My father died young, and my mother spent more than twenty years as a widow, enduring hardship and contempt.
No one helped her, and no one dared to.
Then, when my son was three, he suddenly pointed at the photo on the wall and cried out in a childish yet utterly firm voice:
“I’m your husband. I’ve come back to protect you!”
Everyone thought the child was babbling nonsense. Only my mother burst into tears on the spot.
That voice, that look in his eyes, the way he protected her: it was unmistakably the husband she had missed for half her life.
From that day on, my mother had a little bodyguard who never left her side.
If anyone dared to snap at her, he would slap them, and that included me, her own son.
Only then did I understand: he had never really left.
He had simply returned in another form to watch over the person he had loved most in this life.
