The Wrong Number

Pablo was cooking dinner on Friday evening when his phone buzzed. The message read, “Hi Dad! Are you coming on Sunday? Mum made your favourite cake.” Pablo frowned at the screen. He was twenty-six, and as far as he knew he had no children; the only thing he had ever fathered was a rather ambitious sourdough starter.

His thumb hovered over the screen, because it would have been easy simply to delete the message. Instead he replied, “Sorry, I think you have the wrong number.” A minute later an answer arrived: “Oh no! Dad changed his phone and never told me. I’m mortified!” Pablo felt a pang of sympathy and typed, “Don’t worry. But now I’m curious about the cake.” He put the pan to one side and waited for the three dots to appear.

The girl, Lucía, explained that it was a lemon cake, made from her grandmother’s recipe, which included a secret ingredient that the whole family guarded like a state secret. Pablo joked that he could stand in as her father, purely for the sake of the cake. She sent him three laughing faces.

They kept chatting for a week, though never about anything of importance: music, burnt toast, the neighbour’s deafening parrot. The messages grew longer and sillier, and without quite noticing, Pablo began to check his phone far more often than he would have cared to admit. Some mornings, the first thing he did was to see whether she had answered.

On Sunday evening Lucía wrote again: “We’ve finished the cake. Dad knows about you now, and he has something to say.” A photograph followed, showing a smiling man holding a plate and a scrap of paper: “Come for a slice next Sunday, stranger.” Pablo studied it for a long time. Then he typed, “What time?”