He pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper, scribbled something quickly, and pressed it into my hand. “Read it later,” he said, his expression strange but gentle. I slipped the note into my coat pocket and rushed off, already worrying about whether there would be a seat on the bus.
That night passed like any other. Homework spread across the kitchen table. Complaints about teachers. My husband talking about a new client at his law firm. Life continued, loud and demanding. The note stayed forgotten until the next evening, when I emptied my coat pockets before doing laundry.
“Thank you for saving my life. You don’t know this, but you already saved it once before.”
Below that was a date from three years earlier and the name of a café I hadn’t thought about in ages. Lucy’s Café. It had been my regular lunch spot before it closed.
The memory came back with startling clarity. A thunderstorm. People crowding inside to escape the rain. A man stumbling in, soaked, eyes hollow, carrying something heavier than hunger. The waitress hesitated. Everyone else looked away. I had bought him coffee and a croissant, smiled, and wished him a good day. It hadn’t felt important. Just normal decency.
That night, sleep wouldn’t come. The idea that something so small had mattered so deeply refused to let go.
The next day, I left work early and went back to the shawarma stand. He was there, huddled in the same spot, his dog curled beside him. When he saw me, the dog wagged its tail, and the man smiled in a way that looked fragile but real.
I told him I’d read the note. He nodded. He told me his name was Victor.
We sat in a café nearby, warming our hands around mugs of coffee. I learned that he had once been a truck driver with a wife and a daughter. A rainy-night accident had shattered his leg and buried him under medical debt. Disability benefits never came. His marriage collapsed under the weight of stress and loss. Depression followed, slow and consuming.
He told me that the day we first met, at Lucy’s Café, he hadn’t planned to survive the night. That being seen, even briefly, had given him one more day. Then another. Then another. Finding his dog had given him a reason to keep going when nothing else remained.
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