It is extremely irksome what the brain tends to remember. You may struggle to remember what it felt like to freefall when skydiving, but sure as the sky is blue, you remember the humiliation of tripping and falling on your face before giving a speech in front of the class in third grade. It can be infuriating how the embarrassing memories simply keep nagging at you. Embarrassment, humiliation, pain and guilt all seem to stick around. The last one, guilt, is your conscience talking. Even years later, a guilty conscience can still nag at you. Unlike the memory of your third grade face plant, though, that niggle in the back of your brain should remain instead of fading into the ether. Unfortunately, most people become very adept at ignoring old guilt from long ago. Sometimes, however, a person listens to that little voice in the back of their mind and decides to clear their guilty conscience. This is exactly what happened with a former waitress from Arizona.

A former waitress from the popular El Charro Café recently cleared her guilty conscience after nearly 20 years. The people she wronged were never even aware of her crime, but the former waitress felt obligated to apologize and make amends anyway. In the 1990s, the former waitress worked for El Charro Café and a fellow waiter “encouraged [her] to ‘forget’ to ring in a few drinks a shift and pocket the cash.” The former waitress made no excuses in an anonymous letter of apology she wrote to the owner of El Charro Café, Carlotta Flores. “I [stole the cash.] I grew up in church, I knew better,” the letter read. “I hadn’t stolen a dime before then, nor have I since…It’s been 20 years, but I still carry great remorse. I am very sorry that I stole from you. Please accept my apology and this money as a repayment + 20 years of interest. May God forever bless you and your family.” In the envelope with the letter was $1,000 cash.

The former waitress’ unexpected apology came at the perfect time for the Flores family. The day before Carlotta received the former waitress’ letter, Carlotta had been robbed. Ray Flores, Carlotta’s son, described how he was shocked and touched when Carlotta showed him the envelope and the letter. “I [said], ‘Are you for real?’ [Carlotta’s] eyes welled up,” he remembers, “And she said, ‘Can you believe it?’”

The identity of the former waitress remains a mystery, but the Flores have made no secret of their gratitude. “Thank you to whomever you are for sending us this letter in a week [when] I really needed to see the good in people,” Ray wrote on Facebook. “[This] definitely restores your faith in humanity.”

The full text of the letter is available at ChristianHeadlines.com.