Something in his face shifted, a small, painful movement, as if something that had been held rigid for a long time had released all at once.
“Yes,” he said. “Simon Caleb. I stopped using Simon a long time ago. I don’t remember exactly when.” He paused. “Perhaps because it was the name she knew me by.”
Rebecca looked at this man, this neat, controlled, silver-haired man sitting on the edge of his leather chair with his hands loosely clasped and the remnants of a 30-year-old guilt sitting plainly on his face, and tried to find words for what she was feeling.
She could not.
There were too many things at once. Too many layers. Too many years. Too many mornings.
“I saw the photograph,” she said at last. “In the study. The 3 of you. You and Benjamin and my mother. Her name was written on the back.”
He nodded. He did not seem surprised. “I thought you might have.”
“Is that why you asked for my documents?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I asked for your documents,” he said carefully, “because I needed to be sure. Because I am a man who has spent his whole life dealing in certainties, and I could not let myself believe something this…” He paused, searching for the word. “This large without being certain.”
“And are you?” Rebecca asked. “Certain?”
He looked at her directly, fully, without flinching.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
The word landed between them and stayed there.
Rebecca looked at the floor.
She had imagined this moment before. Not often—she was not a person who spent much time in fantasy—but occasionally, as a child, she had let herself imagine what it would be like to sit across from her father and hear him say something that made everything make sense.
She had always imagined it would feel like relief, like a door opening.
It did not feel like a door opening.
It felt more like standing in a field after a long, long time underground. The light was real. The air was real. But her eyes had not yet adjusted, and everything was very bright and very overwhelming, and she did not yet know which direction to walk.
She looked up.
“My mother worked as a seamstress,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “She worked from a table near the window. She took in other people’s clothes and she mended them and she made enough for us to live. She bought me books. She came to every school event. She baked me a cake every birthday even when money was very tight.”
She looked at him steadily.
“She raised me alone for 16 years. She raised me completely alone. And then she got sick and she died, and I was 16 years old, and I was alone in a different way after that.”
