In that quiet room, surrounded by humming machines and stale air, her words did what time and guilt never could: they woke him. She wasn’t asking for apologies or grand gestures, only for fans that worked and a refrigerator that didn’t leave her hungry in the dark. Simple things. Human things. The very things he had long stopped seeing as love.

When she told him, “What you offer is what you get,” she wasn’t cursing him; she was warning him. One day, his children might make the same “practical” choice. One day, he might feel the same hot, suffocating air, the same emptiness in his stomach and in his heart. Her lesson was brutal but pure: every act of neglect plants a seed, and every act of kindness does too. Sooner or later, we all harvest what we’ve sown.