“That I’ll be disappointed. Or that she’ll be disappointed in me.”
Dennis placed a cup of hot coffee in front of her.
“Meeting her doesn’t mean you have to forgive her right away,” he said thoughtfully. “You could just see her. Figure out how you feel.”
“What if I don’t feel anything?” Maria worried.
“And what if you feel something important?” Dennis smiled.
Maria drank her coffee and thought. The letter lay on the table between them, a bridge between the past and the future.
“I need more time to think,” she finally decided.
The phone rang late that evening. Alex was in bed with a book, getting ready to sleep.
“I read the letter,” Maria said without preamble. “I cried for two hours. I want to see her.” Her voice trembled with emotion. “But not meet her. Just see her from a distance.”
Alex sat up in bed.
“What do you mean?”
“Can you arrange a ‘chance’ encounter? You two are sitting in a cafe, and I walk by,” Maria explained. “I need to know if I’m ready for a real conversation.”
“You think that will help?”
“I don’t know. But it’s the only way I can do it right now,” his sister confessed. “I need to see her in person, not just in your memories.”
Alex understood this was an important, if small, step for Maria.
“Okay,” he agreed. “I’ll set it up.”
Susan was so nervous she was dropping dishes and forgetting words mid-sentence. Alex explained the plan for the chance meeting, and his mother treated it like a final exam on which her entire life depended.
“What if she comes over?” she asked for the hundredth time. “What will I say?”
“The truth,” Alex answered patiently. “Like always.”
“And what if she doesn’t?”
“Then we’ll wait until she’s ready for a real conversation.”
They arranged to meet at the same cafe where they’d had their first coffee. Saturday, at two o’clock. Susan bought a new dress, modest but pretty. She wanted to look nice for her daughter.
“Remember,” Alex warned, “she might just walk by and not stop. Don’t take it personally.”
“I’m prepared for any outcome,” his mother said, but her voice betrayed her anxiety.
Alex knew this meeting would change everything. Either the family would finally come together, or Maria would realize she wasn’t ready for reconciliation. Either way, the uncertainty would end. Outside, snow began to fall, covering the city in a white blanket of anticipation. The moment of truth had arrived. A mother and daughter were about to see each other after twenty years.
The coffee in her cup grew cold, but Susan didn’t notice—her entire focus was on the window. She sat across from Alex in Anna’s Cafe, the same place they had met a month ago, and couldn’t stop her hands from shaking.
“Mom, calm down,” Alex said quietly, using the word for only the second time. “It’s going to be okay.”
“What if she changed her mind?” Susan whispered, fixing her hair for the hundredth time. “Or what if she sees me and is disappointed?”
Her new dress, a conservative but lovely navy blue, fit perfectly, but she kept smoothing out imaginary wrinkles.
At five minutes to two, a young woman in a bright red coat walked past the cafe. Alex recognized Maria immediately; she was walking slowly, clearly nervous. She stopped at the window of the shop next door, then turned toward the cafe window. Maria looked through the glass at the woman at the table and was startled to see her own features reflected back. The same shape of the eyes, the same curve of the lips, the same stubborn chin.
Susan felt the gaze, looked up, and froze. Mother and daughter stared at each other through the glass, and the entire world shrank to that single moment. Twenty years of separation dissolved in a single look.
Maria stood on the sidewalk for a full minute, wrestling with herself. Her heart was pounding so loudly she thought passersby could hear it. Finally, she made her decision, pushed open the cafe door, and a bell chimed above her head. She approached the table slowly, uncertainly, as if walking a tightrope over a chasm. Alex stood to greet her.
“Maria, this is Susan,” he said, his own voice trembling with emotion.
Susan rose as well, unsure whether to offer a hand or not. Maria sank into the chair across from her and studied her mother in silence for a few seconds.
“You… you look a lot like me,” she finally said quietly, her voice full of surprise.
“You look like your father,” Susan replied, her voice shaking. “And like me, too. Especially the eyes—you have your father’s eyes.”
At the surrounding tables, people carried on with their conversations, unaware that a small miracle was taking place nearby. Maria didn’t waste time on small talk. She looked her mother directly in the eye and asked without preamble:
“Why did you leave us?”
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