“Take care,” Amara replied.
He returned to the restaurant without looking back. He had forty seconds of rest left.
What he didn’t know was that, thirty meters back, a thirty-six-year-old man had seen everything.
Richard had been walking toward his mother. He had calculated that he would arrive in twenty seconds. Twenty seconds was nothing in his schedule, divided into blocks of fifteen minutes, but it was enough for someone else to do what he hadn’t.
She watched as the young woman in the apron took Eleanor’s arm. She watched as her mother laughed. She watched as she crossed a street she hadn’t been able to cross alone.
And something cracked inside him.
Eleanor had raised him alone since his father died when Richard was nine. She worked two jobs. She never said “I can’t.” When he asked for a $12,000 loan to start his logistics company, she simply said, “Then do it right.”
He now owned three buildings in the city. His name was on glass and steel. But he hadn’t been there in time.
He entered the restaurant.
He sat down at a table in the Amara section.
She didn’t recognize him. She offered him coffee without looking at him too closely.
“Can I ask you something?” he said when she returned.
-Of course.
—Did you help an elderly woman cross the street a few minutes ago?
-Yeah.
-Because?
Amara frowned slightly.
—I needed help. I had ten minutes.
Richard looked at her.
—She’s my mother.
Silence fell between them.
“I was on the other side,” he continued. “I would have arrived in twenty seconds. But I didn’t arrive.”
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