A Ribbon of Hope
by Megumi Kashuahara
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Romance Story: She was nine years old, poor, and hungry herself. He was ten, dying slowly outside her school fence. She gave him her only meal anyway. Every day. For six months. He made her a promise the day he left. Twenty-two years later, he kept it. A story about what happens when one child with nothing chooses to see another child with less — and changes the world.
Tags: Teenagers AI Generated
The sandwich cost her everything, but it gave him a future worth $47 million.
Selena was nine years old, black, and growing up in the projects three blocks from Lincoln Elementary School. She saw the starving white boy through the fence on a Monday in October. Her family had nothing — free lunch, broken radiators, medicine rationed between three people — but she gave him her only meal anyway. Every day. For six months.
No one asked her to. No one thanked her. She just did it.
When he left, Seth made a wild promise. “I’ll marry you when I’m rich.”
She laughed, then tied half her ribbon around his wrist.
Twenty-two years vanished. Seth became a CEO, spent five years searching for her, bought buildings, hired investigators, and found nothing. Tonight he would walk into a community meeting in Chicago. Selena would be there, still wearing her half of the ribbon. Neither knew they were seconds away from reunion.
Seth Roberts woke at 6 AM in a penthouse that cost more than most people earned in a lifetime.
Floor-to-ceiling windows. Lake Michigan stretched out below. Sunrise painted the water gold. He didn’t notice. He never did.
The espresso machine hummed. Italian. $7,000. He pressed a button and walked away before the cup filled. His closet held 40 suits, all tailored, all perfect. He grabbed one without looking.
The apartment was silent. Always silent. No photos on the walls. No personal touches. Nothing that said someone actually lived here. It looked like a hotel. Felt like a tomb.
His phone buzzed. His assistant. “Board meeting at nine. The Thompson deal closed. Twelve million.”
Seth texted back. “Good.”
Twelve million. He felt nothing.
He walked to his home office, unlocked a drawer. Inside, a small glass frame containing a faded red ribbon. This. This was the only thing that mattered. He touched the glass gently. Twenty-two years old. The fabric was deteriorating despite preservation. Every morning he looked at it. Every morning the same thought: Where is she?
The board meeting was predictable. Congratulations, handshakes, applause for another successful quarter. Seth smiled, said the right things, played the part. Inside, nothing.
His business partner Richard pulled him aside after.
“You okay, man? You seem distant.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been saying that for five years, ever since you started buying up South Chicago.” Richard studied him. “Why specifically? There’s no profit for years.”
“I have my reasons.”
“This is about that girl, isn’t it? The one you’re looking for.”
Seth’s jaw tightened. “Drop it.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
“I said drop it.”
Richard held up his hands. “Just don’t let this consume you.”
Too late. It already had.
Seth sat alone in his office that afternoon and opened a file on his computer. Five years. Three private investigators. Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent. Nothing. The last report: We’ve exhausted all leads. Selena Jackson is too common a name. Family left no forwarding address after 2008.
He pulled up a map of Chicago. Twelve red pins marked his properties, all within two miles of Lincoln Elementary School. If Selena was still in Chicago, she’d be in that neighborhood, helping people. That’s who she was. So he’d bought properties, developed them, created reasons to be there constantly. Hoping. Waiting.
His phone buzzed. “Community meeting tonight at 7pm. South Chicago Community Center.”
Seth usually sent representatives to these meetings. But something made him type back: “I’ll attend personally.”
He didn’t know why. Just a feeling.
The memories came unbidden. They always did.
Twenty-two years ago, he was ten years old. Winter, Chicago. Two weeks on the streets after his mother died of an overdose in their apartment while he slept in the next room. Foster care tried once. One family said he was too difficult. The truth: he was traumatized, grieving, a child who had watched the only person in the world who loved him disappear. They put him back. He slipped through the cracks.
Two weeks of sleeping in doorways. Digging through trash. Stealing when he could. By day fourteen he couldn’t walk straight, dizzy from hunger, his lips cracked and bleeding. He found Lincoln Elementary and sat outside the fence during lunch recess, watching kids eat and laugh and play the way kids did when they didn’t know how lucky they were.
A teacher noticed him. Walked over with her arms crossed.
“You need to leave. You’re scaring the students.”
Seth tried to stand. His legs buckled. The teacher walked away.
That’s when he saw her.
A black girl with braided hair, maybe nine years old, standing on the other side of the fence. Watching him. Their eyes met. She didn’t look scared. She looked sad, the way someone looks when they see something that isn’t right and know it.
Selena Jackson had grown up understanding that life was not fair and that unfairness was not an excuse to stop caring.
Her grandmother had made sure of that.
They lived in subsidized housing with peeling paint and a radiator that worked when it felt like it. Her parents worked three jobs between them and were gone before she woke up most mornings. Breakfast was oatmeal. Lunch was whatever the school provided free of charge. Dinner was rice and beans with love stirred in, because her grandmother believed that food made with love tasted different from food made without it, and Selena believed her.
They had very little. Her grandmother never let her forget that someone always had less.
“Baby,” she said, “we may not have much. But we always share what we got.”
That October Monday, Selena’s friends called her from across the yard. “Selena, come on!”
But Selena couldn’t move. The boy outside the fence looked like he was dying. His clothes were torn. His face was hollow. His eyes were glassy in a way that frightened her.
Her friend Jasmine ran over. “What are you looking at?”
“That boy.”
“Him? He’s been there for days. Creepy.”
“He’s not creepy. He’s hungry.”
“Not our problem.”
Selena looked at her lunch. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple, a juice box. Her whole meal. The only food she was guaranteed until dinner that night. She thought about her grandmother’s voice. She thought about the way the boy’s eyes looked when he watched the other kids eat.
She picked up her lunchbox and walked to the fence.
“Selena, where are you going?”
She didn’t answer. Up close the boy looked even worse. She pushed her lunchbox through the gap in the fence.
“Take it. It’s okay.”
He grabbed the sandwich and ate it in four bites, tears running down his face. She watched him eat the apple, drink the juice, eat the crackers down to the last crumb. When he finished he looked up at her with an expression she would remember for the rest of her life. Like someone who had stopped believing in kindness and suddenly wasn’t sure anymore.
“Thank you.” His voice was hoarse. Broken.
“What’s your name?”
“Seth.”
“Are you okay, Seth?”
He shook his head. No.
Selena’s heart broke cleanly in two. “I’ll bring you lunch tomorrow too.”
Seth’s eyes widened. Like she had said something impossible. “You will?”
“I promise.”
The bell rang. Selena had to go. She looked back three times. Seth sat clutching the empty juice box, watching her walk away.
She went home that afternoon and ate rice and beans and didn’t tell her grandmother what she had done. She lay in bed that night thinking about his eyes. The way they changed when she pushed the lunchbox through the fence. Like a light coming on in a dark room.
She had never felt so certain of anything in her life.
The second day was harder than the first.
The first day had been impulse, pure and fast, over before she could think. The second day she knew exactly what she was doing. She stood in the lunch line and made a choice in cold blood — took her tray, sat down, looked at the food, and then did not eat it. Wrapped it carefully in a napkin when the lunch aide wasn’t looking. Tucked it into her bag.
Her stomach growled through the entire afternoon. She ignored it.
Seth was at the fence. He stood up straighter when he saw her coming. Like he hadn’t quite believed she would come back.
She had.
The third day, her grandmother noticed.
Selena was packing her lunch — the same school lunch she’d been bringing home uneaten to give Seth — when her grandmother appeared in the kitchen doorway and stood there quietly. She didn’t say anything. She just watched. Then she went to the cabinet, took out an extra apple and a package of crackers, and put them in Selena’s bag without a word.
Selena looked at her.
Her grandmother looked back. “We always share what we got,” she said.
That was all.
By the second week, Selena’s whole family knew. Her mother started packing extra food. Her father, who worked a double shift at the warehouse on Tuesdays and came home gray with exhaustion, started leaving something on the counter for her to take — a banana, a piece of cornbread wrapped in foil, whatever there was. Nobody made a production of it. Nobody called it sacrifice. They just did it, quietly, the way her grandmother had taught them.
The way Selena had already learned.
Other kids noticed. Some of them teased her. “Selena’s feeding the homeless boy.” “Selena’s got a white boyfriend.” She ignored them. Her friend Jasmine tried every day for two weeks to talk her out of it, standing beside her at the fence with her arms crossed, saying things like you don’t even know him and what if he’s dangerous and my mom said you shouldn’t talk to strangers. Selena listened and nodded and went back the next day.
Because Seth wasn’t a stranger anymore.
He was Seth. He was ten years old. His mother had died and the system had lost him and he was cold and scared and alone, and every day when she came to the fence he stood up a little straighter and his eyes had a little more light in them, and that meant something. That meant everything.
They talked through the fence while he ate. Selena told him about her day, what she was learning, the book she was reading. She asked him questions — real ones, the kind that required him to think. What did he want to be when he grew up? What was his favorite thing about Chicago? If he could go anywhere in the world, where would he go?
Nobody had asked Seth those questions in a very long time. Maybe ever.
He started answering carefully, like he was remembering how to use a part of himself he’d shut down.
“You’re really smart,” Selena told him one afternoon.
Seth shook his head. “I’m not.”
“You are. You ask good questions back. Smart people ask good questions.”
He was quiet for a moment. “My mom used to say I was smart.”
“Your mom was right.”
Mrs. Patterson, the fourth-grade teacher who had told Seth to leave that first day, came to Selena after school one afternoon in the third week. Said she had seen what Selena was doing. Said she had a responsibility to report it.
Selena looked at her steadily. “If you report it he won’t have anything to eat.”
Mrs. Patterson was quiet for a long moment. She looked out the window toward the fence. Then she said, “I didn’t see anything.” She walked away. The next morning there was an extra granola bar and a small bag of pretzels in Selena’s cubby. No note. Just food.
It kept appearing. Every day, something small. Mrs. Patterson never mentioned it. Selena never mentioned it either.
People were kinder than you expected, sometimes. If you gave them the chance.
December came and the temperature dropped to fifteen degrees.
Seth was outside in a thin jacket. No hat. No gloves. His lips were blue. His hands shook so badly he could barely unwrap the sandwich Selena pushed through the fence.
Selena went home that afternoon and went to her closet. Took out her winter coat — the good one, the puffy one her mother had saved up for — and her father’s work gloves and a scarf her grandmother had knitted and a blanket from her bed.
She brought them to the fence the next morning before school.
“Seth. Put these on.”
He stared at the pile she pushed through the fence. “I can’t take your coat.”
“You need it more than I do.”
“You’ll be cold.”
“I have another one,” Selena said. She did not have another one.
She shivered through recess in a sweater for the next two months. Her grandmother noticed but didn’t say anything, just started making sure Selena left the house with an extra layer every morning. Selena got sick twice. The second time was bad enough that she missed three days of school and her mother sat beside her bed at night after her double shift, too tired to take her shoes off, stroking her hair.
Seth never knew. He wasn’t supposed to know.
That was the fifth week of winter. Seth had a fever. Coughing so hard he couldn’t stand up straight. Selena could see it from twenty feet away — the glassy eyes, the way he was breathing.
She ran home at lunch.
“Grandma. The boy at the fence is sick. Really sick. I think he might die.”
Her grandmother looked at her for a long moment. Then she put on her coat.
She came to the fence with medicine and soup in a thermos and a cup of hot tea. She sat on a folding chair on the outside of the fence, on the cold concrete, for forty-five minutes while Seth drank the soup. She talked to him gently, the way she talked to Selena when Selena was sick. Told him he was going to be okay. Told him she had seen worse and people came through it.
The medicine was expensive. It was supposed to be for Selena’s grandfather, who had a bad chest every winter. She gave it to Seth instead.
She came back every day for two weeks until the fever broke.
Seth never fully understood what that cost. He understood later, when he was older and had learned what things like that meant. But at ten years old, shivering against a chain-link fence in Chicago in December, he only understood that a woman who didn’t know him had sat in the cold and made sure he didn’t die.
He asked Selena once, “Why does your grandmother do this?”
Selena thought about it. “Because she said we always share what we got. I think she meant it about everything. Not just food.”
Seth nodded slowly. Filed that away somewhere deep.
The days got longer. The weather turned. Six months passed the way six months do when you are ten years old and every day has the same shape — the bell, the fence, the sandwich, the conversation, the bell again.
And then one morning in April, Selena came to the fence and Seth was standing differently. Straighter. Something had changed in his face.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
Selena’s stomach dropped. “What?”
“Foster care found me a placement. A family in Evanston. They seem okay.” He paused. “Mrs. Patterson told me yesterday.”
Selena didn’t say anything for a moment. She had known this was possible. She had not let herself think about it.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
One more day.
Selena went home that afternoon and packed the biggest lunch she had ever packed. Everything she could fit — two sandwiches, cookies her grandmother had baked, an orange, crackers, a juice box, a piece of cornbread wrapped in foil. She put it all in a bag and stayed up late writing a note that she folded and tucked inside.
The note said: You are smart. You are going to be okay. Don’t forget that someone saw you.
She signed it with her name.
At the fence the next morning, she pushed the bag through. Seth took it and held it and didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he reached up and untied the red ribbon from his wrist. He had found it weeks ago, blowing across the yard, and tied it on because red was Selena’s favorite color and it felt like a small way to keep something of hers close.
He reached through the fence and tied it around Selena’s wrist instead.
“So you remember,” he said. “That someone saw you too.”
Selena looked down at it. Then she untied the ribbon and tore it carefully in half and tied one half back on Seth’s wrist and kept the other.
“Now we both have half,” she said. “And when you’re rich you can come find me.”
Seth looked at her. He was ten years old and homeless and had nothing in the world except a half a ribbon and a bag lunch and whatever this girl had given him over six months through a chain-link fence.
“I’ll marry you when I’m rich,” he said. Like a promise. Like a vow.
Selena laughed. “Okay. Deal.”
She watched him walk away. He turned back three times. The third time she held up her wrist so he could see the ribbon.
He held up his.
Then he was gone.
Seth blinked. The memory faded. He looked at the clock. 6:45 PM.
The community meeting started at 7. He grabbed his coat and touched the ribbon in its glass frame one more time.
I’m coming, Selena. I don’t know if you’re there. But I’m coming.
The South Chicago Community Center was old — chipped paint, flickering lights — but clean and cared for in the way that places are cared for when the people inside them love what they represent.
Inside, folding chairs filled the room. About fifty people. Families, elders, young activists. Seth straightened his tie. His expensive suit felt wrong here in a way it never felt anywhere else.
The woman at the registration table looked up.
“Name?”
“Seth Roberts. Roberts and Associates.”
Her expression shifted. Guarded. “The developer. You’re actually here.”
“Yes.”
“Most developers send lawyers.”
“I’m not most developers.”
She handed him a name tag. “We’ll see.”
Heads turned when he walked in. Whispers rippled. That’s him. The millionaire. Probably here to bulldoze everything. Seth found a seat in the back. A woman in her sixties stood at the front — Dorothy Carter, Community Board President — and called the meeting to order.
“Tonight we discuss the proposed development. Roberts and Associates wants to build housing and renovate our center, but we’ve heard promises before.” Murmurs of agreement. “Mr. Roberts will present his plans, then we ask questions. Real questions.” She looked at him. “Mr. Roberts?”
Seth walked to the front. Fifty pairs of eyes tracked him. He opened his presentation.
“Good evening. I’m Seth Roberts. I grew up not far from here. I know what broken promises look like.”
That got attention. He could feel the room shift slightly, the way a room shifts when someone says something unexpected.
“I’m proposing affordable housing — not luxury condos. Sixty percent of units reserved for current residents at current rent rates. The community center will be fully renovated. New heating, new roof, expanded services, all funded by my company. We’ll create a job training program. Hire locally. Invest in this neighborhood’s people.”
He paused. “I know you don’t trust me yet. I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to hold me to these commitments in writing.”
Hands shot up. Hard questions. Good questions. A question about what “affordable” actually meant to a millionaire versus someone making minimum wage. A question about lease protections for current businesses. A question about community oversight of the construction process.
Seth answered each one directly, without hedging. He was in the middle of answering a question from an elderly woman in the third row when a voice cut through from the middle of the room.
“How do we know you’ll keep these promises?”
Seth turned toward the voice.
And stopped.
A black woman, early thirties, professional but not corporate — natural hair, a blazer that had seen better days, a notepad she was holding like a shield. She was standing with the particular posture of someone who has learned to take up exactly the space she needs and no more.
“I grew up in this neighborhood,” she continued. “I’ve watched developers come and go. I’ve heard these speeches before. So how do we know you’re actually different?”
Their eyes met.
Seth’s heart stopped.
“I’m a social worker at this center,” she said. Her voice was steady. Certain. The voice of someone who had learned to say hard things clearly. “I see homeless youth, foster kids, families on the edge every single day. Your buildings mean nothing if the people who need them most get displaced in the process.”
Seth stared. Twenty-two years. The eyes. The way she held her chin. The particular quality of her attention — like she was really looking, like she actually saw you.
He found his voice.
“You’re right to be skeptical. May I ask your name?”
“Selena Jackson.”
The room tilted. Seth gripped the edge of the table.
Selena Jackson. After five years of searching — twelve properties, three investigators, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and five years — she was standing twenty feet away with a notepad and a blazer and the same eyes he had last seen through a chain-link fence in 1998.
“Did you — “ he stopped. Steadied himself. Fifty people were watching. “Did you go to Lincoln Elementary? About twenty-two years ago?”
Selena frowned. Confused now, alert in a different way. “Yes. How did you know that?”
“Do you remember feeding a boy through the fence? A white boy, ten years old. Every day for six months.”
The room went very quiet.
Selena went still. Her notepad slipped in her hands. Seth watched the recognition move across her face like weather — confusion first, then something clicking into place, then disbelief, then something that broke open.
“Seth?” she whispered.
“I came back,” he said. “I told you I would.”
Selena’s hand went to her chest, to the locket she wore every day. Her eyes filled.
Dorothy Carter stood immediately. “I think we’ll take a fifteen-minute break.”
People filed out, whispering. Seth and Selena didn’t move. They stood at opposite ends of the room while it emptied, and when the last person was gone they walked toward each other and met in the middle and stood there close enough to speak quietly.
“You’re alive,” Selena breathed. Like it was the thing she had needed to know most.
“Because of you.”
“Seth.” Her voice broke on his name. “I looked for you. After you left I asked Mrs. Patterson, I asked anyone who might know, I asked —”
“I know. I looked for you too. Five years. Investigators.” He shook his head. “You’re really here.”
Selena reached for her locket and opened it with shaking hands. Inside, half of a red ribbon, worn to almost nothing, still red. Seth reached into his pocket and pulled out his keychain. The other half. He had carried it that way for twenty-two years. They held them up, side by side.
A perfect match.
They both started crying at the same moment and neither of them tried to stop.
Selena’s small office was just big enough for a desk and two chairs. Seth sat across from her. Neither of them could stop looking at the other.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” Selena said. “I convinced myself you were — I didn’t let myself finish that thought. But sometimes I did. Sometimes I thought you were gone.”
“I almost was. If it wasn’t for you.”
She shook her head. “I just gave you lunch.”
“Selena.” He leaned forward. “You gave me your coat. You shivered through two months of Chicago winter so I wouldn’t freeze. Your grandmother gave your grandfather’s medicine to a boy she didn’t know. Your family — who had nothing — worked extra hours so you’d have enough food to give me. You wrote me a note that I kept for ten years until it fell apart.” He stopped. “You didn’t just give me lunch. You gave me proof that I was worth something. Do you understand what that does to a child who has decided he isn’t?”
Selena looked at him for a long time. Then she said quietly, “Tell me what happened to you. After you left.”
He told her. The foster family in Evanston who were decent but distant. The group home at fourteen. Aging out at eighteen with nothing. Six months living in his car, working day labor, eating once a day, touching the ribbon every night and saying to himself: she believed in you, don’t waste it. A construction job that led to a foreman who saw something in him and gave him more responsibility. Night school. Community college. A business degree he finished at twenty-four while working sixty-hour weeks. The first investment. The second. The third.
“Every decision I made,” Seth said, “I asked one question. Would Selena be proud of this? Would this honor what she taught me?”
Selena listened with her hands folded, very still, the way she listened to people who needed to be heard.
“Five years ago I hired the first investigator,” he said. “Bought the first property in the neighborhood. I thought if I was here enough, visible enough, you’d find me. Or I’d find you.” He looked at his hands. “Twelve properties, Selena. All within two miles of Lincoln Elementary.”
She stared at him. “All of them.”
“Because I knew you’d still be here. Because you’re not the kind of person who leaves.”
Selena’s eyes filled again. She blinked it back. “I thought about you every day,” she said. “Every single day for twenty-two years I wondered if you made it. If that family was kind. If you were okay.” She paused. “I have your half of the ribbon in this locket. I’ve worn it since the day you left. My mom thought I was being ridiculous. My grandmother understood.”
“Your grandmother,” Seth said. “She saved my life. Twice. Once with the soup and the medicine. Once by raising you.”
Selena smiled at that — slow and real and a little undone. “I’ll tell her you said so. She’ll act like it’s nothing.”
“Because to her it was nothing. That’s the most extraordinary thing about your family. The sacrifice was invisible to you. You didn’t call it sacrifice. You called it what you do.”
A knock on the door. Dorothy’s voice. “Folks? People are waiting.”
Selena called back, “Five more minutes.” She turned to Seth. “What happens now?”
“Now I don’t lose you again.” He said it simply. Not a declaration, just a fact. “Whatever that means. Whatever pace makes sense. But I’m not walking out of this building and spending another twenty-two years wondering.”
Selena looked at him for a long moment — really looked, the way she used to look through the fence, seeing past the surface to whatever was underneath. She had always been able to do that. It had always undone him.
“The project,” she said. “Is it real? Or is it about finding me?”
“Both,” Seth said. “I wanted to help this neighborhood because of what you taught me. But I also hoped that if I was here long enough I’d find you. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
“I appreciate the honesty.”
“I built all this trying to become the person you believed I could be. The person who deserved to come back.”
Selena was quiet for a moment. Then she stood. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go finish the meeting. And then — “ she stopped. Looked at him with something careful and wondering. “And then we figure out whatever comes next.”
She held out her hand.
Seth took it.
They walked back into the meeting room together, hand in hand, and fifty faces turned. Dorothy raised an eyebrow and called the room back to order, and the meeting continued, and by the end of it the community voted unanimously to approve the project.
Seth spoke simply and honestly and answered every question without deflecting. Selena sat in the third row and watched him with an expression nobody in the room could quite read.
She knew what she was looking at. She was looking at the boy she had saved, standing in the skin of the man he had become. She was trying to understand how those two things were the same person and also completely different people. She was trying to understand what it meant that he had spent five years and twelve properties looking for her while she had spent twenty-two years wearing a scrap of faded ribbon in a locket against her chest.
She thought she was beginning to understand.
Over the next two weeks they met four times. Officially to discuss the community center. Unofficially because neither of them could stay away. Every meeting ran long. One hour became three. Business dissolved into stories and laughter and the particular ease of two people who have known each other at the level that really counts.
Seth noticed everything about her. The way she checked her phone constantly for work emergencies. The way she ate lunch quickly, standing up, like sitting down to eat was a luxury she hadn’t quite given herself permission to take. The worn heels on her shoes. The blazer with the fraying cuff that she tugged absently when she was thinking hard.
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