I didn’t know his name for the first week. The police told me a motorcycle struck my son.

They told me the rider stayed at the scene, called 911, did CPR until the ambulance arrived. They told me he wasn’t speeding, wasn’t drunk, that Jake ran into the street chasing a basketball.

But I didn’t care about any of that. Someone on a motorcycle hit my boy, and my boy wasn’t waking up.

The doctors said Jake’s brain was swelling. They said we had to wait. They said coma patients sometimes hear everything around them, that we should talk to him, play his favorite music, remind him why he needed to come back.

I couldn’t do it. Every time I looked at Jake with those tubes and machines, I broke down.

But this biker—this man I’d never