Her fingers trembled as they gripped the rusty handlebars of her old bicycle.

“Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” she whispered.

“I promise,” he replied. “I’ve wondered about this my whole life.”

She gave a faint, sorrowful smile.

“We were all naive… and I was desperate,” she said quietly. “We thought that if we buried pain under sand, it would disappear.”

He frowned.

“What sand?”

She slowly sat down on a bench. He sat beside her.

“I had a grandson,” she began. “He was my entire world. I raised him alone. His parents died when he was very young.”

She took a deep breath.

“When he grew up, he went to serve at the border. He always said, ‘Grandma, don’t worry. I’ll come back.’ But I was afraid every single day.”

Her voice broke.

“One day, they called me. An accident during training. An explosion. There was almost nothing left of him.”

The former guard felt his throat tighten.

“They gave me a small urn,” she continued. “That was all they could recover.”

She lowered her eyes.

“I opened it at home. There was only a little ash inside. I didn’t know what to do. But I knew I couldn’t leave him in a foreign land.”

She looked up at him.

“I took a tiny part of it. Mixed it with sand. Every time in a new bag. So no one would notice.”

“So those bags…” he whispered.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I brought him home little by little. For years.”

Life continued around them. People walked by, laughed, talked on their phones. But their world stood still.

“Why did it take so long?” he asked.

“Because I was afraid,” she admitted. “If they had caught me, they would have taken him away. I wouldn’t have survived that.”

She sighed softly.

“I knew your shifts. Your faces. Who was strict, who was kind, who was tired. You checked the sand… I protected my heart.”

He lowered his head.

“We sent it to the lab so many times…”

“And every time, I said goodbye to him in my mind,” she whispered. “But you always gave the bag back.”

“Because it was just sand,” he said quietly.

“To you. To me, it was my child.”

Tears rolled down her wrinkled cheeks.

“When I finished,” she went on, “I stopped coming. Everything was finally home.”

“Where is he now?” he asked.

“In my garden,” she replied. “Under an apple tree we planted together. It blooms every year. And I talk to him.”

He turned away, hiding his tears.

“Forgive us,” he murmured.

She gently placed her hand on his shoulder.

“You were doing your job. And because of that, I was able to remain his grandmother until the end.”

She slowly stood up and took hold of her bicycle.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “For never looking deeper.”

She walked away down the street.

And he stood there for a long time, realizing that he had spent his life checking bags of sand…
never knowing they carried a broken human heart, scattered into thousands of invisible grains.