What I leave out is that I was sitting outside a hospital, just half an hour after my father passed away. I remember staring blankly at the rain hitting the pavement, wondering if I had the strength to keep going. Then Rowan appeared in his wheelchair, handed me a black coffee—no sugar, just how I like it—and said, “You looked like you needed this more than I did.”
And somehow, he made me smile.
Rowan lost both of his legs above the knee in an explosion at a U.S. military base. When people ask about it, he shrugs it off with, “I made it back.” Sometimes he uses prosthetic legs, but most of the time, he relies on his wheelchair.
