We still exchanged occasional messages.
On Sarah's birthday, we sometimes spoke.
But the life we'd built was gone.
I never blamed my former wife for needing a different kind of healing.
And I knew she hadn't been wrong to ask me to keep living.
I simply hadn't known how.
The motorcycle became my answer.
At first, I rode because the engine drowned out my thoughts.
Then I rode because the highway was the only place I could sleep afterward.
Eventually, the Iron Ghosts became the people who kept checking on me when I stopped returning calls.
Ron showed up at my house with groceries.
The others invited me on rides.
Sometimes they sat in my garage for an hour without saying anything.
They never demanded that I stop grieving.
They just refused to let me disappear completely.
Now Tucker had done something none of them could.
He'd made me want to open the door to the room where Sarah's memories lived.
I stood.
Then I walked into the house.
At the end of the hallway was a closed bedroom.
I hadn't entered it in nearly two years.
Sarah's bedroom.
After she died, I'd packed most of her belongings carefully.
But I couldn't bring myself to change the room completely.
The door remained closed.
The curtains stayed drawn.
I stood outside for several minutes.
Then I turned the handle.
The room smelled faintly of old wood and fabric.
A small bookshelf stood beside the window.
A faded purple blanket covered the bed.
Several stuffed animals rested on a chair.
And above the desk hung a crooked paper star Sarah had made in school.
I switched on the light.
For a moment, the pain was so sharp that I considered leaving.
Then I saw a drawing pinned beside the desk.
It showed three motorcycles with enormous wheels.
A tiny girl stood between them.
Above the picture, Sarah had written in uneven letters:
Daddy and his big motorcycle friends.
I stared.
Then I sat on the edge of the bed and cried.
Not the quiet tears I'd learned to hide.
I cried so hard that my shoulders shook.
I cried for the years Sarah never got to live.
I cried for the wife I'd lost.
I cried for the birthdays I'd spent riding past midnight because I couldn't face an empty house.
And I cried because a five-year-old boy with seven dollars and forty cents had reminded me that my heart was still capable of caring.
When the tears finally slowed, I looked around the room.
I wasn't ready to change anything.