Charles had been quietly documenting eleven years of my life, in moments nobody else had thought worth noticing.
***
Beneath the photos was the notebook. The same one. The one he'd written in every single day after lunch for over a decade.
I opened it with hands that weren't quite steady.
Beneath the photos was the notebook.
The entries were short. Dated. Some just a sentence.
Charlotte smiled today. First time this week.
Promotion day. She pretended it wasn't a big deal. It was.
Her mother is gone. Ask tomorrow if she slept.
Page after page, year after year, in handwriting that had grown slightly shakier over time but never less careful.
Her mother is gone.
Every small thing I thought nobody had registered, Charles had written down like it mattered.
Because to him, it had.
***
At the very back of the notebook was a folded letter, my name written on the front in the same handwriting.
I sat down on a bench outside the chapel and read it.
He wrote that he knew what people said about us. The jokes, the comments, the way some of them looked at me with a kind of pity for sitting with the janitor every day.
Charles had written down like it mattered.
He said he never minded because none of them understood what they were looking at.
Then I reached the last page.
Something slipped out and landed in my lap.
A photograph.
A young woman standing beside Charles.
Smiling.
Something slipped out and landed in my lap.
For a second, I thought I was looking at myself.
I turned it over.
On the back, in Charles's handwriting, were two words:
My daughter.
***
My hands started shaking.
I unfolded the last page of the letter.
My hands started shaking.
He wrote that years before I started at the company, he'd had a daughter.
She had passed away young, before I was even born, and after that, most days had felt like background noise he was simply waiting out.
Then I sat down across from him on my first day.
He wrote that I reminded him of her. Not in the way that made him sad, but in the way that made the world feel a little less empty again.
She had passed away young.
He said he never told me because he didn't want me to feel like I owed him anything or like I was filling in for someone I'd never met.
