Not a common name. Not a name that could be confused with another.
He had known a Victoria Lawson 30 years ago, a girl with warm eyes and hair tied loosely and a laugh that held nothing back. A girl who had come to him 1 afternoon, nervous and young and certain, and told him something he had been too afraid to receive. A girl who had written him a letter he had not read for 3 decades.
I am keeping the baby.
He set the birth certificate down flat on the table with both hands and looked at it. His own name was not on it. The father line was blank, marked with that single insufficient word. But that word, he now understood, was not the truth. It was simply what happened when a man ran away and a woman was left to fill in the forms alone.
He had run away.
He sat in his kitchen at 61 years old, in the house he had filled with order and control and the evidence of everything he had achieved, and he felt something he had spent 3 decades carefully avoiding.
He felt exactly what Victoria had predicted he would feel.
The guilt will find you on its own.
He put the documents back in the envelope gently, the way you handle something that belongs to someone else. He straightened them so they sat neatly inside and set the envelope on the table.
Then he got up, walked to the kitchen doorway, and looked down the hall.
Rebecca was in the sitting room. He could see her through the open door, standing at the bookshelf, dusting the shelves in her careful, methodical way, working from left to right, lifting each book slightly and wiping beneath it.
He watched her for a moment. The shape of her face in the flat morning light. The way she held herself straight, quiet, completely focused on what was in front of her, not performing, not aware of being watched, just herself, fully and simply herself.
He pressed his hand against the doorframe.
