He died in the line of duty. Before he died, he wrote: “Thank the woman from the cafe who fed my son. She gave him what the world had deprived him of—the feeling that he was still remembered.”
When I finished reading the letter, my hands trembled treacherously.
Everything around me froze—even the spoons stopped clanking. The soldiers saluted. And I simply stood there, unable to utter a word.
For a long time, I couldn’t recover from that day. I reread the letter over and over, as if afraid the letters would disappear if I let go of it. Sometimes I thought he would still come—with the same backpack, with the same timid smile.
A few weeks later, I received another letter. From that same officer. Inside was a short note and a photograph: the boy, the same one, sitting on the grass next to a man in uniform.
It turned out he had been adopted by his father’s friend, a soldier whose life he had once saved. “Now he has a home. And he often thinks of the woman who fed him in the mornings,” it read.
