“They told us he wasn’t going to make it,” he said, quieter. “The first forty-eight hours, they told my wife and me to prepare ourselves. And then he held on, and he came home, and he spent two years learning to live in a body that got hurt that day. And the whole time, all we knew about the man who went back for him was a last name on a piece of paper. We prayed for you, Ethan. For eleven years. My wife prays for you by name every single night. Mercer. We didn’t even know if you were alive.”
“My son is thirty now,” he said. “He’s a high school baseball coach in Asheville. He has two kids. The older one is named Ethan.” He looked at me. “He never knew your first name. He named his son after the only part of you he had. The last name on the citation. Ethan, because he said the man who carried him out deserved to have a kid running around with his name on him, even if he never got to say thank you.”
