Then he smiled. Because the old primer wasn't really lost. It was scattered — in scans, in memories, in the way he still sounded out difficult words under his breath, like a first-grader.

He kept scrolling. Page fifty-two. Page fifty-three. Then — a gap. The PDF jumped from page fifty-four to page sixty.

The link was buried on the tenth page of search results, between ads for used textbooks and a forgotten blog from 2009. The filename was simple: bukvar_1987.pdf . No preview. No thumbnail.

He wasn't a teacher. He wasn't a parent. He was a thirty-year-old man who had, three hours earlier, found a yellowed photograph of himself at six years old, holding a worn-out bukvar — the first-grade primer with the blue cover and the smiling sun on page one.

Luka checked the file properties. The scan was incomplete. Someone had torn out that page long ago. Why? A child’s tantrum? A teacher’s correction? Or maybe — and this thought made him stop — that page held the story he had never finished reading as a boy.

Except it wasn't.