Page 159 of Bend

She just stayed, then somehow it stopped being strange that she was here.

The rest of the afternoon slips back into the usual paddock rhythm. Bikes come in, riders give feedback, Echo makes notes and disappears under fairings or around tool carts, then starts the whole process over again. By the time things finally settle enough for everyone to breathe, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen her cross from one side of the team area to the other.

So when I notice she isn’t there, it stands out.

I find her a few minutes later behind one of the transporters, where the noise drops from constant engine roar to something more manageable. She’s leaning against the metal side with a water bottle trapped between both hands, peeling the label into thin strips with her thumbnail while she stares toward the road.

“Running away?”

Her head turns toward me.

“I’m hiding for five minutes before somebody asks me to touch another fucking fork.”

I laugh and lean back against the transporter beside her. “That bad?”

“I’ve heard preload, rebound and compression so many times today they’ve stopped sounding like real words.”

“Could start talking about tire pressure instead.”

She cuts me a look. “I will actually walk away from you.”

I grin. “Got it. No bike talk.”

For a while neither of us says anything. Engines start somewhere across the paddock, followed by the rise and fall of voices. An announcement crackles through a speaker farther away, too distorted for me to catch more than a few words. The air smells like fuel, damp pavement and fried food drifting over from somewhere beyond the team area.

Echo keeps tearing pieces off the bottle label.

Eventually she says, “I hate when you guys go out.”

I look over at her and find her still staring ahead.

“At the normal circuits, even if I can’t physically see every part of the track, somebody can. There are cameras, sectors, marshals, runoff, and you come back around again. There’s a rhythm to it.” She gestures vaguely toward the road with the bottle. “Here you all disappear for thirty-seven fucking miles and I’m supposed to stand there staring at a screen like that’s enough information.”

“It is a little strange when you’re used to circuits.”

“A little?”

I smile.

“Okay. A lot.”

She looks down at the shredded label. “I keep thinking about everything I can’t see. Every section where I don’t know what the bike is doing, whether something feels wrong, whether one of you is pushing harder than you should.”

“You should be scared.”

Her head turns toward me so fast I laugh.

“That is possibly the least comforting thing you could have said.”

“I wasn’t trying to comfort you.”

“Yeah well no shit, I gathered that.”

I nudge her shoulder gently with mine.

“There are sections out there that scare me too.”

That makes her pause.