“Lily-Anne,” she replied, and then, because honesty felt like the only currency she had, she added, “You looked sad.”
A murmur rippled through the bikers, a mixture of discomfort and something like admiration, and Ridge exhaled slowly, as if a truth had been pulled from him without permission. “Did I now?”
She nodded, unconcerned with the politics of observation. “My grandma says when people look far away but they’re standing right here, it means they’re missing somebody.”
Ridge’s jaw tightened, not in anger but in recognition, and for a fraction of a second Lily saw moisture gather at the corner of his eye before he blinked it away. He did not explain that he had been staring at nothing because nothing was safer than remembering, or that the date on the calendar marked the third anniversary of his daughter’s funeral, a girl named Ava who had loved sunflowers and had once asked him why the moon followed their car home at night.
Instead, he tucked the dandelions carefully into the pocket of his vest as though they were rare artifacts, and he said, “You’re a wise one, Lily-Anne.”
From her porch, Rosa Rivera had emerged just in time to witness her granddaughter conversing with a man the evening news might have described with adjectives she did not care to repeat, and though fear had gripped her chest for a moment, what she saw instead unsettled her in a different way; the biker was listening, truly listening, to her granddaughter as if she were the only person in the world capable of speech.
Later that afternoon, after the bikes had roared away and Lily had been coaxed inside with promises of grilled cheese and apple slices, Ridge sat alone in his garage, the door open to let in the smell of rain that threatened but had not yet arrived. The dandelions lay on his workbench beside a framed photograph of Ava in a hospital gown too large for her shoulders, her bald head crowned with a paper tiara some nurse had fashioned to make her laugh.
He had promised Ava, in a room that smelled of antiseptic and inevitability, that he would not let grief turn him into a man she would not recognize, and yet over the years he had drifted toward a version of himself that felt carved from stone rather than flesh, a man who rode hard and slept little and spoke even less about the ache that nested beneath his sternum.
Murphy Donnelly, who had owned the gas station since before Ridge first learned to ride, had filled him in that morning over bitter coffee about Lily-Anne’s life beyond the porch, about the way children at Hawthorne Elementary had begun calling her “Squeaks” because of her wheel, about the day someone had taped a note to her back that read “Broken,” about how she sometimes pretended she preferred reading alone so the teachers would not see the pattern forming like mold in a damp corner.
Murphy’s granddaughter, Elise, had come home angry more than once, describing how a boy named Connor Blake, whose father sold insurance and whose mother chaired the PTA, had decided Lily’s wheelchair made her less eligible for tag or hide-and-seek or the unspoken currency of childhood inclusion, and how a girl named Paige Larkin had laughed in a way that suggested cruelty could be fashionable.
Ridge had felt something old and volatile stir in him then, something that had once propelled him into bar fights and darker corners of the world, but it was not rage alone; it was the echo of Ava’s voice, thin but steady, asking him to find someone else to protect when she was gone, someone who might need his size and stubbornness for reasons gentler than vengeance.
