She laughed.
He slept.
She called her sister.
He went inside.
Something in my chest loosened as the pattern finally came into focus. Thomas hadn’t spent his life collecting memories. He’d spent it collecting the exact moment when someone chose, quietly and without ceremony, that life was still worth walking back into.
I looked over at the backpack, empty now except for its own shape. For the first time since the lawyer had set it in my lap, it didn’t feel heavy. It felt full.
Over the following days I found myself replaying every small conversation we’d shared, the way you replay a song once you finally understand the lyrics. The nurse whose husband had taken up baking sourdough to cope with a bad diagnosis. The volunteer whose grandson had passed his driving test on the second try. The cafeteria worker who slipped Thomas an extra peppermint every afternoon because she’d noticed — of course she had noticed, everyone around him eventually did — that he always gave his first one away to whichever visitor looked most afraid.
