I’m a nurse, and for six weeks I brought coffee to the man in room 14 every morning. No visitors ever came. No phone calls. Just silence, the kind that settles heavy in a hospital room when someone has no one left waiting for them.
Still, he always thanked me like the coffee mattered more than it should. Sometimes we talked for a minute or two about the weather, old music, or nothing important at all.
On his last morning, I found him sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, holding a small envelope. He handed it to me and quietly said, “Don’t open it here.”
That night, long after my shift ended, I finally opened it at my kitchen table. My husband found me sitting on the floor in tears.
Inside were dozens of lottery scratch cards. None of them had been scratched. Tucked between them was a note written in shaky handwriting:
“I saved them. Didn’t feel right winning anything alone.”
My husband and I scratched every single ticket together at the kitchen table. We won only thirty-one dollars.
The next morning, we used it to buy coffee. And somehow, it tasted different.
