Santiago closed his eyes, and a single tear slid down onto the pillow.

“I only helped his daughter with her math,” he whispered.

“Sometimes,” Magdalena said softly, “you don’t know the size of what you do for someone until it comes back to you.”

Santiago lay quietly for a while, letting that settle, and then he asked to see the photograph closer, and Magdalena held it where he could look at it.

He studied the ordinary face of the deliveryman who had opened his own body to save a boy he barely knew, and something moved across Santiago’s face that his grandparents would talk about later, privately, as the moment they knew he would be all right.

It was not gratitude, exactly, though it was that too.