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.
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.