The photograph was of her mother at twenty.
Smiling.
Holding the same pocket watch.
Behind the photo was one sentence:
Meet me at table seven when you are free.
The woman slowly sat down.
“My mother came here?” she whispered.
“Every Thursday,” the old man said. “Until one day, she stopped.”
Her mother had never told her about him.
Only about a kind man she once lost because her family wanted a better name, better money, better everything.
The old man looked at the empty chair.
“I kept ordering for her,” he said. “Then after she was gone from my life, I kept ordering because I hoped someone from her world would find me.”
The woman’s eyes filled.
“My mother used to say she left her heart in a cafe.”
The old man laughed once, broken and soft.
Then the woman pushed the empty cup toward herself.
“Then today,” she whispered, “let me sit where she should have.”
And for the first time in thirty years, table seven had no empty chair.