No parents had visited.
No family had called.
In hospital records she existed only as a case file number and a series of medical notes written by exhausted doctors during long overnight shifts.
Except one person refused to let her remain invisible.
Marcus.
But Marcus wasn’t her father.
He wasn’t related to her in any way.
In fact, forty-seven days earlier he had never even heard of her.
That night had started like any other.
Marcus had closed the small motorcycle repair shop he owned on the edge of Tulsa sometime after midnight. Business had been slow lately, but the quiet didn’t bother him. He liked the solitude of late nights in the garage—tools hanging neatly along the wall, the smell of oil and metal in the air, the steady rhythm of mechanical work that never asked complicated questions.
After locking up, he climbed onto his Harley and started the ride home along Highway 412.
