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I wanted to hate him — I did hate him — but my wife, Sarah, saw something I couldn’t.
“He didn’t run,” she said. “He stayed. He helped. Maybe he needs this as much as Jake does.”
I couldn’t understand then how right she was.
He brought in Jake’s favorite stories — Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Hobbit. He even told him stories about his own son, Danny, who had died in a car accident twenty years earlier.
“My boy loved bikes,” Marcus said one day. “Used to help me fix mine in the garage. He was about Jake’s age when he died. I wasn’t there when it happened. I’ve been trying to make peace with that ever since.”
That was the first moment I saw him not as a villain, but as a grieving father trying to make something right.
Sometimes, I’d find Marcus whispering, “Come on, buddy. You’ve got a whole world waiting for you. Don’t give up now.”
“Jake loves motorcycles,” Sarah said, crying. “If he can hear anything, maybe he’ll hear that.”
That night, the nurse said Jake’s heart rate spiked briefly.
Marcus found me there and sat beside me without saying a word. After a while, he simply said, “You can’t give up on him. Not yet.”
His faith didn’t make sense, but it gave me strength.
I nodded, too choked up to speak.