"I wanted to be," Nolan admitted. "But he was right, and he didn't even enjoy being right at my expense." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I don't know how to make this stop following me."
His wife considered that. "Maybe you can't stop it. Maybe you can decide what people will see you do after it." She pushed the laptop back toward him.
"Write down what you learned. Let the next kid who comes into your shop read it. That seems more useful than letting strangers make you ashamed of knowing how to work."
Nolan began documenting unusual carburetor failures and the reasons they were missed in ordinary inspections. He shared the notes with a small vintage-motorcycle forum under his own name, acknowledging the error without dramatizing himself as its victim. Some users continued mocking him. Others thanked him for explaining what the viral clip could not, and a few mechanics described similar failures they had seen.
Curtis Wade responded to the coverage by withdrawing from public view. A short edited video paired his confident recommendation of a major rebuild with Owen's five-minute repair, turning an uncertain diagnostic process into a joke that spread across engineering and automotive accounts. Curtis deleted his social profiles after receiving a flood of hostile messages. His consulting website went dark temporarily while he reviewed his business materials and decided whether to keep offering services under his own name.
He had legitimate qualifications, and years of careful work had preceded the afternoon at the Iron Rail. That was what made his mistake painful. He had substituted a broad estimate for a verified failure and delivered it with confidence because he expected his reputation to carry the uncertainty. When confronted with an unfamiliar hybrid machine, he had behaved as though the machine were wrong for not fitting the models he understood.
A former colleague called to ask how he was handling the publicity. Curtis said he was thinking of leaving consulting entirely. The colleague told him not to make another large decision because one bad afternoon had made him ashamed.
"You were wrong," the man said. "So were half of us at some point. Figure out why. Don't disappear just because you've discovered you're human."
Curtis did not call Owen. He was not yet capable of that conversation. But he took the old paper wiring diagram of a Shovelhead from a folder he had not opened in years and spread it across his desk. He spent the evening following each line, writing down the assumptions that had misled him. It was quiet work, unlikely to become a viral video, and for that reason perhaps the first genuinely useful thing he had done since the diagnosis.