Her last words before cancer stole her voice were simple, yet unforgettable:
“I wish I had a daddy like you.”
She said them to Big John, a 300-pound Harley rider with teardrop tattoos on his face, who had stumbled into her room by accident while looking for the bathroom.
That wrong turn changed everything — not just for Katie, a seven-year-old abandoned by her parents, but for every hardened biker who would spend the next ninety-three days making sure she never faced her final moments alone.
Big John had been visiting his own dying brother that day, walking the sterile halls of Saint Mary’s Hospice, when he heard her crying from Room 117. Not the usual cry of a sick child, but the deep, soul-crushing sobs of someone who had given up hope.
“Are you lost, mister?” she asked, peeking at him from under her bald head.
“Maybe,” he admitted, crouching by her bed. “Are you?”
“My parents said they’d be right back,” she whispered. “That was twenty-eight days ago.”
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