My taxi meter kept running while she cried

Dear Delyara, A young woman entered my taxi outside a hospital and gave an address across the city. Ten minutes into the journey, she began crying silently. I kept my eyes on the road. Taxi drivers learn when conversation helps and when it becomes intrusion. At a red light, she asked whether I had daughters. I said two. She told me she had just been informed she could not become pregnant. Then she apologised for telling a stranger. I said strangers are sometimes easier because they do not know which version of you to expect tomorrow. She cried harder. Traffic was heavy, and the meter continued climbing. When we reached her building, she stared at the fare and searched through her bag with shaking hands. I turned the meter off and told her she had already paid. She asked when. I said, “When you trusted me with the truth.” It was a sentimental thing to say, perhaps too sentimental, but she smiled for the first time. After she left, I sat at the curb and thought about my youngest daughter, who has not spoken to me in six months because I disapproved of the man she loves. I had offered tenderness to a stranger and withheld it from my own child. The empty back seat made that contradiction impossible to ignore.