HE SAW HIS 80-YEAR-OLD FATHER SELLING PURE WATER IN TRAFFIC… HE FROZE.

He turned slowly, squinting against the sun. When his eyes found Oberi, his face emptied of expression. The basin slipped from his hands. Water sachets burst and scattered across the road.

For a second, neither man moved.

They simply stood there in the middle of traffic—father and son, twelve years apart, staring at everything that had been lost between them.

“Oberi?” Dano said at last, his voice barely more than breath.

Oberi wanted to run to him. Wanted to kneel in the dust and gather every scattered sachet with his own hands. Wanted to ask a thousand questions all at once. But shame had already risen in his throat like smoke.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, and hated himself the moment the words came out.

Dano bent slowly to collect the sachets.

“I’m working,” he said quietly.

“Working?” Oberi’s voice cracked. “You’re eighty years old.”

“Eighty-two,” Dano corrected, without looking up.

A bus driver shouted at them to move. A small crowd was already forming. Someone had started recording with a phone. Oberi knelt and began helping gather the sachets, his Italian shoes sinking into dirty water from the ones that had burst.

“Where are you living?” he asked.

Dano lifted the basin again, though his hands shook so badly it nearly slipped.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

Dano finally looked at him then, and his eyes were sharper than Oberi expected.

“Does it?” he asked. “After twelve years?”

The words landed like a slap.

Oberi stood up slowly, still holding several sachets in his hands.

“I sent money,” he said. “Every month. I sent money.”

“What money?”

“The bank account. The one I opened for you before I left.”

Dano stared at him.

“I never saw any money.”

The noise of the road seemed to pull away from Oberi. His head buzzed.

“That’s impossible.”

“I’ve been selling pure water for three years just to eat,” Dano said. “If you sent money, someone else collected it.”

“Who had access to the account?”

Dano adjusted the basin again. “Your brother. Quacy.”

Oberi went still.

His younger brother.

The one who had promised to “help Papa with bank matters.” The one who always said things were fine. The one who claimed their father was stubborn but comfortable.

Quacy.