He thought about a girl with warm eyes and hair tied up loosely in a garden somewhere, laughing. He thought about the day she had come to him, nervous, very young, speaking quietly, and what she had told him. He thought about what he had said back.
He pressed the tips of his fingers against his forehead and closed his eyes.
He had been 29 years old. He had been afraid. He had been building something, just beginning to build something, and a child had felt like the end of everything he was trying to create. That was what he had told himself. That was how he had explained it then.
It sounded different now, sitting in a quiet house at 61 years old in a room full of everything money had ever bought him.
He opened his eyes.
Through the study doorway, the hallway was dark. The house was silent. Rebecca had long gone home.
He thought about her face.
“Stop it,” he told himself.
He turned back to his papers. But sleep, when it finally came that night, took a long time in arriving.
He woke at 2:00 in the morning, not slowly, the way you sometimes drift out of sleep, but suddenly, completely, as if something had reached into his chest and pulled him upright.