Pete was silent for a long moment. When he looked up, his eyes were wet.
“Because I was ashamed. Not of him, never of him, of myself.”
“I survived because a 31-year-old kid threw himself in front of a truck for me. How do you live with that?”
“How do you stand up at a meeting and say, ‘This man died so I could keep breathing,’ and then just go on breathing?”
“I couldn’t face it, so I didn’t. And by the time the Waterloo chapter fell apart, it was easier to let it stay buried.”
Nathan leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“His daughter ties ribbons to motorcycles. Did you know that?”
Pete’s face collapsed. Not dramatically.
It was a quiet implosion, the way a building falls when the foundation gives out.
He pressed his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes, and his shoulders shook with the kind of grief that comes not from loss, but from the recognition of failure.
“She’s seven years old,” Nathan continued, and his own voice was not as steady as he wanted it to be.
“She ties her daddy’s ribbon to every bike she finds with our patches on it, because she wants someone, anyone, to remember that he existed. That he mattered.”
Pete couldn’t speak. He sat in his recliner and wept, and Nathan let him, because some things need to be felt before they can be fixed.
When the tears had passed, Nathan told Pete about the rally. Nine days from now, Sturgis, South Dakota.
Two hundred and fifty members from chapters across the Midwest and beyond were gathering for the annual summer meet. It was the largest single gathering of their brotherhood all year.
“I’m going to tell them,” Nathan said. “I’m going to stand in front of every one of those men and tell them what Ryan Brennan did.”
“And I’m going to bring his daughter with me.”
Pete stared at him.
“Morrison will have to approve it. You know how he is about the program.”
“Morrison will approve it when he hears the story. And if he doesn’t, I’ll tell it anyway.”
Pete nodded slowly. Then he stood up, walked to the wall, and carefully removed the framed photograph of Ryan Brennan.
“Take this with you,” he said. “He should be there, too.”
The ride to Sturgis took two days. Nathan led, Danny rode beside him, and behind them, in a rented SUV that Danny’s wife had the good sense to suggest, Margaret Brennan drove with Ellie buckled in the back seat.
The girl’s face pressed to the window, watching the landscape scroll past like the pages of a book she was reading for the first time.
They had discussed it, Nathan and Margaret, on the porch of Margaret’s small house in Cedar Falls while Ellie played in the yard with a neighbor’s dog.