She had not remembered it until that moment.
Simon.
She looked at the photograph in her hands.
Benjamin. Simon. Victoria.
Her mother.
Her mother’s name, right there in this house, on this wall, inside this frame that she had dusted and replaced and never truly looked at until now.
She put the photograph back on the wall very carefully. She made sure it was level. She made sure it was exactly where it had been.
She picked up her cleaning things.
She walked out of the study and down the hallway to the kitchen and stood at the sink and turned on the cold tap and held her wrists under the running water for a moment, the way she sometimes did when she needed to feel something simple and real.
The water was cold. The tap was real. The kitchen was real. And the photograph on the wall down the hall was real.
She turned off the tap. She dried her hands. She looked out the window at the overcast sky.
Somewhere upstairs, she could hear Mr. Caleb’s footsteps moving slowly back and forth.