"We used to," she answered. Daniel glanced at her, then at Walter. "Even if the person doesn't know the date?" The room went still. Evelyn brought a hand to her mouth, as though a memory had crossed the space between them before she was ready to receive it. "Danny?" she whispered. The suited man's composure broke. He nodded once, unable to say anything for several seconds. Then he managed, "I wasn't sure you'd want me to come back."
Walter made a sound Maggie would remember for the rest of her life, half a sob and half a breath released after decades of holding it in. He stepped forward without trusting his legs and placed both hands against Daniel's face, looking for the boy beneath the lines. "Want you?" he said. "Lord, son, we spent years trying to find you." Evelyn rose slowly, and Daniel caught her before she could lose her balance. She clung to his jacket with both hands and cried into the shoulder of a man who had crossed the country in a limousine but still seemed, in that moment, like a child who had arrived with nothing.
Frank backed away. The truck drivers stared into their coffee cups, suddenly aware that they were witnessing something that did not belong to an audience. Maggie pulled a chair from another table and set it beside Evelyn. Daniel sat between the two people he had once called Mom and Dad, his expensive cuff brushing the edge of their worn cardigan and jacket. The coins remained on the table. Nobody touched them now, not because they had become insignificant, but because they were part of the morning that had brought the three of them together again.
For a long time, they spoke in fragments. Evelyn asked if he was well, then asked again because she could not believe the answer. Walter wanted to know if he still liked to fix radios, and Daniel laughed through tears and admitted he hadn't held a soldering iron in twenty years. He told them about his company, a daughter named Lucy, and the wife he had lost five winters earlier. He had been widowed long enough to know how strange a morning could feel without someone waiting for you at the end of it, but hearing Evelyn ask whether he ate proper dinners almost undid him.
"We wrote," Walter said eventually, tapping one finger against the table. "We wrote to every address they gave us. Most came back, but we kept trying." Daniel stared at him. "I wrote too." Evelyn shook her head in sorrow. "Nothing came here, honey. We thought you were angry with us for not coming to get you." Walter glanced down at his hands. "We weren't permitted to know where you'd gone. They said your aunt would be your family now, and we had to respect that. I never stopped hoping somebody would tell you we wanted you."