Through the study doorway, the hallway was dark. The house was silent. Rebecca had long gone home.
He thought about her face.
“Stop it,” he told himself.
He turned back to his papers. But sleep, when it finally came that night, took a long time in arriving.
He woke at 2:00 in the morning, not slowly, the way you sometimes drift out of sleep, but suddenly, completely, as if something had reached into his chest and pulled him upright.
He lay in the dark for a moment, staring at the ceiling, and knew immediately that sleep was not coming back. He got up.
He did not turn on any lights. He knew the house well enough to move through it in the dark, every doorway, every step, every corner. He went to the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and drank it standing at the sink, looking out at the back garden where the mango tree was just a dark shape against the sky.
Benjamin’s voice kept coming back to him.
She looks like her. Victoria. Around the eyes, especially.
He set the glass down. He told himself again that it was nothing. Rebecca was a young woman who happened to have a face that reminded a tired, jet-lagged man of someone from 30 years ago. Benjamin had always had a flair for the dramatic. It was nothing.
He went back to bed. He lay there for 20 minutes looking at the ceiling. Then he got up again.
The storage room was at the far end of the upstairs hallway, a narrow room he used for old files and things he did not need often enough to keep in the study but could not quite bring himself to throw away. He had not been inside it in at least a year, maybe longer.
He turned on the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and looked at the shelves.
He was not entirely sure what he was looking for. He told himself he was not looking for anything, just moving, just doing something with his hands and body so his mind would quiet down. He pulled out an old folder, looked at it, put it back. He shifted a box of archived contracts. He moved a stack of old magazines he kept meaning to sort through.
Then, on the bottom shelf, pushed to the back behind everything else, he saw it.
A cardboard box. Brown. Slightly soft at the corners from age. No label on the outside.
He looked at it for a long moment.
He knew what was in it. Somewhere at the back of his mind, beneath all the years of deliberate forgetting, he had always known exactly where it was.