Daniel Laroux grew up in a house where love had rules, silence had weight, and a child learned early how to read the weather in a room before stepping inside.
Raised among family secrets, shifting names, and truths no one wanted spoken aloud, Daniel spends his life trying to become someone the past cannot claim. The Air Force gives him structure. Marriage promises shelter. Fatherhood gives him a reason to break the cycle. But the wounds he carries follow him into every room, and the truth about who he is?what was hidden, what was taken, and what still waits to be named?refuses to stay buried.
The Name They Gave Me is a moving novel about survival, inheritance, fatherhood, and the courage it takes to tell the truth. From the porches of East Texas and Louisiana to military life, courthouse hallways, family tables, and the long road back to buried origins, this is the story of a man learning that leaving is not betrayal, love does not have to be survived, and the names imposed on us do not have to be the names we carry forever.
