She had grown up looking at her mother’s face. She had a photograph of her own, smaller and different, her mother older in it than this, but the face was the same face: the eyes, the cheekbones, the way the smile reached all the way up.
Victoria.
Her mother’s name, written in pencil on the back of a photograph hanging on the wall of the house where she worked.
Her mother, young and laughing and alive, standing between 2 boys, 1 of whom was called Simon, and the other, the one in the middle, straight-backed, self-contained, even then.
She looked at the boy in the middle. She looked at his jaw, his eyes, the way he stood.
She looked up at the room around her: the desk, the bookshelves, the chair, the house she had come to know over the past 3 weeks. The man she saw every morning. The man whose face she had looked at in that black-framed photograph on the wall and felt that pull she could not explain.
The man named Caleb, whose first name she had never thought to ask, whose first name Grace had mentioned to her exactly once months ago in the easy way people mention things that seem unimportant.
“Oh, his name is Simon. Simon Caleb. But everyone calls him Mr. Caleb.”