Page 213 of Bend

I watch him look at each of us.

Count us.

Every rider.

Every person he sent onto that course after losing one two days ago.

When he gets to the end, his shoulders drop.

He turns his face away and wipes quickly beneath one eye.

Nobody comments on it.

Wolfe’s parents are watching too.

His mother is crying, but there is a small smile mixed in with it as she looks around at the team her son loved and sees everyone who went out come back.

That might be the part that stays with me longest.

Because survival doesn’t cancel grief.

Apparently they can sit right beside each other.

I pull away from Thorne enough to breathe and look back toward the timing board.

Fourth.

My first actual race with the Speed Demons, my first fucking TT, and I came fourth.

I beat Talon, which is obviously going to become unbearable for everyone around me.

But as good as that feels, it isn’t the part of today that matters most.

Everyone came back.

The race mattered. Wolfe’s tribute mattered. Taking his open place on the grid mattered, and placing fourth feels fucking incredible.

But seeing Talon, Sayshen, Reign, Revel, Draygon and Thorne standing here again matters more.

I look down at the three on my new team leathers before glancing toward Wolfe’s family, then back at the people crowded around me.

One final ride for him, and this time, we brought everyone home.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Echo

We got back to Florida yesterday, and somehow that feels both too soon and like we were gone for months.

The flight home was a blur of airport lights, uncomfortable seats, people talking too loudly around us and all of us pretending we weren’t watching one another every time someone got too quiet. By the time the doors opened and Florida heat wrapped around me again, I thought being somewhere familiar might make something inside me settle.

It didn’t.

Home is different when somebody who belongs in it doesn’t come back with you.

We dropped bags, dealt with the bikes and whatever pieces of our lives had followed us overseas, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, Wolfe’s parents asked me to sit down.

His mom put a set of keys in my hand, and at first, I didn’t understand what they were.