They said he wasn’t speeding.
They said he wasn’t drunk.
They said Malik had run into the street chasing a basketball.
None of that mattered to me.
All I knew was that my son wasn’t waking up.
The doctors kept saying the same things over and over. His brain had swollen from the impact. We had to wait. Sometimes coma patients could still hear voices.
“Talk to him,” they said.
“Play his favorite music.”
“Give him a reason to come back.”
I couldn’t.
Every time I looked at Malik lying there with tubes running into his arms and machines breathing beside him, something inside me broke.
But that biker—this complete stranger—talked to him every single day.
I first saw him on the third day.
Continued on the next page
