– Free movies in Albanian.

The footage shifted. Grainy, handheld, beautiful. An old man dancing alone in a field, pretending to waltz with a ghost. A boy riding a bicycle made of scrap metal, shouting lines from a forgotten partisan poem. A woman washing clothes in a river, singing a lullaby so sad and sweet that Agon felt his throat tighten.

The man behind the counter was old, with fingers stained yellow from years of filterless cigarettes and eyes that had seen too many decades of blackouts and curfews. His name was Skënder.