The cashier looked over Tria's shoulder and asked whether a classmate had come in with him. There was nobody there.
Your shoelace is untied.
Tria was wearing slippers.
When he returned to the fifth floor without his key, a shape waited in the unlit stairwell. It was his height. It wore slippers. Its dragging steps sounded like his father's.
It touched his head gently and spoke in his father's voice:
Your mother will not come back. Your father will not wake up.
Before dawn, Tria answered the message from his mother with two words: It's me. Then he walked downstairs and did not return home.
For days he slept in bus shelters and doorways. A street outreach worker eventually found the exhausted boy and took him to a clinic.