“Correct.”
“And today you’re telling me…”
“That you may be the majority owner of the company whose motorcycle poster has been hanging above your workbench for six years.”
Casey covered her face.
Walter laughed until he had tears in his eyes.
Then Casey started laughing too.
Not because the money felt real.
It didn’t.
Not because she suddenly wanted mansions, cars, or private planes.
She didn’t.
She laughed because somewhere, somehow, Frank Marlowe had managed to reach seventeen years into the future and pull one last impossible trick on the granddaughter who still missed him every day.
Walter extended the Panhead key again.
This time Casey took it.
Six months later, the sign outside Garrison Auto disappeared.
The building had been sold after Marcus’s legal troubles consumed the business.
Casey bought it.
She kept every employee.
She raised every wage.
Then she installed a new sign.
MARLOWE MOTOR WORKS
Underneath, in smaller letters:
Nobody gets passed on the side of the road.
Eleanor saw it first.
She stood beside Casey in the parking lot with tears in her eyes.
“Your grandfather would have liked that.”
Casey smiled.
“He probably would’ve complained about the font.”
Eleanor laughed.
“Yes.”
Walter arrived ten minutes later riding a modern Doyle prototype.
He parked beside Casey’s Panhead.
“Ready?”
Casey pulled on Frank’s old leather gloves.
“Where are we going?”
Walter looked down the highway.
“Does it matter?”
Casey swung one leg over the motorcycle.
The Panhead fired on the second kick.
The sound rolled across the garage lot like distant thunder.
For a moment, Casey remained still.
She could see Frank’s hands over hers.
Could hear him in the rain.
Every one of them has a reason not to stop.
Casey looked at the road ahead.
Then at the garage behind her.
A young apprentice named Luis was helping an elderly woman diagnose a dead battery for free.
Inside the waiting room, Eleanor argued cheerfully with Walter over who made worse coffee.
Above Casey’s workbench hung the photograph from the old book.
Except the caption had been replaced.
It no longer read:
Walter Doyle’s legendary 1959 Panhead.
It read:
Frank Marlowe and Walter Doyle beside the first Marlowe-Doyle Panhead, 1959.
Two names.
Exactly where there should always have been two.
Casey eased the motorcycle forward.
Then she noticed a sedan stopped on the opposite shoulder.
The hood was raised.
A young mother stood beside it holding a little boy.
Cars streamed past.
One.
Two.
Three.
Nobody stopped.
Walter looked at Casey.
She looked at him.
Then she smiled.
“You go ahead.”
Walter smiled back.
“I figured.”
Casey turned the Panhead around.
She crossed the road and pulled onto the shoulder behind the stranded car.
The woman looked nervous as Casey removed her helmet.
“Everything okay?” Casey asked.
“My car just died. I’m sorry. I already called someone.”
Casey set the helmet on the seat.
“You don’t have to apologize.”
The little boy stared at the motorcycle.
“Is that yours?”
Casey looked back at the cherry-red Panhead.
At Frank’s machine.
At her machine.
At a piece of history that had carried a secret through nearly seven decades until exactly the right person had stopped beside it.
She smiled.
“Yeah.”
Then she opened the sedan’s hood.
The woman looked embarrassed.
“You really don’t have to do this.”
Casey leaned over the engine.
“I know.”
She reached for the battery cable.
“Someone taught me a long time ago that having a reason to keep driving doesn’t mean you should.”
Behind her, traffic continued streaming down the highway.
Most of it never slowed.
Casey didn’t notice.
For the first time in a very long while, she knew exactly where she was supposed to be.
