I never forgot you. Hearing your voice at the beginning of the flight… it brought everything back.”
Eli looked down for a moment, then met my eyes again.
“You saved me.
Back then. And I never got to thank you for that. Not properly.”
“But you kept your promise,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat.
“It meant something to me,” he said, sighing.
“That promise became my own mantra to be better.”
We stood in the terminal, surrounded by strangers passing through, and I felt more seen in that moment than I had in weeks.
I looked at the man he had become: clean-cut, accomplished, grounded in a way that told me life hadn’t come easy to him. There was a calm in his posture, the kind earned over time, not inherited.
He looked like someone who had learned how to fight for every inch of peace he carried.
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