I first met Amara on a Thursday afternoon, the day I walked into room 432 with a children’s book in my hand and a leather vest on my back. I’m a 58-year-old biker—tattoos up my arms, beard to my chest, the kind of man most kids initially shrink from. But she didn’t. Seven years old, bald from chemo, small as a bird beneath hospital blankets, she looked at me with those huge brown eyes and asked me, almost shyly, to read to her. The nurse had already warned me: her mother had dropped her off for treatment and never returned,...
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