The wooden yoke bites into your shoulders. Water sloshes against the buckets as you drag them up the dirt path, same as every morning, same aching arms, same silence. But someone is standing on the road. A young man, dust on his boots, a sealed letter at his belt. He isn't passing through. He's watching you — specifically your arms, the ring-shaped burns, the older scars mapped across your skin like a history you never got to tell. No one ever looks. Not like that. You don't know yet that he's the one your father sold you to. He doesn't look like a man who came to collect. He looks like a man who is trying to remember why he came at all.