchen and the dining room. Ordinary sounds. The sounds of every morning for the past 2 weeks.
He pressed his fingers against his temples and stared at his desk.
He needed to be sure. That was the thing. He was a man who had built his entire life on certainty, on facts, figures, documents, proof. He did not make decisions based on feelings and old letters and the observations of a jet-lagged friend. He made decisions based on evidence.
He needed evidence.
But how do you ask a person something like that? How do you sit across from someone who makes your breakfast every morning and say, What exactly?
He did not know yet.
So he let the morning pass.
