Nineteen ninety-six, Evelyn said, without looking up. Her voice was calm, the voice she used at the office when a client shouted about a number that was not wrong. "Heritage Softail. Black. My husband bought it new."
Your husband, Cody said, the way young men say things they have not yet learned to be careful with. "He still riding it?"
No, Evelyn said. She folded the cloth once, precisely, and put it back in her pocket. "He died six years ago. Cancer. This was the last thing he ever touched."
She said it plainly, because it was true. Cody was quiet for a moment. Jake lowered his phone. Luis stopped smiling.
Then Cody recovered, the way a performer recovers when the audience has gone still, by reaching for a bigger laugh.
Well, he said. "No offence. But maybe it's time to retire it. Put it in a shed. Grow some tomatoes."
Nobody laughed that time. Not even Jake. The silence sat in the lot for three full seconds, long enough for Evelyn to hear the jukebox inside, muffled by the walls, and the tick of the Heritage cooling.
Maybe, Evelyn said. She put on her helmet, swung her leg over the seat in one smooth movement, and started the bike, first try. The engine caught with a low, steady rumble that sounded, in the quiet lot, like an answer. She did not look back. She rode out past the abandoned tire shop, and the orange light fell away, and the night air came cold and clean over her jacket. She did not cry, and she did not shake, and she did not hurry, because hurrying would have meant Cody Reyes had decided something about her evening, and he had not.
Ray followed her out, riding behind her at a respectful distance. At the turn for her street he raised one hand, and she raised one hand back, and he turned off toward his own house.
At home she made tea and sat at the kitchen table with the note framed on the wall beside her. She did not let fear win that night, although she understood that fear had changed its shape, and was no longer only about riding.
The next morning Ray came by with coffee, and on her porch he told her plainly what she had already guessed. "Cody's group aren't a club," he said. "They call themselves the Night Riders, but they're not a club. No charter, no president, no rules except Cody's. Just boys with money and new bikes. Murphy tolerates them because they pay."
Boys, Evelyn said. "He's twenty-seven."
I know, Ray said. "I'm not excusing him, Ev. I'm telling you so you know what you're dealing with. A real club has old men in it. Old men remember what a bike costs a family. Boys like Cody only remember what it costs at the shop."
Thank you for following me home, she said.
I'll always follow you home, Ray said, simply, as if it were a fact about the road. "That's what riding beside somebody means."
She believed him. She had believed him since the church parking lot, since the day he had stood beside her while she cried at the kerb and had not tried to fix it, only waited.
Monday morning came grey and quiet, the way Mondays in the accounting office usually came, with the radiators ticking and the light through the high windows falling in pale bars across the desks. Evelyn arrived before anyone else, as she always did. She hung her coat on the hook by the door, switched on the coffee machine, and opened the ledger for the first client of the week, a bakery owner whose numbers never quite added up and who always apologised for it as if arithmetic were a personal failing. Evelyn did not mind. She liked the slow work of finding where a number had gone astray, the small satisfaction of a column that balanced at last. It was work that asked for patience, and patience was something she had in abundance.
Grace Turner arrived at eight-thirty with a paper cup in each hand and a look that said she had already heard the weekend's news, or at least the part of it that mattered. Grace was fifty-four, practical and warm, the kind of friend who remembered how you took your coffee and also remembered the anniversary of a death without being told. She set one cup on Evelyn's desk and pulled her chair close.
Ray called me, Grace said. "He said the boys were at it again on Friday."
They were, Evelyn said.
And you?
I polished the chrome, Evelyn said, and Grace laughed, a short, surprised laugh, and then shook her head.
Only you, Grace said. "Only you would answer a bully with a polishing cloth."
It wasn't an answer, Evelyn said. "It was just what I do."
Grace studied her for a moment, the way she had studied her four years ago, on the spring morning she had driven Evelyn to the garage and waited in the car. "Daniel was right about you," she said, and meant it, and Evelyn looked down at her ledger because the words, coming from Grace, still landed somewhere tender.
The morning went on in numbers. Invoices, receipts, a payroll query, a client who wanted to know why his tax estimate had changed. Evelyn answered each one in her calm, precise voice, and wrote each answer down, and filed each paper in its place. At noon Grace brought sandwiches from the deli across the street, and they ate at their desks, talking about nothing important, about the bakery owner's new grandchild and the leak in the office roof and whether the radiators would hold through another winter. It was an ordinary Monday, and Evelyn was grateful for it in a way she had not been grateful for ordinary things before Daniel died, when ordinary had seemed like something that would always be there.