Her mother’s name, right there in this house, on this wall, inside this frame that she had dusted and replaced and never truly looked at until now.
She put the photograph back on the wall very carefully. She made sure it was level. She made sure it was exactly where it had been.
She picked up her cleaning things.
She walked out of the study and down the hallway to the kitchen and stood at the sink and turned on the cold tap and held her wrists under the running water for a moment, the way she sometimes did when she needed to feel something simple and real.
The water was cold. The tap was real. The kitchen was real. And the photograph on the wall down the hall was real.
She turned off the tap. She dried her hands. She looked out the window at the overcast sky.
Somewhere upstairs, she could hear Mr. Caleb’s footsteps moving slowly back and forth.
She finished her work that day the way a person finishes something when their hands know what to do but their mind is somewhere else entirely. She swept. She mopped. She prepared lunch and set it on the table at 1:00 and said, “Lunch is ready, sir,” through the study door in a voice that sounded, even to her own ears, remarkably normal. She washed the lunch dishes. She wiped down the counters.
And all the while, underneath all of it, the same thing kept turning over and over in her mind like a stone in water.
Simon. Benjamin. Victoria.
She was not a person who panicked. She had learned that a long time ago, that panic was a luxury people without safety nets could not really afford. When her mother got sick, she had not panicked. When her mother died, she had cried privately and then stood up and figured out what came next. When jobs ended and money ran short and the world proved itself once again to be indifferent, she had simply steadied herself and taken the next step forward.
But this was different from all of those things.
Those had been losses, things taken away.
This was something else, something arriving, something enormous coming toward her from a direction she had never thought to look.
She needed to be sure.
1 name in a photograph proved nothing by itself. Her mother’s name was not the rarest name in the world. People had the same names all the time. And the boy in the middle of that photograph, the 1 called Simon, she was reading his face through the lens of everything she already feared. She knew that was not a reliable way to look at anything.
She needed to be sure.
That evening, after she had said good night and the gate had closed behind her, she walked to the bus stop at a slower pace than usual. The overcast sky had cleared during the afternoon, and now the evening was clean and pale, the sun going down somewhere behind the buildings in long orange stripes.
People moved around her on the pavement, heading home, carrying things, talking into their phones, the ordinary world doing its ordinary things completely unaware that a young woman was walking through it with something enormous sitting quietly in the center of her chest.
She sat on the bus and thought.
She was good at thinking carefully. It was 1 of the things she had trained herself to do. Not to react immediately. Not to say the first thing that came to her. To sit with something until she understood its shape.
So what did she actually know?
She knew that her mother’s name was Victoria.
