I stood up, walked to my saddlebag, and pulled out my own wallet. Tucked behind my driver’s license was a faded, creased photograph. It was me, twenty-five years younger, sitting on a park bench. On my lap was a little boy with a toothy grin, holding up the exact same book. My son, Daniel. Age five.
I didn’t say a word. I just showed her the picture.
She covered her mouth, a sob escaping. In that moment, in that cheap motel room, we weren’t a biker and a junkie’s sister anymore. We were just two people who knew what it felt like to have a piece of your soul ripped out.
For the first time, I saw Ethan not as a statistic, not as the enemy. I saw him as a man who read a book about monsters to his child, just like I had.
We decided to drive them all the way to Scranton. It was another day on the road, but it felt different now. The silence wasn’t angry anymore. It was heavy, filled with unspoken things. I found myself watching Leah in the rearview mirror of the pickup I’d borrowed from a club brother. She was quiet, tracing pictures on the foggy window, a ghost in the backseat.
That night, we stopped at another motel. Around 2 AM, the screaming started.
It wasn’t a child’s tantrum. It was pure, primal terror. I was out of my room and knocking on theirs before I was fully awake. Chloe opened the door, looking frantic. Leah was sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes wide with a waking nightmare, screaming for her dad.
“It’s the same every night,” Chloe cried, trying to hold the thrashing girl. “The doctors call it trauma response. She won’t let me touch her.”
I didn’t know what I was doing. I just walked in. I didn’t go to Leah. I sat in a chair across the room, where she could see me. I didn’t say, “It’s okay.” I knew it wasn’t.
I just started talking.
“Max had a wolf suit,” I said, my voice a low rumble. “And when he put it on, he made mischief of one kind and another.”
Leah’s screaming subsided into ragged sobs. She was watching me.
“His mother called him a ‘Wild Thing’ and sent him to bed without any supper,” I continued, the words coming back to me from a place I thought was dead and buried. “And a forest grew in his room.”
I told her the whole story. From memory. I told her about Max sailing to the island where the Wild Things were.
I made my voice low and gravelly for their terrible roars. I told her how Max tamed them with the magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once.
“He was their king,” I said, looking right at Leah. “But even kings get lonely. Even kings want to be where someone loves them best of all.”
She had stopped crying. She was just listening, her small body trembling.
“Sometimes,” I said, my own voice getting thick, “the monsters are scary. Sometimes, they’re loud. And sometimes… they win the fight.”
I swallowed hard, thinking of Ethan, thinking of Daniel. “But that doesn’t change the love, kid. The love is the boat that brings you home. Your dad… he loved you best of all. That’s the part you have to remember. The monsters don’t get to take that.”
I finished the story, about how Max sailed home and found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot.
Leah laid back down on her pillow. She didn’t speak. She just closed her eyes. Within minutes, she was breathing the deep, even breaths of a child who was finally, truly asleep.
Chloe was staring at me, her face a mess of tears and awe. “How did you know how to do that?”
“I was a father once,” I whispered. It was the truest thing I’d said in three years.
We got to Scranton the next afternoon. It was a small, tired-looking house on a street full of other tired-looking houses. I helped them with their bags. It was awkward. The end of the road.
I knelt down in front of Leah. I didn’t know what to say. Goodbye felt too small.
She reached out and her tiny hand touched the memorial patch on my vest. “Was your son a king, too?” she asked.
The question knocked the wind out of me. “Yeah, kid,” I managed to say. “Yeah, he was.”
“Are he and my daddy friends now?”
I thought of my son, the cop, and her father, the addict. Two men on opposite sides of a war, now just dust. Two fathers who loved their kids.
“I think they are,” I said.
I didn’t stay. I didn’t hug anyone. I just got in the truck and drove away. My job was done. It wasn’t my place to be a substitute. It was my place to be a bridge, and I had crossed it.
A week later, I was back on my bike, the road humming beneath me. I called the President of our Scranton chapter. He confirmed what I’d asked him to do.
The boys had shown up at Chloe’s house. They fixed her busted water heater, re-shingled a leaking part of her roof, and left a few grocery store gift cards in the mailbox. No words. No questions. Just brothers helping.
My last stop before heading west was a cemetery outside Philly. I stood before Daniel’s headstone, the granite cold and unforgiving under my hand. The folded flag felt heavy in my memory.
For three years, I had come here and felt nothing but rage. The line was so clear. Daniel was the hero. The men who took him were the monsters.
But now, it was blurry.
I thought of Ethan, the carpenter who fell. The father who read stories to his little girl. The man who fought a war inside his own head and lost.
“Hey, Danny,” I said to the stone. My voice was a stranger’s. “I met a little girl. Her dad… he was on the other side. But he was a father, son. Just like me. He loved his kid. Just like I love you.”
I took a deep breath, the air clean and sharp. “I think maybe… maybe there are no sides. Not really. There’s just people. People fighting their own monsters. Some win. Some lose.”
I wiped a tear from my cheek, surprised to find it there.
“He lost a different kind of war, that’s all.”
I stood there for a long time, the silence of the graveyard a comfort. The rage was gone. In its place was something quiet, something heavy. It wasn’t peace. Not yet. But it felt like the beginning of it.
The world was still broken. But I was finally starting to see the cracks not as battle lines, but as places where, sometimes, if you’re lucky, a little bit of light gets in.
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This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment and inspirational purposes. While it may draw on real-world themes, all characters, names, and events are imagined. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidenta
