I had discreetly asked if anyone in the office was planning to attend.
A few strangers made me the gesture of bowing my head with sympathy that people use when they want to seem to care without really doing anything.
Nobody in my office was.
After eleven years of working in that building, the man who had indicated to people where to go, repaired countless stuck printers and helped keep the whole place running, was being fired with just a dozen people present.
I sat near the bottom. The ceremony was brief, simple and dignified, with the same stillness that Charles had had.
When I finished, I stayed a while after everyone left, not ready to leave and not knowing what I expected.
That’s when a man in a dark suit approached me.
Is it Charlotte?
I nodded, surprised.
My name is Liam. I am Mr. Wilson’s lawyer.” He reached out to me, and I narrowed it, still processing the word “lawyer” associated with Charles’ name. He left him something. They told me to deliver it to you personally, if you came.
I was extended by an old shoebox, whose cardboard had softened over time, with a corner held by already yellowish adhesive tape.
“Mr. Wilson left this to him,” he gently repeated, as if he wanted to make sure he had really heard it.
—
I held the box for a good while before daring to lift the lid.
Inside, resting on top, there were photographs.
Dozens.
The first one pressed my chest before I even understood everything I was seeing.
It was me. My first day. Sitting in front of Charles at that table by the window, holding my lunch bag and smiling with the nervous and grateful smile of someone they just offered a lifeguard to.
I didn’t remember anyone taking that picture. I didn’t even know Charles had a camera back then.
Then I remembered that I was taking out his old phone. Maybe I had taken those pictures when I didn’t look.
I kept looking.
There was a picture of the day of my promotion, I holding the little cake of the gas station, smiling as if it were the best gift I had ever received, which in a way was.
There was a picture of the week of my divorce. I looked exhausted, empty, looking at nothing. But she was still sitting at our table.
I had also kept that one.
There was a picture of the day after my mother’s funeral, with the half-sandwich visible between us on the table, my hands around a cup of coffee as if it were the only stable thing in the room.
Charles had quietly searched eleven years of my life, capturing moments that no one else had considered important enough to see them.
—
Under the pictures was the notebook. The same notebook. The one I had written every day after lunch for over a decade.
I opened it with hands that kept shaking.
The notes were brief. With date. A few just one sentence.
*Charlotte smiled today. First time all week. *
*Day of promotion. He acted like it wasn’t important. It was. *
♪ Her mother’s gone. Ask tomorrow if he managed to sleep. *
Page after page, year after year, written with a letter that had become a little more trembling over time, but never less deliberate.
Every little thing I thought no one had noticed, Charles had written it down as if it mattered.
Because for him, it was.
At the end of the notebook was a folded letter, with my name written in front with the same letter.
I sat on a bench outside the chapel and read it.
He wrote that he knew what people were saying about us. The jokes, the comments, the way some looked at me with a strange shame because I chose to sit with the janitor every day.
He said he had never bothered him, because none of them understood what they were really seeing.
Then I got to the last page.
Something slipped and fell into my lap.
