One can travel hundreds of miles, cross deserts and mountains,
but sometimes the distance between two people
is nothing more than a letter that never reached its destination.

Tomás Herrera sat silently by the bus window, his hands in the same position since the vehicle had left the northern terminal.

On his lap rested a dusty, earth-colored backpack — worn, yet neatly packed.
His palm was slightly damp, not from sweat, but from the worn paper he held.

The once-blue ink had faded into blurry lines, like chalk smudged on stone.

It was the letter he had just read for the third time since leaving the barracks,
and as always, the ending dried his throat:

“Papa, today I didn’t have breakfast. Mama Miriam Herrera said there aren’t any eggs left in the house, but I saw the woman who sells them passing by. I didn’t ask anything, because if I ask, they send me outside to the yard. I’m telling you so that when you come back, you knock at the back door, because the front one is locked.”

The handwriting was shaky, leaning to the left.
Each word carried the clumsy effort of a child’s hand — still unsteady, but full of determination.

Alma Herrera wrote as if she feared someone might tear the letter apart, or worse, that no one would ever read it.

Tomás lowered his head and turned to the next page.
Each letter showed signs of having been opened.
Some were slightly torn at the edges, as if someone had hesitated before deciding not to send them.
One bore stains that looked like rain, but Tomás knew well there had been no storm inside a sealed envelope.

The bus driver, a man with graying hair, a wrinkled face, thin yet agile, suddenly broke the silence:

—“You’re military.”

Tomás glanced up, nodded once.

The driver gave him a small smile.
—“Then you know how to be strong.”

Tomás didn’t answer. He just folded the letter carefully and tucked it back into his chest pocket, close to the beating heart that had carried him through two deployments — but now felt like brittle glass.

Back Home

San Isidro was smaller than he remembered. The bus hissed to a stop in the middle of the cracked town square. The old clock tower still leaned a few degrees west. The fountain was dry.

The dusty road toward his property stretched ahead like a scar.

He walked.

Children playing marbles in the street stopped and stared. An old man dozing under the shade of the general store tipped his hat.

Tomás raised a hand but said nothing.
His boots crunched against the gravel as he reached the broken wooden gate of his farm.

A crow lifted off the fence post with a sharp cry.

Everything was silent.

Until he heard it.

A soft, muffled cry.
High-pitched, cracked with fatigue.

It was coming from behind the house.

From the pigsty.

The Pigpen

Tomás rounded the corner and froze.

There, curled up in a nest of dry straw, was Alma.

His daughter. Eight years old now.
Her dress was torn at the hem, her bare feet coated in dried mud.

Her small arms were wrapped around her knees, her head resting on them as she dozed fitfully.
Tears had carved dusty streaks down her cheeks.

A thin sow nuzzled near her side as if trying to keep her warm.

Tomás’s throat closed.

For a long, shattered moment, the man who had seen war and fire and comrades fall could only stand there, boots sinking in the mud.

Then Alma stirred and blinked blearily at him.

Her green eyes widened.

“Papa?” she croaked.

The Reunion

Tomás dropped to his knees. The mud didn’t matter. The smell didn’t matter.

He reached for her, and she flew into his arms like she had been holding herself together just for this moment.

She was trembling.

“They… they said not to come in the house,” she whispered into his chest. “Mama locked it. She goes away for days. I sleep here so I can be near something alive.”

Tomás held her tighter.
His jaw locked to keep the howl in his chest from breaking loose.

“Never again,” he murmured. “Never again, mi cielo.”

Confrontation

He carried her inside.

The house smelled of stale beer and rot. Dishes stacked high in the sink. Dust coated the furniture. Flies hovered over something unidentifiable on the counter. The curtains were drawn, the air heavy and sour.

Miriam lay on the couch, passed out, an empty bottle hanging from her limp hand.

Tomás stood in the doorway, Alma clinging to his neck, and something ancient in him went still.

He gently set Alma down and told her to wait in her room.

Then he walked to the couch and knelt, not in anger but in something deeper — grief.
He took the bottle from Miriam’s hand and set it aside.

She stirred, blinking blearily. “Tomás…? You’re… home?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “And our daughter has been sleeping in a pigpen.”

Her face crumpled. Tears slipped silently down her temples.
“I… I didn’t know how to do it alone.”

“I know,” he said. “But you don’t have to anymore.”

The Choice

People expected rage. Shouting. Divorce papers. A scene.

Instead, Tomás did something no one in San Isidro expected.

He stayed.

He cleaned the house.
He scrubbed the floors, threw open the windows, threw out the bottles.

He called the town clinic and arranged for Miriam to enter treatment. When she resisted, he didn’t yell — he simply told her that if she loved Alma at all, she would fight.

Then he sat beside her until she agreed.

The Town Watches

The neighbors whispered.

At first they said he was foolish, that once broken things stay broken.

But they also saw the man who rose before dawn to make Alma warm oatmeal.
Who walked her to school holding her hand.
Who spent his afternoons painting the faded house yellow again while Miriam went to counseling sessions at the clinic.

And slowly… the whispers changed.

A New Beginning

Months passed. The rosebushes bloomed again. The pigsty was empty now — cleaned, rebuilt into a chicken coop.

Alma slept in her own bed, beneath clean white sheets. She laughed easily again.

Miriam returned home one evening from the clinic, sober and shaking, and Tomás was waiting on the porch with a bowl of warm stew.

She wept into his chest.
He just held her and said, “We begin again.”

Epilogue — The Letter

A year later, Alma sat at the kitchen table, tongue between her teeth as she wrote carefully on lined paper.

Tomás watched from the doorway as she signed it:

“Papa, today I had two breakfasts. Mama made one, and then you made another because you forgot she already did. I didn’t mind. I like too many breakfasts. Love, Alma.”

She sealed it in an envelope, then grinned.

“It’s just pretend, Papa,” she said. “In case you ever go away again.”

Tomás knelt and pulled her into his arms.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered.

And the town that had once pitied the Herrera family now looked at them with something else entirely —

Respect.

Because the soldier hadn’t come back to punish.
He had come back to rebuild.