People began noticing the boy at the cemetery at the very beginning of May. He was around ten years old, no older. Every day, he came to the same grave. He would sit on the ground, pressed against the cold stone, and cry out to the sky:

— She’s alive! She’s not here!

Visitors looked at him with sympathy. Everyone thought the same thing: grief. He simply couldn’t accept the loss. Sooner or later, he’d come to terms with the fact that his mother was gone.

But a week passed, then another, and the boy kept coming. In any weather.

The cemetery caretaker struggled to endure the daily screams. One day, he finally called the police.

A young officer arrived. He walked up to the boy.

— Hi, he said gently.

The boy flinched and looked up. His face was tear-streaked and thin, his eyes had the look of an adult.

— Do you know how to tell if someone is breathing underground? — he asked.

The officer was taken aback.

— No… that’s not something a child should be thinking about.

— They said my mom fell asleep at the wheel. But she was never tired. Not once! — the boy whispered. — And they didn’t let me say goodbye…

The officer looked at the grave. The earth… it hadn’t settled, it was fresh. A shovel lay nearby…

— Who told you that?

— The people she worked for. A man with a gold ring… and a woman who always smiles. She smiles even when she’s angry.

— Do you know their names?

The boy said them. The officer wrote them down. There was something in his tone that made the young officer remember the conversation — and report it to his superiors.

Soon, an investigation began. It turned out the boy’s mother — Anna — was an accountant at a large pharmaceutical company.

A week before the “accident,” she had supposedly gone missing from work. Her employer said she was “overworked,” then later said she had “died.” The death certificate was signed by the company’s own doctor.

There was no viewing at the funeral — it was a closed casket. No autopsy. The officer insisted on an exhumation. The coffin was empty.

The case became a federal investigation. More details emerged: Anna, the boy’s mother, was not just an accountant.

She had gathered an extensive file on the company’s leadership — documents, audio recordings, money transfers, schemes. She planned to hand it all over to the prosecutor’s office. But someone at work found out.

And then came a twist even the boy hadn’t known.

Anna had not been in a car crash. Her “death” had been staged… by the police.

On the day she brought the evidence to the station, the police already had parts of other cases related to the same company.

A quick decision was made — Anna was placed in the witness protection program.

To keep the company’s executives from suspecting a leak, they staged her death. The coffin had been empty from the beginning.

All the evidence was handed over to the court. But the boy was told nothing — to avoid jeopardizing the operation. He only knew one thing: his mother wasn’t dead.

And he was right.

Three months after the trial, once the case had been won and the guilty were arrested, Anna appeared at the doorstep of their old house.