“Yes,” he said finally. “Not often. I worked very hard to make sure it wasn’t often.” He paused. “But yes. In the quiet moments, the ones I couldn’t fill with work or plans or the next thing, yes. I wondered.”
He looked at her.
“I was just too afraid of the answer to go looking for it.”
Rebecca nodded.
She stood up slowly. She picked up her bag from beside the chair and held it in both hands.
“Good night, sir,” she said.
Then she paused, because that word—sir—felt strange in her mouth now in a way it had not before, like wearing a coat that no longer fit.
He noticed it too. She could see it in his face.
Neither of them said anything about it.
Not yet.
She walked down the hallway, through the front door, and along the flower-lined path to the gate. The night air was cool and clean. Above the city’s glow, a few stars were visible.
She let herself out and walked to the bus stop.
For the first time in her life, the question she had carried since she was 6 years old—the 1 she had drawn as an empty space in a picture, the 1 she had looked at the floor to avoid, the 1 she had carried quietly and alone for 23 years—was no longer a question.
It was still painful. It was still complicated. It was still something she would have to sit with for a long time before she knew what shape it would finally take in her life.
But it was no longer empty.
And for that night, that was enough.
Part 3
The weekend passed quietly.
Mr. Caleb moved through his house in a different kind of silence than usual. Not his working silence, that focused, productive stillness that filled the rooms on weekday mornings. This was something else, looser, more uncertain, the silence of a man who had said the truest thing he had ever said in his life and was now living in the space that came after it, not yet knowing what would grow there.
He did not call anyone. He did not open his laptop. He sat in the garden on Saturday afternoon on the wooden bench beneath the mango tree, the 1 that looked slightly less controlled than the rest, and stayed there for a long time doing nothing at all. He could not remember the last time he had done nothing at all.