The shift in him started so quietly I almost missed it. Leo wasn’t the kind of boy who burst through the door with stories. Not anymore. Not since we lost his father. But that afternoon, there was something different in the way he stood in the hallway—like a small light had been switched back on inside him. “Sam wants to go too,” he said. I remember pausing, one hand still resting on the kitchen counter. “But they told him he can’t.” That should have been the end of it. A passing frustration, one more unfair thing in a world that...
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