(Peeta's POV)

My dad coined me as soft spoken from two years old. I would always stop to ask if a person was okay even when it was nothing. I learned and inherited many of these traits from my grandmother. She was dying in a nursing home, many people knew. But I was her most frequent visitor. I would be holding her hand, listening to her stories. No one visited as much as I did.

She died on a hot July day, sunny and bright. Her funeral service was on my sixteenth birthday.

What I missed the most about her was listening to her stories. At 85, she taught me patience and love, but kindness more than anything through her experiences. She humbly explained her mistakes as she matured, some she would tell me shamefully, some she would tell me with pride. The dementia made her repeat some of her stories. Her favorite was when she would hide their allotted food stamps from her mother during WWII.

If she were still alive, she would not approve of how I have treated others. So, I'm bettering myself and taking the initiative of changing that.

My best friend and neighbor, Hersh, says I'm bitter, and then justified it as bitter of rejection. But technically, I never was rejected, because I never spoke up to the girl I have liked since kindergarten.

But once, she noticed me. My mother had just finished screaming at her for digging in our outside garbage cans when she noticed me aglow with the lights of the oven.

She couldn't have known me well. I stuck with the kids who owned shops on my street, and she stuck with the kids in her neighborhood. So how could she?

I watched as her knees buckled and she slid down the tree trunk down to its roots. Her brown braid frazzled and her grey eyes distanced and empty. She looked so weak and tired. She was starving.

In my fourteen-year-old maturing brain, I knew she would die if I didn't help.

So I did. I stood in the middle of the street on that damp spring afternoon and threw her two slightly burnt loaves of bread. As she reached for them, she shoved them under shirt, the heat of the bread branding her skin. But she just crossed her arms around the bread and didn't let go, clinging to the idea that that bread would carry her into the next day.

Four and a half years later, I can still feel the effect she had on me that day. I was her last hope.