“Thank you so much,” I said, accepting the surprise meal. “Wow. Maybe I won’t mind having Greg laid up for a while as much as I thought.”
She smiled at the teasing, but Greg looked slightly guilty again. As soon as his mother left the room, he turned to me.
“I’m really sorry to put the team in a lurch,” he said.
“You don’t have anything to apologize for, and you didn’t put us in a lurch.”
“Of course I did. The team has planned for the season to have two racers, and now it’s down to just you. I promise I will find a replacement to step in for me until I’m back on my feet. Someone who can take my place for the races I miss.”
I wasn’t too sure about that offer. As much as I understood how he was feeling and appreciated him trying to do whatever he could to minimize the negative impact his crash and injuries had on the rest of the team, I didn’t particularly like the idea of a different person just walking on to the team. I’d known Greg for a long time before I’d even considered having him race for us. It took watching him work on the bikes, practicing with him on the practice track at the complex, then putting him through training and trials before I agreed to recommend Quentin put him in his first race.
The idea was still tossing around in my head when I left Greg’s house and headed for the compound. Along the way I stopped at one of my favorite bakeries and bought three large boxes of pastries. Mom’s baking had taken a savory turn recently, and though I always enjoyed what she made, a spinach and feta puff didn’t stand in the place of a raspberry jelly-filled donut or a ganache-covered eclair. There was definitely a place in the world for the rich, buttery, cheesy things that kept cranking out of the kitchen and filling little bags Mom placed on our desks during the day. But that place wasn’t today. Days like today, when everyone was still going to be upset about what happened at the race the night before and shaken up worried about Greg and his recovery. Days when everyone’s minds would be on trying to figure out once and for all what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. Those kinds of days deserved chocolate.
When I got to the compound, I didn’t head straight for the garages like I usually did. Instead, I went into the main building carrying the three boxes of treats. I stopped by the reception desk and offered Glenda a pastry. After she chose the one she wanted, I borrowed her intercom and made an announcement inviting everybody to come get a snack in the conference room.
“Thank you,” I said to Glenda, and she flashed me a thumbs-up from behind her custard-filled donut.
I carried the boxes into the large room and set them out on the table. Going into the nearby kitchen, I started making pots of coffee. I brought the first two into the conference room and came back with several mugs just before everybody started showing up. I went for another round of gathering the mugs, then brought a final two pots of coffee before settling in to enjoy the treat. Mom and Merry stood off to one side chatting about the baby, and I half listened to them for a while, but most of my attention was focused on the people milling around the conference room.
It was a rare occurrence to have everyone together on the compound and seeing it added to the sheer value of every one of these people. It also made the absence of Greg feeling heavier. I tried not to think about it, which led my eyes to wandering over to Kelly. She stared into the boxes carefully, evaluating each of the available pastries so she could select the perfect one. It was such a nonevent, something I never would have noticed someone else doing. Yet Kelly doing it was somehow adorable. She was being so analytical in her decision, like it was the most important thing she was thinking about that day. It made me interested in what she was finally going to choose.
More than that, it made me rethink the decisions we made about each other. What happened to Greg was the first major injury on the team since my time racing. There were some severe incidents many years ago before Quentin took over and racing was a different sport. But since the era of my oldest brother running the company and me racing, we hadn’t suffered any major catastrophes. A few bumps and bruises, a couple of skids, but no moments when any of us thought one of our own wasn’t going to make it away from the racetrack.
If there was anything to take away from this, it was that life was short. It was short, it was unpredictable, and it wasn’t guaranteed. None of us knew how much time we had left. On any given day, something completely unexpected and horrible could happen, no matter how careful we were or how much we did to avoid it. I decided right then I wasn’t going to waste any more of the time I had.
20 Kelly
I tried to make up for my indulgent lunch with Pam by eating a healthy breakfast, but Darren announcing the presence of pastries in the conference room was just too much for me to resist. It was an unexpected treat to gather with the other people from around the complex to eat the delicious goodies and drink coffee together. Many of these people were coworkers of mine, but I wasn’t familiar with them, yet. I spent the vast majority of the time I was on the
