“A coworker showed me the appeal recently. On her phone.” She glanced at the flyers. “She thought the girl looked like me. Then she read the name.”
“Recently?”
“Yes. I thought my letter had stopped it.”
She tucked the receipt back into the folder, but left the copy where I could see it.
“I didn’t want to come here,” she said. “I didn’t know whether you’d believe me, or whether you’d ask me to prove everything in front of a room full of people. But there was a date on that appeal. If I left it, you’d do it again tonight.”
Behind Derek, the packet of paper cups lay unopened on the counter. I had bought biscuits for the guests. I could still smell them warming in the kitchen while Ruth stood across from me, explaining why she had needed to stop us herself.
Derek reached for the packet of cups.
“People are coming,” he said. “We could still give them something good. Twenty years, and here she is. We could say the campaign worked.”
He looked at me rather than Ruth. For a second, I looked at him too.
I could see how easy it would be. Put the chairs straight. Stand beside her. Tell everyone their kindness had brought us to this moment. Leave out the letter, and nobody would have to watch my brother lose the thing he had built.
“No,” Ruth said.
Derek left his hand on the cups. “Nobody needs the difficult parts.”
“They’re my parts,” she said. “You don’t get to cut them out.”
I had asked her for a photograph before I had properly asked how she was. Derek hadn’t made me do that. I had wanted proof of the ending I thought I deserved.
“I thought you’d be pleased,” I told her. “That someone kept looking.”
“Even after being asked to stop?”
“I didn’t know.”
“You know now.”
She gathered the letter and receipt. “If there’s ever going to be a friendship, it has to be private. And this has to end. Not turn into a different kind of appeal.”
I wanted to ask whether she meant a real friendship. Whether she remembered me the way I remembered her. Even then, I was trying to get a promise out of her before doing what she had asked.
Instead, I brought my laptop from behind the counter.
“I’ll cancel tonight. Tell them you’re safe and the search is over. No location. I’ll write a correction for the café account, then delete the search page.”
Ruth stayed standing while I opened a blank document.
“And him?” she asked.
“I want to say what he did. But not if that means putting your letter in front of everyone.”
“You can tell them he received it. You can tell them he hid it. Not my surname now, or where I work, or my address. No copy of the letter.”
“And no picture,” I said.
“No photograph of us making up. We haven’t made up.”
Derek pushed his chair back. “You’re going to humiliate me in front of people we’ve known for years.”
“You let them come here for years.”
“You did too.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I had booked evenings around this search, kept that photograph where every customer could see it, accepted sympathy with their money for coffee. His lie had made it possible. My need had made it welcome.
I typed, then turned the screen toward Ruth.
The search appeal is canceled permanently. Ruth is safe and has asked for privacy. Twenty years ago, she sent Derek a registered letter asking him to tell me she was safe and to stop the search. He received it and did not tell me. I learned this today. I am sorry for continuing to publish her photograph and appeal. Please remove any copies you shared. There will be no reunion event or photographs.
“That’s enough,” she said after reading it twice.
She put the folder in her bag. The childhood photograph was still on the table.
