Paul brought the same plain sandwich to work every day, wrapped in brown paper, and ate it without complaint. His coworkers joked about it, but he only smiled, never explaining why he never changed his routine.
They teased him lightly at first, then more often, calling him “budget lunch Paul.” He never argued. He simply nodded, as if their words belonged to someone else, and kept showing up with the same simple meal each morning.
When Paul left the company, a colleague cleaning his desk found folded children’s drawings. They showed a man handing out lunch bags to smiling kids, carefully labeled with names and tiny hearts drawn in the corners.
Curious, they followed the clues to a small library in the West End. There, Paul had been quietly giving sandwiches to children after school, remembering his own years in foster care and the hunger that shaped him.
