“That is all I ask,” he said.
She stood. She picked up her bag. Then she did something she had not planned, something that surprised her as she did it.
She reached out and picked up the folder from the table. Not to read it that night, just to take it with her, to let it come home with her and sit on her table and be a thing she could look at in her own space, on her own time.
Mr. Caleb watched her pick it up. Something moved across his face that he did not try to hide.
“Good night,” she said.
“Good night, Rebecca,” he said.
For the first time, the word felt different in his mouth. Not Rebecca the maid. Not Rebecca who started last week, Grace recommended her. Just Rebecca.
She walked to the door.
She did not come to work the following Monday or Tuesday.
Mr. Caleb did not call her. He had promised her time, and he intended to keep that promise, even as the house felt the particular emptiness of waiting. He made his own breakfast. He left his own dishes in the sink. He ate lunch standing in the kitchen and dinner alone at the dining table.
On Tuesday evening, he sat in the sitting room with the lamp on and a book he was not reading and thought about how quiet a house could be when you had spent 30 years filling the silence with work and had suddenly run out of ways to do that.
He thought about calling Benjamin. He decided against it. This was not ready to be talked about yet, not in the easy, anecdotal way Benjamin talked about things. This was still too new, too tender.
He went to bed early and lay there looking at the ceiling.
On Wednesday morning, just after 8:00, the gate bell rang.
He went to the window.
Rebecca was standing at the gate.
She was not wearing her work clothes. She had on a simple blue dress, the kind of thing a person wears for herself, not for a job. Her bag was over her shoulder. Her face was calm.
He went downstairs and opened the gate.
She looked at him.
“I would like to accept the offer,” she said. “The company, the training.” She paused. “I want to learn it properly from the beginning.”
He looked at her for a moment.
“Good,” he said simply and warmly. “Good.”
She came through the gate.
He made breakfast that morning himself. Not perfectly. The eggs were slightly more done than they should have been. The toast was a shade too dark. He put it on the table and looked at it critically.
“It’s fine,” Rebecca said, sitting down.
“It isn’t,” he said. “You’ve been making mine better for a month.”
She picked up her fork and ate without responding to that, but the corner of her mouth moved.
He sat across from her.
They ate together at the long dining table that had been set for 1 person for as long as either of them could remember: for him, 30 years; for her, her whole adult life. Morning light came through the tall windows. The clock ticked in the hallway.
It was not a comfortable meal exactly. It was not easy the way easy things are. But it was real. 2 people sitting at a table, learning how to be in the same room in a new way, without the roles they had been using to manage the distance between them.
After a while, Rebecca said, “You burned the toast.”
“I know,” he said.
