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.
Then I recognized the little worn leather keychain attached to them and immediately tried to give them back.
Wolfe’s cabin had been left to his parents. I knew that much. It made sense. They were his family, and whatever he owned went to them, so I assumed they would keep the place for when they visited Florida or eventually sell it when they were ready.
Instead, they gave it to me.
Not to stay in for a few weeks, or until I found somewhere else.
Mine.
I told them no so many times that his dad eventually looked at me and said, very calmly, that continuing to live in a motel when I had an entire life here was fucking ridiculous.
His mom was nicer about it.
Barely.
She told me Wolfe had apparently complained more than once about me living out of bags and refusing to admit that Tampa wasn’t temporary anymore. He thought I needed somewhere that felt like mine instead of another room I could leave without looking back.
Then she said they couldn’t think of anyone he would rather have there.
And well, I didn’t have the heart to argue, so, now I have a house.
His house.
Which might be the kindest gift anyone has ever given me and also the most emotionally fucked-up thing I’ve ever agreed to.
Because Wolfe is everywhere.
His boots are still beside the front door.
There’s coffee in the cupboard he bought, a jacket hanging on the hook near the kitchen and books on the shelves with receipts and random pieces of paper shoved between the pages because apparently bookmarks were too much commitment.
There’s a plant on one of the windowsills that looks half-dead, which means I’m now responsible for keeping it alive because I refuse to let the first thing I do in Wolfe’s house be murder his fucking fern.
It should be unbearable.
Sometimes it is.
But sometimes I walk into a room and catch the faint smell of him still hanging in the wood, the couch or the clothes he left behind, and something inside me settles for half a second before reality catches up.
It’s a blessing and a curse.
I get to be surrounded by him.
I also have to be surrounded by him.
Maybe eventually those two things will stop feeling so different.
But today isn’t that day.
The Speed Demons’ garage feels wrong the second I walk through the doors for Wolfe’s memorial. Everything is exactly where it should be, which makes the one thing missing impossible to ignore.
His bay is empty.
His locker is still closed, his name still printed across it, and for a second I can see him leaning against the bench like he did a hundred times before, pretending to be interested in whatever I was working on when really he was just there to bother me.
Draygon comes in behind me and pauses when I do. His hand settles at my lower back, warm and steady, while Thorne stops on my other side.
Nobody says anything, because we don’t need to.
Andre has already started arranging the memorial wall when we arrive. Cruz is up there, his number and photo surrounded by pieces of a life I never knew, and beside him is a new space that makes my stomach turn.
Wolfe’s helmet goes up first.
Not the one from the crash.
His parents didn’t want that here.
This one is familiar, the black shell scratched in places from use, and seeing it sitting empty on the shelf somehow makes it look smaller than I remember.
Then his number.
His photo.
That stupid smiling photo from the TT tribute where he looks alive enough that my brain still expects him to walk through the door and complain about everyone making such a big deal out of him.
Thorne disappears for a few minutes and comes back carrying several sheets of paper.
I know they’re his before he even reaches us.
A manga-style comic strip.
The first panel is Wolfe, complete with stupid little wings, standing there looking confused as hell like even death managed to annoy him.
In the next, Cruz is running at him with this massive grin on his face, wings spread behind him, looking happier than I’ve ever seen anyone drawn on a piece of paper.
Then Wolfe is smiling too.
Really smiling.
The last few panels are them together, sitting side by side with game controllers in their hands, arguing over whatever they’re playing while their wings are squashed awkwardly behind them.
My throat closes.
It’s so painfully Thorne that it almost hurts worse than a normal portrait would have. He didn’t draw Wolfe dead. He didn’t draw him alone.
He drew him finding someone.
Andre takes the pages carefully, his expression changing as he looks through each panel.
“Thought it could go up for today,” Thorne says, his voice quieter than usual. “Figured Cruz had probably been waiting for the miserable bastard anyway.”
Andre nods and places it beside the photograph.
Thorne looks away before anyone can watch his face too closely.
I reach for his hand and he takes it and holds on.
People start arriving soon after. Racers from other teams, mechanics, friends from Florida, people from Canada, sponsors, family.
Bex keeps herself busy with food because apparently feeding grieving people is universal, while Cece and Lena help her and Revel somehow becomes responsible for handing out water. Reign stays close to Lena, Sayshen drifts between everyone, and Talon spends most of the first hour beside our father.
Dad catches my eye a few times across the room.
There’s something easier between us now.
Still strange and new, but easier.
Wolfe’s parents arrive together, and his mom hugs me before I can figure out whether I’m supposed to go to her first.
She holds me hard enough that I feel the breath leave my lungs.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she whispers.
“Me too.”
It isn’t the right answer, but there probably isn’t one.
The memorial doesn’t become a formal speech immediately, which I’m grateful for. People tell stories instead.
Sayshen tells everyone about Wolfe refusing GPS somewhere in California because he claimed he had “natural directional intuition,” then somehow getting them twenty miles farther away from where they were supposed to be.
Talon immediately interrupts to clarify that Wolfe absolutely did not have natural directional intuition.
Reign says Wolfe couldn’t find his own ass with both hands.
People laugh.
The sound comes naturally enough that it takes a second for everyone to realize they’re laughing at a funeral.
The room goes awkwardly quiet.
Andre notices.
“Oh, fuck off.”
Several people look at him.
He folds his arms and gestures toward Wolfe’s picture. “You’re all going to stand here pretending that bastard wasn’t funny because he died? He’d haunt every one of you just to be annoying.”
Wolfe’s mom lets out a watery laugh.
That breaks the tension.
Revel tells a story that starts questionably and gets progressively worse until he glances at Wolfe’s parents and stops mid-sentence.
His mom wipes beneath one eye. “Keep going.”
Revel looks genuinely alarmed. “With respect, ma’am, there are some things about your son I don’t think you want confirmed.”
“I raised him.”
He pauses.
“Fair.”
By the time he finishes, she’s laughing through tears.
That might be harder to watch than the crying.
Because Wolfe existed before all of us. Before the Speed Demons, before Tampa, before me. He was somebody’s little boy before he was the cocky idiot who called me wa?yé?a and somehow convinced me that taking up space wasn’t something I needed to apologize for.
Andre eventually says a few words, but he keeps them simple.
He talks about Wolfe as a racer first because that’s Andre’s language. Talented, intuitive, stubborn enough to be infuriating and smart enough to know when to listen, even if he usually needed to complain first.
Then Andre looks toward the empty bay.
“He was one of mine,” he says, and his voice catches just enough that the entire garage goes silent. “And my riders will always mean more to me than some bike, or trophy on a wall.”
He doesn’t try to continue after that.
Nobody needs him to.
By the time the memorial starts winding down, the sun is lower and the garage has emptied enough that the silence between conversations feels larger. Wolfe’s mom finds me near the wall before she leaves.
Her fingers close around mine.
“Thank you,.”
My throat tightens.
“For what?”
She smiles, it’s soft, but genuine as her eyes drift toward Thorne, “For bringing them together. He loved you both, so much, and you all deserved more time,”
She glances toward the team behind me. “The team, your little family, it meant everything to him. Every phone call was somebody’s name, some ridiculous story, something one of you had done. He loved this life here.”
Her gaze comes back to me.
“But you made him happy in a way I hadn’t heard in a long time.”
I don’t know what to do with that.
“Thank you.”
It sounds inadequate.
She squeezes my hand.
“I know it won’t be easy, but you keep living in that cabin, okay? Make it yours. He would want that.”
I nod because speaking feels dangerous.
She hugs me once more, then leaves with Wolfe’s dad.
I stay at the garage another half hour before I can’t anymore.
Nobody stops me when I grab my keys.
I think they understand.
****
The cabin is quiet when I get back.