Every day at 3 p.m., a thin 7-year-old boy visited the same grave in a small town cemetery. He wore a jacket too light for the weather and spoke softly to the headstone of a young woman.

“Mom… I’m here again. I’m cold. I miss you,” he whispered through tears.

Locals assumed he was grieving his mother, left in the care of a neglectful father. But something didn’t add up. When the caretaker saw him arrive drenched in rain one day, he called the police.

What they discovered was heartbreaking.

The woman buried there wasn’t his mother.

The boy was an orphan. His real mother abandoned him at birth, and he had lived in an orphanage since he was three. The woman in the grave was a volunteer who had visited the orphanage, read to him, hugged him, and promised to adopt him.

For the first time, he felt loved. But just days before the adoption papers were to be signed, she died in a car crash.

He was told she couldn’t come anymore—so he found her grave and came every day, needing to tell her what no one else would listen to: that he missed her. That he was still waiting for a mother.