The rescue itself lasted less than a minute, but its consequences rewrote my entire life.
The night it happened, winter had settled in with quiet cruelty. The air burned my lungs with every breath, and the road shimmered with thin ice under the glow of streetlights. I had been driving my bus route longer than usual, delayed by weather and late pickups, when something near the frozen lake caught my eye. At first, I thought it was debris. Then I saw movement—small, frantic, impossible to ignore.
A child was in the water.
I slammed the brakes, threw the door open, and ran without thinking. The lake’s surface had cracked in jagged lines, and the boy was half-submerged, clinging to the edge with hands already losing strength. I didn’t calculate risk or recall safety protocols. I only knew that if I hesitated, he would disappear.
The water was agony. It felt like knives slicing into my legs as I reached him, grabbing his coat, hauling him toward the edge with strength I didn’t know I had. When we collapsed onto the ice, my body shook uncontrollably, but the boy was breathing. Alive. That single fact eclipsed everything else.
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