Month: October 2023

I met two women today at the coffee shop. Both named Betsy. I didn’t ask if Betsy was a nickname for either woman, but I wondered. My friend Stephanie, introduced us. I only know Stephanie from this coffee shop where I go each day to write. She’d once asked me to watch her infant daughter while she ran to the restroom. Today I asked her if she’d worried the entire time her daughter was in my care, with me being a stranger, and all, and while laughing, she told me and the women named Betsy, that on her way to the ladies room that day she’d stopped by the counter and asked the baristas to keep an eye on me while I kept an eye on her daughter. It was a leap of faith that she took, leaving that precious child with a stranger. One of the Betsys had lost her own daughter to murder. Not to a stranger, but to someone they’d known well. And it struck me as the saddest thing I’d ever heard. It sat with me all morning as I worked, this knowing that we never really know.