Chapter 23
CAREER CONVERSATION
The morning after Jonathan’s win, while he was in the bathroom, my phone rang.
It was Thea Blackwood.
I sat up straighter on the edge of the hotel bed. “Good morning, Thea.”
“That race report was excellent,” she said. “Clear strategy analysis. Controlled emotion. You didn’t overreach. You let the moment breathe without turning it into sentimentality.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m serious,” she continued. “This is why we hired you. You understand how to write about pressure without becoming part of the spectacle.”
I let myself exhale, just slightly.
“Now,” she said, shifting gears with the efficiency of someone who never wasted momentum, “I need you in London.”
“I thought I wasn’t needed again until Hungary,” I said carefully.
“You’re not. Not trackside.” A pause. “But there are things we should discuss in person. Career things. And I’d like you working out of the office for a week. We have stories that need writing.”
Though I didn’t have a ticket yet, I had been planning to head back to Philadelphia during the three weeks between Silverstone and the next race in Hungary.
“We’ll arrange transport. Be at the Shoreditch office by two PM.”
The line went dead before I could ask anything else.
Jonathan came out of the bathroom then, his hair wet and slicked down.
“My father wants me at the office in Germany for a while. Then I’ll meet the team in Belgium for training, debriefing, and some recovery time before we ramp up for Hungary.” He began donning fresh team gear. “You’re heading back to Philly?”
I shook my head. “Thea wants me at the office in London.”
Jonathan leaned down and kissed me, soft and lingering. “These three weeks are going to go fast. Next time I see you, everything might be different, depending on what happens between my father and your boss.”
His smile was uncertain. “But we’ll make it work, right?”
“We’ll make it work.”
After he left, I took a cab back to the Travelodge, sneaking out so no one would notice I was wearing the same clothes as the day before. When I arrived, my phone pinged with a text from Mason. “Meet in the lobby in half an hour to return the car to Heathrow?”
I hurriedly showered, changed, and packed my bag. By the time I reached the lobby, Mason and Sandra were already there, Mason leaning against the wall with car keys in hand while Sandra scrolled through her phone with the focused intensity of someone rewriting a headline in her head.
“You look disgustingly refreshed,” Mason said as I approached. “Did you actually sleep?”
“Some,” I said. It wasn’t technically a lie.
Sandra glanced up, studying me for half a beat longer than was comfortable. “You vanished pretty fast after dinner.”
“Jet lag finally caught up with me,” I said lightly. “Even adrenaline has limits.”
She hummed, noncommittal, and slid into the back seat. I took the passenger side while Mason started the engine. The early morning air was gray and damp, the parking lot nearly empty as we pulled onto the bypass toward Heathrow.
For a while we drove in companionable silence, the road unwinding ahead of us. I watched the hedgerows blur past and thought about Jonathan’s word.
Transparency.
Michael had made it sound almost clinical. A strategy. A system you could implement and monitor. But sitting beside my colleagues, the people whose trust I depended on every day, it felt less like a plan and more like a confession waiting to happen.
I could tell them now, I thought. Get it over with. Control the narrative before it controlled me.
My mouth even opened.
“So—”
Mason beat me to it. “You see the paddock rumor mill this morning?” he asked. “Some genius thinks Hirsch is negotiating a mid-season engineering shuffle.”
Sandra snorted softly. “Clickbait. His camp’s been denying that for weeks.”
“Hirsch doesn’t do impulsive,” Mason said. “Everything with that guy is calculated.”
I felt a small, sharp twist in my chest at hearing Jonathan reduced to a case study in strategy. Not inaccurate. Just incomplete.
“People love a storyline,” I said. “Especially one that sounds like drama.”
They laughed. I managed a smile, but my thoughts were racing ahead of me. If transparency started anywhere, it would start with Thea. Not in the cramped anonymity of a rental car barreling down the M1, but in her office, face-to-face, where nuance had room to exist.
Telling Mason and Sandra now would turn it into gossip before it had the chance to become policy. And Michael hadn’t been talking about confession for its own sake. He’d been talking about structure. About protecting the work.
I let the moment pass.
The airport signs began to appear, blue and inevitable. Mason flicked on the indicator and followed the curve toward the rental return.
“Back to reality,” he said lightly.
I looked out at the spreading terminals and felt the weight of what waited on the other side of the flight.
“Yeah,” I said. “Back to reality.”
I took the Tube into London, watching the city slide past in flashes of brick and graffiti while I tried to prepare for whatever conversation with Thea awaited me.
Apex’s headquarters occupied three floors of a converted warehouse in Shoreditch, polished concrete, exposed brick, glass walls that suggested transparency while offering none. It felt less like a newsroom and more like a command center.
Thea’s office sat at the far end of the floor, glass-walled and immaculate. When I stepped inside, she stood to greet me, tall, composed, assessing in a way that made you feel immediately measured.
“Sit,” she said, gesturing to the chair opposite her desk. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
She prepared it herself, efficiently, while I took in the room. Racing memorabilia lined the walls, but not in a fan-girl way. Real artifacts. A carbon-fiber front wing endplate. A faded Monaco credential from the nineties. Framed investigative clippings rather than glossy covers.
This was what success looked like here.
“Your Silverstone coverage was exceptional,” she said, handing me the mug. “Both pieces. The race report and the historical context. You managed to balance technical clarity with emotional restraint. That’s not easy.”
“Silverstone demands it,” I said.
“So does this job.” She sat, folding her hands. “Which brings us to why you’re here.”
She slid a folder across the desk.
“Your assignments for the week,” she said. “Three pieces, four if I can get the interview I want for you.”
I opened it.
“First: Silverstone’s environmental footprint,” she continued. “Noise mitigation, sustainability initiatives, community pressure. Technical, but grounded. Eight hundred words.”
I nodded.
“Second: a profile on Lando Norris. Thirty minutes. His people are cooperative. I want something that goes beyond lap times.”
“Understood.”
“And third,” she said, watching me closely now, “a comparative analysis. Formula 1 versus American motorsports, fan culture, accessibility, economics. You’ve covered both. Use that.”
I closed the folder slowly. “These are… manageable.”
“They’re meant to be,” she said. “I’m not testing whether you can perform miracles. I’m testing whether you can maintain quality under sustained pressure.”
I looked up. “And if I do?”
Thea didn’t answer immediately. She leaned back in her chair, studying me with the same stillness I’d seen on drivers waiting for the lights.
“If you deliver clean copy, on deadline, at publication standard,” she said, “then we talk about your future here.”
She opened another folder.
“We’re expanding our American motorsports coverage, IndyCar, IMSA, selective NASCAR events, as well as putting more focus on business and environmental aspects. We could use a reporter with your background. If you can continue to deliver through the rest of this leg.”
Michael’s voice flickered through my mind: Full disclosure to the people who matter.
This was the moment, if there was going to be one. I could tell her now. Lay everything on the table and trust professionalism to carry us through.
But because Thea didn’t say anything about Jonathan, I presumed Michael hadn’t spoken to her yet.
For all I knew, his proposal was still theoretical, a strategy sketched over dinner rather than a decision implemented.
If I raised the issue of the relationship first, I risked turning a controlled disclosure into a rumor.
And I wasn’t willing to gamble my future at Apex on a conversation that hadn’t officially begun.
I said nothing.
Thea rose and I picked up my bag, which was suddenly heavier than it had been when I arrived.
“I’ll do my best for you this week,” I said.
As I stepped back into the open-plan newsroom, the low hum of keyboards and quiet conversations pressed in around me. People doing the work. Building careers one assignment at a time.
Outside, London traffic moved with indifferent momentum, but it was possible my life could undergo a major shift.