Men like her father are the reason I have a folded flag instead of a son. They’re why my world is broken. So when this little girl looked at me with her dad’s eyes and called me ‘Daddy,’ I saw a ghost.
The state of Pennsylvania gives you a folded flag when your son, a cop, is murdered by a couple of junkies during a routine traffic stop. They hand it to you, all stiff and formal, and the weight of it feels like it could break your wrists. It’s been three years. I can still feel that weight.
My name is Marcus Miller. My road name is Grizz. I ride with the Iron Patriots MC, and my world is made of chrome, leather, and absolute truths. Good and evil. Right and wrong. The thin blue line, and the scum who try to cross it. My son, Daniel, died on that line. So for me, the world isn’t complicated. It’s just broken. And I know exactly who broke it.
I was somewhere in Ohio, in a Waffle House that smelled of old grease and regret, when the girl appeared. Maybe eight years old, with eyes that looked like they’d already seen the end of the world. She stood by my booth, silent, just staring at the memorial patch on my vest. In Memory of Officer Daniel Miller. E.O.W. 8/14/22.
I ignored her. Kids make me… uncomfortable now. They’re a language I forgot how to speak.
But she didn’t leave. She pointed a small, trembling finger at the eagle on my club patch. “Daddy had an eagle, too,” she whispered, her voice so quiet it was almost swallowed by the diner’s hum.
Then she did it. She slid into the booth across from me, wrapped her arms around herself, and said the one word I never thought I’d hear again in a voice that wasn’t a memory.
“Daddy?”
It was a question, full of a hope so fragile it felt like a crime.
Something inside my chest, a place that had been scar tissue for three years, pulled tight. Before I could form a word, a woman rushed over, her face a mask of panic and exhaustion. Mid-thirties, hair pulled back, circles under her eyes so dark they looked like bruises.
“Leah, no. Honey, we don’t bother people. I’m so sorry, sir.” She tried to pull the girl, Leah, out of the booth.
Leah wouldn’t budge. She just stared at me. “But it looks like him. The jacket. And he’s sad like you now, Aunt Chloe.”
The woman—Chloe—froze. She looked at me, really looked at me, and her apology died in her throat. “Oh, God,” she whispered, sinking onto the bench beside Leah. “I am so sorry. Her father… he passed away last month.”
I grunted, my standard reply to things I don’t want to deal with. I figured he was a soldier. A firefighter. Another man who stood on a line. That’s the kind of man a little girl should be looking for. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, the words tasting like rust.
“He had a vest just like that,” Chloe continued, her voice trembling. “Rode an old Sportster. He… he wasn’t a club member. Just loved eagles.”
I felt a flicker of something. A phantom limb of brotherhood. “What was his name?” I asked, my voice rougher than I intended.
“Ethan.”
I nodded. “Good man?”
Chloe looked down at her hands, then back at me, her eyes shining with unshed tears. She made a decision. She was going to tell me the truth.
“He was,” she said, her voice cracking. “He was a good man who got sick.” She took a deep breath. “He died from a fentanyl overdose.”
The air left the booth. The friendly diner hum became a roar in my ears. The flicker of brotherhood vanished, replaced by a cold, familiar rage. Fentanyl. The same poison they found in the car of the two animals who had ambushed my son.
I looked at this woman, this child, and I no longer saw a grieving family. I saw the other side. The enemy. The cause of the hole in my world. The reason I had a folded flag in a box instead of a son.
I stood up, threw a ten-dollar bill on the table. “My condolences,” I said, the words a lie. I felt no condolences. I felt judgment. I felt disgust.
I turned to walk away.
“Daddy said he was fighting monsters,” Leah’s tiny voice cut through my anger. “He said they were in his head. And he was trying to be a hero, but the monsters kept winning.”
I stopped. My back still to them, my hand clenched into a fist.
Monsters.
That’s what Daniel had called them. The dealers. The users. The darkness he went out to fight every single night. But this little girl, his enemy’s daughter, was using the same word. And for the first time in three years, the world felt… complicated.
Chloe’s car was a beat-to-hell Honda Civic with a spare tire on the back. The starter was shot. They were stranded two hundred miles from family in Scranton. She’d spent their last forty dollars on breakfast and a tow truck that never came.
I don’t know why I did it. Maybe it was the word ‘monsters.’ Maybe it was the hollow look in the little girl’s eyes that was too old for her face. I heard myself speak before my brain could stop it.
“Get your stuff. I’ll give you a ride to the next town. You can get a bus from there.”
Chloe stared at me, disbelief warring with desperation. “Sir, we can’t ask you to—”
“I’m not asking,” I said. “It’s getting dark.”
The next few hours were a silent, grinding hell. Chloe and Leah were in a motel room I paid for, and I was supposed to be sleeping on a cot in the room next door. But I couldn’t sleep. I just sat on the edge of the bed, the image of my son’s face swimming in my head, the word ‘fentanyl’ echoing like a gunshot.
I was helping the family of the thing I hated most. It felt like a betrayal. I was a traitor to my son’s memory. I decided I’d leave before sunrise. Drop the key and ride. They weren’t my problem.
A soft knock came at my door. It was Chloe, holding two cups of terrible motel coffee.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, her voice low. She didn’t wait for an invitation, just walked in and sat in the room’s only chair. “You think he was just another junkie. A drain on society. You have every right to think that.”
“My son was a cop,” I said, the words sharp as broken glass. “He was murdered by two men high on that poison.”
Chloe flinched, but she didn’t look away. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and for the first time, it sounded real. “Ethan wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a criminal. He was a carpenter. A damn good one. He fell two stories from a roof, crushed three vertebrae.”
She told me the whole story. The story of America, written on a prescription pad. OxyContin, then Percocet. The doctors who prescribed it like candy, then cut him off when the new laws came in. The withdrawal, the agony, the desperation that led him to street heroin, and finally, to the fentanyl that was cheaper and deadlier.
“He went to rehab three times,” she said, tears now streaming down her face. “He fought so hard. For her.” She nodded towards the wall separating our rooms. “But the pain… it always came back. The physical pain, and then the other kind. The shame.”
As she spoke, she rummaged in her bag and pulled out a book. It was worn, the cover soft with age, the spine held together with tape. Where the Wild Things Are.
“This was his,” she said. “He read it to her every single night. Even when he was sick. He’d do the voices. The roar of the Wild Things. It was the only time he sounded like himself.”
My blood ran cold. I couldn’t breathe.
