You sat on the couch in a stranger’s living room, grease still under your nails from the shop, when the six-year-old girl with the white bandage wrapped around her head looked up at you and whispered the words that cracked your chest wide open. “I don’t want a motorcycle ride.

I want you to pretend to be my daddy.” At fifty-three you had spent twenty-seven years riding with your club. No wife, no kids, no plans to change that. You figured that part of life just wasn’t written for you. When the club president asked for volunteers to give a little girl with a brain tumor one last ride, every hand went up. Her mother picked you from the pho…