He said without preamble, “Did she keep your photographs? Your mother. Did she take pictures of you when you were small?”
Rebecca looked at him from across the kitchen. “Some,” she said. “Not many. We didn’t have a camera. Sometimes a neighbor would take 1.”
He nodded as if noting something down somewhere inside himself.
“What were you like?” he asked. “As a child.”
She looked at him for a moment. Then she turned back to the kettle.
“Quiet,” she said. “Serious. I read a lot. My mother used to say I was born 40 years old.”
She paused.
“I didn’t have many friends when I was small, but the friends I had were loyal. I was good at school, especially mathematics.”
He was quiet for a moment and then, very softly, almost to himself, said, “I was good at mathematics too.”
She set his cup on the table in front of him.
Neither of them said anything else. But something in the room had shifted again, slightly and carefully, the way things shift when they are being rebuilt from the ground up, 1 small piece at a time.
It was the following Friday evening when he asked to speak with her again.
She came to the sitting room the same way she had the week before and sat in the same chair, and he sat across from her. But this time he did not seem like a man carrying something unbearable. He seemed like a man who had made a decision and was at peace with it.
He had a folder on the table in front of him.
She looked at it but said nothing.
“I want to say something,” he began, “and I want you to hear it properly before you respond.”
She looked at him. “All right.”
“You are my daughter,” he said simply and directly. “Nothing will change that. Not time, not what I did, not anything. That is simply the truth.”
He looked at the folder.
“But I am also aware that a truth does not undo 30 years. I am aware that I cannot walk back into your life as if I were simply late for something.”
Rebecca said nothing. She was listening.
“But I would like to try,” he said. “Whatever form that takes, whatever pace you need. I’m not going anywhere.”
He paused.
“I have been going somewhere my whole life. Always the next project, the next goal, the next thing to build. I think perhaps I was always moving so I would not have to stop and look at what I had left behind.”
He placed his hand on the folder.