"Why?"
"Because I'm asking nicely and I've reached the age when repeating myself gives me a headache."
Cassie smiled. She told Evelyn where she was going, drove the short distance in her mother's car, and arrived to find only a few motorcycles in the parking lot. The main room was lit, but the usual noise was missing. When she stepped inside, she saw Graham, Maria, Hank, Tommy, and Derek standing beside the long table.
Her father's original leather cut lay on the wood beneath the lights. It was the old one, worn in 1971 and repaired many times, kept separate from the newer riding vest Graham wore on ordinary trips. The faded Iron Wolves emblem covered most of the back, and beneath it sat the founding-member patch with its old gold thread. The leather was softened by decades of use, darkened at the shoulders, and scarred by a small burn mark Graham had once told Cassie came from a careless cigarette at a gas station in New Mexico.
"What's going on?" she asked.
Maria came around the table. "We've been talking about the work you've done."
Cassie looked toward Derek. He stood with his arms crossed, but there was no mockery in his expression. Hank rested one hand on the back of a chair, watching with an unusual openness.
"You came here asking for stories," Maria said. "And you learned how to listen, which is harder than asking. You've worked on the memorial program, checked names most people here hadn't looked at in years, kept your promises about privacy, and told us when something in our history was more complicated than we wanted to admit."
Cassie felt her cheeks warm. "I just did what you asked me to do."
"No," Derek said from the other end of the table. "You did more than that. Half the things you took care of, nobody had thought to ask for. You don't get to make that smaller because you're embarrassed."
She stared at him. He looked away immediately, as though the compliment had cost him more than he intended to reveal. Hank chuckled quietly.
Graham lifted the old vest. For a moment Cassie saw his younger self in it, the man in the photographs who had ridden away from an old kind of life without knowing what he would build next. He ran his thumb over the founding-member patch.
"I've had this for fifty-four years," he said. "Every mile I rode, every argument I lost, every friend we buried, every time somebody decided to keep showing up when I didn't make it easy. It's all in here, at least for me."
Cassie's eyes filled. "Dad, I can't take your cut."
"You can accept what it means without taking my place," Graham answered. "Nobody can wear fifty-four years of somebody else's life. But they can promise to carry the story forward honestly."
Maria explained that the club had agreed to let Cassie wear the original cut for the memorial as a ceremonial family legacy, not as a claim to full membership or the riding privileges earned by adult members. Graham would wear his current colors; the old vest would carry both his name and Cassie's on a removable memorial panel beneath the original patch. Later it would belong to her, to preserve and to decide how the history should be passed along.
"Traditions matter," Maria said. "So do the people they're meant to serve. We can honor both."