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.