Outside the window, the sky had shifted almost imperceptibly from the black of full night to the very deep blue that comes just before morning begins.
He had been sitting there for hours.
He folded the letter carefully and put it back in the envelope. He didn’t put it back in the box. He left it on the desk in the circle of lamplight and went to stand at the window.
The garden was dark and still. The mango tree was a shadow.
And somewhere across the city, in a small fourth-floor apartment he had never been to and could not picture, a young woman was sleeping. A young woman who came to his house every morning, who made his breakfast, who had his eyes without knowing it.
Or so he feared.
Or so, somewhere in the part of him that had been avoiding this moment for 30 years, he was beginning, slowly and terribly, to know.
Part 2
Morning came whether he was ready for it or not. It always did.
Mr. Caleb showered, dressed, and went downstairs at his usual time. He made his own coffee, something he rarely did, but he needed something to do with his hands before Rebecca arrived. He stood at the kitchen counter and drank it slowly, looking at nothing in particular.
He had put the box back in the storage room before the sun came up. He had put the letter back in the envelope, the envelope back in the box, and the box on the bottom shelf where it had always been. He had turned off the lamp in his study and straightened the chair and made everything look exactly as it always looked.
But the letter was still inside him. The words were still there, heavy and permanent, the way words are when they have been waiting 30 years to be read.
I raised our child to be better than the fear that made you run away.
He heard the gate bell at 6:55.
He set down his coffee cup, straightened his shirt, walked to the front door, and opened it.
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