Chapter Three
Beau · Now
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The first ride is the one that got me, and I can tell you the exact mile it happened on.
Dex had been after me for a couple of weeks—you ride?
you should come out, we do the canyon road Saturdays—and I’d kept saying maybe, the way you say maybe to a thing you want and feel guilty for wanting.
Then one Saturday Martha took the kids to a birthday party two hours of small talk long, and the house was empty, and the bike I’d been “restoring” was running fine, and I texted Dex: what time.
There were five of us. Dex up front, a couple guys I’d meet properly later, me at the back trying to remember everything I’d taught myself about counter-steering twenty years ago.
For the first ten miles I was just a nervous man on a machine, white-knuckled, doing the math.
And then we came out of town onto the reservoir road, where it opens up and starts to climb and the curves come one after another like a question and an answer and another question—and somewhere around the third or fourth of them, something happened that I hadn’t felt in so long I’d forgotten it was a thing a person could feel.
I disappeared. In the good way. The way you do when a thing demands all of you at once, no room left over for the title that didn’t fit, or the house that didn’t know me, or the five a.m. heart pounding, or the wife three feet away in the dark I couldn’t reach.
Just the road and the lean and the four men ahead of me in formation, the engine screaming, and me—alive, twenty-five, nobody’s boss and nobody’s stranger, a guy on a bike on a perfect road.
We stopped at a gas station at the top and drank bad coffee, and Dex clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hartley, you mad bastard, you can ride.” And what it did to me was the whole beginning.
It patched something. Some hole I hadn’t admitted was open since we’d moved, since the title, since I’d started evaporating in my own skin.
A man I’d known two weeks called me a mad bastard who could ride, and I felt more seen than I’d felt in months, and I rode home that afternoon ten feet off the ground.
Martha was back from the party. She asked where I’d been.
And here’s the first one—the first small thing, so small you wouldn’t even file it, except I’ve filed all of them now—I said, “Just out riding, clearing my head,” and I didn’t mention Dex, or the crew, or that there’d been five of us, or that I was already thinking about next Saturday.
Not because I was hiding it. That’s what I told myself.
There was nothing to hide. I just... didn’t mention it.
I kept the lit-up part for myself, in a little room with the door shut—the first little room of the many I’d build that year.
It wasn’t a lie. I’d swear that to you even now—except I’ve since learned what my own voice sounds like when it’s getting ready to lie, and it sounds exactly like a man saying it wasn’t a lie, I just didn’t mention it.
That was the first mile. Everything else—the rally, the fire, the empty chair—everything else is just that first mile, repeated, with the stakes going up each time, and me telling myself each time that it was still just clearing my head.