his hands open in his lap, and 30 years of guilt spread quietly across his face.
She thought about what she felt.
The anger was still there, that slow-banked heat. It was still there, and she did not pretend it was not.
But she also felt, and this surprised her—or perhaps it did not; perhaps her mother had made sure of it—something else. Something that was not yet forgiveness, because forgiveness was not a thing that appeared all at once like a light switched on. It was something slower. Something that had to be grown.
But it was the beginning of it.
The very small, fragile first beginning.
She took a breath.
“I am not going to walk out tonight,” she said.
He looked up.
“I’m not ready to forgive you,” she said. “Honestly. I don’t know when I will be or even if. I don’t know.”
She looked at her hands for a moment, then back at him.
“But I have spent my whole life not knowing who you were, carrying a question with no answer. And now I have an answer.” She paused. “Even if the answer is hard, even if it hurts, I would rather have it than not.”
He nodded very slowly.
“Then what would you like to do?” he asked. And he meant it. He asked it with genuine openness, no agenda behind it. He was leaving it entirely to her. “What do you need from me?”
Rebecca thought about it.
“I need time,” she said. “I need to think about all of this properly, away from this house, in my own space. I need to feel what I feel without having to be anyone’s maid while I feel it.”
He nodded. “Of course.”
“And I have 1 question,” she said. “That I need you to answer truthfully.”
“Anything,” he said.
She looked at him directly.
“Did you ever think about us?” she asked. “Even once in 30 years, did you ever wonder what happened to her? To the baby?”
He held her gaze. He did not answer quickly. He did not reach for the comfortable answer. He sat with the question the way it deserved to be sat with.
“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.
