The letter arrived at Larimer Treeline on a morning I was pulling double shifts between both shops.
Not an email. Not a text. A letter. Actual paper in an actual envelope, handwritten, addressed to Treeline Coffee — Larimer Street Location with the kind of penmanship that belonged to a generation that still believed in stamps. No return address. Postmarked from a town in western Colorado I'd never heard of — Paonia, on the far side of the Elk Mountains, the kind of place that exists because the fruit orchards need someone to tend them and the mountains need someone to live in their shadow.
I almost didn't open it. The morning was busy — Larimer was finding its rhythm, the regulars beginning to form, the neighborhood settling into the patterns that would hold the shop the way Union Station's patterns held the original. I set the letter behind the register and forgot about it for two hours.
Then the lull came and I opened it and the floor shifted.
Ms. Bridger,
