She wasn’t his mother. Ethan knew that.
But sometimes the heart decides before blood gets a vote.
Anna came every week. She brought cookies, a book, a small soccer ball. She fixed his hair with her fingers like she could straighten out his whole life that way. Best of all, she never talked to him like he was pitiful. She talked to him like he mattered.
Until one day… she stopped coming.
Three months passed. No explanation.
“She’s not coming back,” one caretaker said without looking at him. “Don’t make a scene.”
Ethan waited anyway. Hungry. Hollow.
Then one night, he ran.
From then on, he learned to sleep wherever he could and to trust no one—except the promise that burned in his chest like a splinter that never healed.
That afternoon, weaving between headstones, he noticed something unusual near a freshly placed grave still covered in flowers.
A wallet.
Not cheap. Not Velcro.
Fine leather. The kind that belonged to someone who never counted coins.
Ethan stopped.
A few yards away stood a man in a dark suit, motionless in front of the same grave. His head was bowed, his hands clenched like he was holding grief that didn’t fit inside his body.