I still remember that day. 9:17 a.m. The air outside seemed to grow thicker — four black SUVs stopped at the entrance. Men in uniform entered the room, step by step, as if carrying not just papers but someone’s fate.

One of them approached me, took off his cap, and said he was looking for the woman who fed the boy every morning. My mouth went dry. “That’s me,” I replied.

He took out a folded letter. His voice trembled slightly.
The boy’s name was Adam. His father was a soldier. He died in service.

Before his death, he wrote: “Thank the woman from the café who fed my son. She gave him what the world had taken away — the feeling that someone still remembered him.”

When I finished reading the letter, my hands trembled helplessly. Everything around froze — even the spoons stopped clinking. The soldiers saluted. And I just stood there, unable to utter a word.

I couldn’t recover from that day for a long time. I reread the letter over and over, as if afraid the words would disappear if I let go of it. Sometimes it seemed like he would still come — with the same backpack, the same shy smile.

A few weeks later I received another letter. From the same officer. Inside — 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 his father had once saved.
“Now he has a home. And he often remembers the woman who fed him every morning,” — it said at the end.