My name is Claire. My flight had been delayed three hours and I was scrolling my phone when I noticed him: an elderly man in a worn brown coat sitting against a pillar with a small cardboard suitcase and one empty water cup.

Hundreds of people passed him. Nobody looked down.

I don’t know why I stopped. I bought a sandwich and a coffee and crouched beside him. ‘Sir, are you all right?’

‘I’m waiting for my son,’ he said. ‘He told me to meet him at Gate 12. I have his name on a paper.’

He took a folded slip from his pocket and handed it to me with a shaking hand. I read the name on it. Then I read it again, because it was mine. My maiden name, in my own father’s handwriting.

‘Where did you get this?’ I whispered.

‘He wrote it forty years ago,’ the old man said. ‘He was my best friend. He said if I was ever in trouble, I should find his daughter. He said you’d have his eyes.’

I looked at his face. I didn’t know him. But I knew the name on the slip of paper, and I knew the small silver ring on his little finger. It matched the one my father had worn until he died.

My father, a bus driver, had once lent an immigrant three months’ wages so he could stay in the country. He never spoke about it. The man’s name was Emil.

Emil had built a small bakery. Then his wife fell ill, then his business, and last month he lost the apartment. He had a flight ticket his nephew had bought him, and a cardboard suitcase, and nowhere to go.

‘My son is dead,’ he told me quietly. ‘I say I’m waiting for him because it sounds better than saying I have no one.’

I missed my flight. I took him home in a taxi. My husband made him tea, and my daughter, who is six, took him upstairs to show him her drawings.

Emil has lived in our spare room for a year now. He bakes bread every Sunday. On the wall over the kitchen table hangs a small cardboard sign. It says, in my father’s handwriting, ‘Gate 12.’

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