It was a warm autumn day, and the long-awaited “Indian summer” delighted passersby with a magical dance of yellow hues and floating cobweb particles. Many people, preoccupied with their chores and problems, simply did not notice the splendor of autumn nature, striving to show its full glory before the coming winter. Although Alyona was rushing to work, she couldn’t help but appreciate the wonderful view of park paths and alleys covered in golden leaves.
Alyona also noticed how young mothers, taking their children to school, always took photos of them against the backdrop of maple and ash trees stained with crimson.
“Probably my Mashenka would have liked it too… Children, they do love frolicking in the leaves…,” Alyona thought sadly, feeling a bitter tear scorch her cheek.
The girl tried to adjust her mood, but it was a struggle. Her maternal heart ached with sadness and longing, at the mere thought of her own little blood.
“Lord, it’s been five years already… But it feels like it was just yesterday…,” Alyona whispered, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. She felt that there was no punishment more terrible than being forced to part with her child.
Alyona stopped and, in front of passersby, gave in to her tears. It was an emotional outburst that simply could not be stopped. Finally, after having cried out and decisively chased away the sad mood, she quickened her pace to leave the park that brought her sorrow and melancholy. Approaching the cafe building where she worked as a waitress, Alyona smiled sweetly, remembering a time when everything was different, and she and her husband owned it.
She considered the establishment her baby and even now, she treated it with great care and reverence. Only a few of the cafe’s regulars remembered the time when Alyona, together with her husband Andrey, had opened it. Back then, they were young and driven, and life seemed to them an easy stroll filled with joyful moments and experiences.
Alyona’s father had died early, leaving his beloved daughter some capital after his death. Unfortunately, hereditary diseases spare no one, and having become an orphan, the girl felt this more acutely than anyone. Alyona didn’t remember her mother at all; according to her father, she had died during childbirth. In his time, her father did everything possible so that his daughter wanted for nothing and, by doing business, was able to save a modest sum.
On that money, the young couple opened the “Chaika” cafe, which immediately became beloved by the locals and began bringing a stable income. By the standards of their town, the establishment was quite large, and one could easily celebrate a birthday or hold a wedding banquet there. Of course, Alyona could not have known that in just a few years, she would turn from an owner into a waitress.
Now, approaching the doors of her beloved cafe, the girl gently touched its wall, warmed by the autumn sun, and quietly asked:
“How are you doing, my ‘Chaechka’? Missed me, haven’t you?”
Of course, the building could not respond to Alyona, but at the same time, the girl felt a kind of warmth emanating from it. Smiling, she opened the door and entered. Inside, everything was as it used to be. Practically nothing had changed. The aroma of coffee and fresh pastries involuntarily whetted the appetite, and the scent of the signature broth wafting from the kitchen rarely left any visitor indifferent. Over the years of working at the cafe, Alyona remembered all the regular guests by face, knowing their preferences and tastes.
There, at the nearest table, sat Nikolay Petrovich, a bus driver who invariably stopped by every morning for a cup of coffee. A bit further, Yegor Andreevich, a school teacher, with enviable constancy daily grabbed a glass of milk and a couple of fresh buns for breakfast. Alyona, out of habit, greeted everyone present and headed to the utility room to put on her apron and, in an instant, transform back into a waitress.
The girl was not offended by the dramatic plunge down the career ladder. It was a forced move and, if anyone was to blame, it was surely the work of cruel fate that had chosen Alyona as its victim.
From a state of melancholic contemplation, Alyona was snapped out by the irritated shout of the cafe’s administrator, Angela:
“Well, how much longer do I have to wait for the waitress? Tables need wiping, and plates and cups need collecting… Napkin holders need filling… Or do I need to drop everything and do someone else’s job myself?”
Without saying a word, Alyona obediently hurried to carry out the command. Deep down, she, of course, harbored no ill will towards Angela, who during the times when she was the owner, worked as a mere assistant cook. Alyona had never mistreated the kitchen worker, not even suspecting that she had harbored hidden, inexplicable malice towards her all this time. And now, when bad times had come for the former owner, Angela did not miss the opportunity to declare this and underscore her superiority.
The new owners of the establishment appreciated the zeal and talent of the assistant cook and immediately made her the administrator. Wiping table after table with a rag, Alyona thought about how fate is sometimes unfair to people, taking away their most precious and dear things in an instant.
Finally, having completed all of Angela’s tasks, the waitress got a short break and was able to chat a bit with the cook Zinaida Sergeyevna, who remembered the times when the cafe still belonged to Alyona and Andrey.
“Well, dear, are you tired? Let me pour you some coffee,” the kind-hearted woman offered with care in her voice.
“Thank you, Aunt Zin… Don’t worry… You are very kind to me already,” Alyona replied, tears welling up in her eyes.
“Now, now, sweetheart… I understand everything… I’m sorry for touching on a sore subject and sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong… But, how are the searches going? Any news about Mashenka?” Zinaida Sergeyevna asked cautiously.
“Unfortunately, I can’t say anything definite, Aunt Zin… I’ve turned to everyone I could think of… To fortune tellers, to private detectives, to psychics… But all in vain,” Alyona replied with a sob, always carrying a photograph of her daughter in her pocket. There probably wasn’t an hour that she didn’t take the picture out and kiss Mashenka’s angelic face.
“Oh, what a tragedy, dear… And why is fate so unfair to you? You and Andrey were always so kind to everyone and never did harm to anyone,” the cook said with pity in her voice.
“Alright, Aunt Zin… Now’s not the time for this… I should probably go… There are more customers in the hall and no one to serve them,” Alyona said, having mustered an extraordinary willpower to pull herself together.
Zinaida Sergeyevna sadly watched the departing girl and stealthily wiped away a tear that had welled up. She treated Alyona like a daughter and remembered this sad story that had happened five years ago. Then the whole town was buzzing about the event, and there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t deeply touched by it.
Alyona and Andrey had long struggled to have a child, and when it finally happened, the young parents’ happiness knew no bounds. They always carried the baby in their arms, surrounding her with care and affection from the first days. It seemed that it would always be this way, and Alyona’s family would bask in happiness, luxury, and prosperity. But time passed, and when Mashenka turned three, a tragedy occurred that remained a festering wound in Alyona’s soul…
On that foggy September day, despite the dense fog, the spouses, together with Mashenka, went to a neighboring city to sign a lucrative contract for the supply of products for the cafe.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go, dear? We’ll still make it… When the weather’s better, then we’ll go. What’s the rush?” Alyona suggested at the time.
“No, my love… If we don’t go today, the suppliers will turn to competitors… And we can’t afford to raise prices… But for that, the products need to be high quality and inexpensive… So don’t worry, we’ll make it slowly,” Andrey argued.
Alyona then agreed with her husband’s suggestion, not yet knowing that in a little while, she would be berating herself for not insisting on her own way that September day. Andrey was an experienced driver and drove the car confidently and cautiously. Unfortunately, this did not protect him from the misfortune that awaited him around the corner in the face of a truck veering into their lane.
At the collision, his car was violently thrown onto the roadside, thickly overgrown with willows and wolfberry bushes. The truck driver got away with minor scratches, while Andrey died instantly, not even fully realizing what had happened. Little Mashenka, at that moment, was lying in a portable cradle in the back seat, which undoubtedly saved her from injuries.
Alyona, upon impact, lost consciousness and woke up in intensive care, where doctors desperately tried to bring her back to life. But the injured girl, at that moment, was only concerned with one question… What happened to her husband and where was her daughter? But the doctors, avoiding eye contact, insisted that the patient needed to calm down and rest a bit… Only on the fifth day did Alyona learn that Andrey had died and her daughter Mashenka had disappeared without a trace. Police and rescuers combed the entire area but found no trace of the little girl.
A month later, Alyona was discharged from the hospital, and she began bombarding police stations with reports of her child’s disappearance. But, to her dismay, the law enforcement officers reacted very passively to her report and were in no hurry to open a case. No one wanted to saddle their department with an unsolved crime, so after brief investigative actions, the search was halted.
Realizing that she could not give up, Alyona turned to private detective agencies, which only drained her money for various surveillances and spy reports. But in reality, their actions brought absolutely no results. Since the case of the girl’s disappearance received wide public resonance, it immediately attracted the attention of various charlatans and fraudsters.
One day, Alyona received a call from an unknown person who, deliberately distorting his voice, said that he knew where her daughter was being held. Naturally, in exchange for the information, the caller demanded a substantial monetary reward from the distraught mother. Wishing to get her daughter back, the girl, with great difficulty, gathered the necessary amount. Thus, without realizing it, she plunged into huge debts. Unfortunately, when the stranger received the required sum, he immediately disappeared from the horizon, turning out to be an ordinary scammer. As a result of this failure, Alyona’s financial situation significantly worsened, and the family business gradually began to decline…
The reason lay in the fact that the desperate Alyona, who only paid for the services of a numerous army of private detectives, simply had no time to deal with the affairs of the establishment. Eventually, it ceased to be profitable, and the last savings were barely enough to pay off the growing catastrophic salary debt. Over time, the cafe’s affairs went so badly that it had to be closed, plunging all its workers into despair.
Therefore, when the young owner announced her bankruptcy, this news surprised no one among her acquaintances. That’s when a businessman from a long-competing restaurant across the street appeared at Alyona’s doorstep. The man offered to buy the cafe, offering a very meager price for it. Of course, if Andrey and her beloved daughter had been by her side, Alyona would never have agreed to such a predatory offer. But as it was, she simply had nowhere to turn.
The girl didn’t ponder long, eventually signing the necessary papers. As if mocking her, the new owner offered her a job as a waitress in the establishment where she had once been the owner. To his surprise, Alyona agreed, putting her pride aside. If only someone could know how many tears the girl had cried and how much grief she had endured.
After all, all her energy and resources, Alyona spent only on the search for her missing daughter. Probably at that moment, it became the purpose of her entire life and hardly anything in the world was more important than her beloved daughter Mashenka. After her husband’s death, Alyona simply could not look at other men and, living alone, cried at night, burying her face in a pillow. All these years, the bereaved mother did not rearrange her daughter’s room, wishing to keep everything as it was in the times when its walls echoed with infectious children’s laughter.
Those of the staff who remembered the years when Alyona was the owner of the cafe, for the most part, sympathized with her grief and harbored no malice. Only Angela, reveling in power, tried to bite and humiliate the former owner more painfully.
Now, as the lunch crowd noticeably increased in the cafe, she literally did not let Alyona sit down, making her spin like a squirrel in a wheel. But the young woman did not despair and worked with persistence and diligence.
Alyona knew that the cafe would soon hit peak hour. Crowds of office plankton from nearby business centers would flock to them for lunch. The premonition did not deceive the waitress and soon, the establishment became so crowded that there was no room for an apple to fall. Therefore, when a tall man entered the cafe, holding a little girl’s hand, there was, of course, no free table for them.
Alyona looked warmly at the visitors and, feeling a growing sympathy for them, said:
“Wait, don’t leave… I’ll definitely come up with something!”
The waitress knew that the elderly Safronov couple had already eaten and in a minute their window table would be free. Soon, that’s exactly what happened. Therefore, when the couple stood up and asked for the bill, Alyona kindly pointed the young man and the girl to their table. Apparently, the man was the father of the little girl, who by age, looked like a first-grade girl.
“What would you like?” Alyona asked, obligingly unfolding the menu in front of the clients.
The man began to look at the offered dishes and, not to wait for him, the waitress headed to the neighboring table.
At that moment, the girl sitting across from her father said:
“Auntie, can I have a pie, please… This one, with cherry jam…”
Alyona turned around in surprise and looked into the girl’s eyes, which she hadn’t managed to properly see before… What the young woman saw next almost made her faint. Her head spun and her hands, holding the tray, treacherously trembled. Alyona thought all this was a dream and, just by opening her eyes, the vision would disappear and everything would become as dreary as before. The thing was, those eyes, she would recognize them among millions of other children’s eyes.
But not only that convinced Alyona of her right. On the right earlobe of the girl sitting at the table was a birthmark in the shape of a heart, which the loving mother always kissed when they were together. There could be no doubt… And Alyona understood this like no one else.
“Mashenka, my dear! Where have you been all this time!?” the young woman exclaimed, and with tears in her eyes, knelt next to the girl.
“How do you know my name? And why are you crying?” the girl asked anxiously.
But Alyona was no longer listening, hugging and kissing her beloved daughter’s little fingers. The man sitting at the table tensed noticeably and felt his face flush with shame and embarrassment.
“Daddy, who is this lady? And why is she acting so strangely?” the girl asked, who thought she had no one else but her dad.
Alyona looked questioningly at the man, struggling to restrain herself from calling the police. But the stranger’s gaze at that moment radiated sadness and repentance, and therefore did not contain any threat.
“This lady… is your birth mother, Mashenka,” the man whispered, and unable to contain his feelings, covered his face with his hands.
From the way the stranger’s shoulders moved, Alyona guessed that he was crying. At that moment, Alyona took a chair and sat down at the table with Masha and her companion. In the background, she heard the cafe administrator, Angela, shouting somewhere, but she didn’t care anymore… Because in front of Alyona now sat her daughter, whom she had been searching for five long, sorrowful years. Of course, the girl had noticeably grown up, but despite everything, it was undoubtedly her.
“Please forgive me… Although, there’s no forgiveness for monsters like me… Call the police, I beg you… Otherwise, I’ll sink into the ground from shame right now,” the man sobbed.
“Wait, I’m not calling anyone until you explain everything to me… Calm down, I don’t wish you harm,” Alyona said, peering into the man’s eyes.
In response, the stranger wiped away tears with his jacket sleeve and, sighing sadly, began his story. As it turned out, the man’s name was Sergey, and he worked as a forest ranger in a hunting estate. Many years ago, his wife died of cancer. After burying his wife, grief-stricken Sergey left his office manager career and moved to the forest, where he began living as a hermit.
The man had always dreamed of having children, regretting in his soul that his wife had not managed to give him any. On that fateful morning, when the accident occurred, he was making his rounds and accidentally stumbled upon the wrecked car, in which a little girl was crying. Sergey could not find a pulse in Andrey and his wife, and so he decided to save at least the girl. At that moment, by his own admission, the forest ranger himself did not understand what happened to him. Perhaps paternal feelings flared up. He simply took the girl in his arms and left with her to his cabin, hidden among dense forests. The little girl remembered only her name and could say almost nothing about her parents.
For five years, the forest ranger raised the girl, considering her his own daughter. Of course, at first, the girl cried, missing her real parents, but then she got used to it and began calling Sergey – dad. All these years, the man sincerely believed that the girl’s parents were dead and did not even suspect that Alyona had been saved by a resuscitation team that arrived at the scene. Sergey grew up in an orphanage and, most of all, feared that such a sweet little girl would end up in a shelter. All this time, the man took care of Mashenka and never denied her anything.
Despite the fact that the forest ranger’s salary did not lend itself to extravagances, he always found money for gifts for his foster daughter. And, by pure chance, entering the cafe, Masha met her real mother. After listening to Sergey, Alyona, to her surprise, did not feel any negativity or anger towards him. The man’s face was streaked with tears, and there was no doubt that they were sincere.
Deep down, the girl understood that Sergey acted as a man, thinking that the girl had lost both parents. Of course, one could condemn him for such actions and call the police… But Alyona, for some reason, suddenly didn’t want to do that… And Mashenka, who threw herself into her arms, melted the ice of sadness in her heart. It was clear that the girl sincerely loved the man who had replaced her deceased father.
Therefore, Alyona decisively removed her work apron and hung it on a chair. Then, taking Sergey and Mashenka by the hands, she offered them a walk in the autumn park… Alyona, without remorse, left the cafe, deciding to turn this page of her life forever… The weather outside was so beautiful, and the three of them still had so much to talk about… And ahead of them lay a whole life, full of joyful and happy moments.