Ask Me First

Chapter 1

chapter one

mia

I let it ring twice first, because I am at my desk with a coffee in one hand and a venue manifest in the other. I don't recognise the prefix. I don't know anyone in Monaco.

"Callahan," I say.

The voice is careful, formal, practiced at delivering bad news without sounding used to it.

Private hospital, Monte Carlo. An incident during a testing session.

A patient in stable condition. I have been listed in the patient's documentation as the designated emergency contact for legal and medical decisions.

"I think there's been a mistake," I say.

There is no mistake.

"What's the patient's name?" I say.

My hand tightens around the phone before he answers.

"Sebastián Carras."

I set my coffee down harder than I mean to. Some of it goes on the manifest. I watch the stain spread across a line item for Zurich catering and find that I do not, for once, care.

Sebastián Carras. I have never met him. Never spoken to him. Never, to my knowledge, been within four hundred miles of him. And my name is sitting inside his private legal world like it has always belonged there.

"How many documents?" I say.

A pause. The sound of pages turning, or their digital equivalent.

"Thirty-seven, Ms. Callahan."

I sit very still.

Thirty-seven is not an accident. Thirty-seven is not a hospital intake form filled out badly by an exhausted assistant. Thirty-seven is a man who sat down with a lawyer and built something with my name as the answer to a question I never knew was being asked.

Thirty-seven was not a mistake. Thirty-seven was a man choosing me before I knew his name.

"Send the index," I say. "I'll call back within the hour."

I hang up.

The PDF arrives in three minutes. I stand before I open it, because I find I cannot do this sitting down.

Medical proxy. Power of attorney. Next-of-kin notification across nine separate jurisdictions, my full legal name typed into each one with the cold precision of a document checked twice and found to contain no errors.

Then I see the date column.

The oldest filing is more than a year old.

Not yesterday. Not last week, in some fit of pre-flight paranoia.

More than a year. Which means this was not someone covering himself before a dangerous job.

Someone had decided, a long time ago, that if something happened to him, I was the one he wanted making the decisions — and then waited, all that time, for me to find out.

"Mia."

I haven't heard Priya come in. She reads the screen over my shoulder before I can stop her, which is the entire premise of our friendship.

"That's Seb Carras," she says.

"Apparently."

"You've never met him."

"Also apparently."

She looks at me, then at the screen, then back at me with the expression she reserves for the truly excellent disasters. "The hospital needs a decision. Now. For a man who has no idea you exist."

"He has some idea," I say, looking at the index. "He had a lawyer build this over a year ago. That's not nothing."

"That is not attraction," Priya says. "That is infrastructure."

"What happens if I don't go?" I say, mostly to myself.

I already know the answer.

"Nobody authorizes the imaging. The window closes in twenty-two hours."

Priya goes quiet, which from her is its own kind of alarm.

I am already pulling up flights.

At Gatwick, I print the index and slide it into a folder, labelling it CARRAS / MEDICAL PROXY / A. CALLAHAN, because paper makes chaos behave.

I read the index on the plane, twice, and understand precisely nothing more the second time than I did the first. By the time the wheels touch Nice I have stopped pretending I'm not going to search his name, and the moment I do, the results arrive the way they always do for a person who has spent his life being watched.

Onboard footage first, his voice clipped and unbothered through the radio.

Box, box now. The voice of a man for whom precision is calm rather than effort.

Then the photographs — podiums, press lines, the practiced containment of someone who decided early that cameras were a condition of his life and made peace with it without ever once looking comfortable about it.

One photograph stops me. Monza, three years ago.

He's climbing out of the car after losing the win on the final lap, helmet off, one hand braced on the cockpit, and for that single frame nobody has told him yet what expression to wear.

Not composed. Not performing. Just a man in the second between what happened and what he'll say about it.

I look at it longer than I mean to, which is the first unprofessional thing I do all day.

I am not calm. I'm operational. There is a difference, and today I am clinging to it.

The road from Nice climbs into Monaco the way money does — slowly, then all at once, the hills folding into terraces of pale stone and old gardens.

Below, the harbour is all glass and gold and yachts that have never once questioned their right to be there.

The hospital sits above it with no signage, set into the hillside like it has something to hide and the money to hide it well.

Below us, glitter. Inside, when the doors open, pale stone and the hush of people handling something they aren't going to discuss in the lobby.

A man meets me before I've finished giving my name at reception. Dark suit, controlled walk, the polish of someone paid to stand next to famous people without outshining them.

"Ms. Callahan." He extends a hand. "Matteo Ricci. I run operations for the Vega team."

"Did you know about the documents?" I say. There isn't time for anything gentler.

A beat. "No," he says. "I did not."

"Eleven years working with him and you didn't know."

"It appears so."

This is either the most disturbing thing I have learned today or the most interesting. I have not decided which.

Down the corridor, two men in Vega lanyards stop talking when Matteo passes. Neither looks at me directly. Everyone here already knows who's behind the door at the end.

The physician finds us at the corridor doors and explains it cleanly — hairline fracture of a cervical vertebra, the imaging requires sedation, the sedation requires my signature. I ask five questions. He answers all five with the faint surprise of a man who expected one.

I authorize the MRI.

Matteo is on his phone when I come out, thumb moving fast. He finishes the message before he looks up.

"Can I see him?" I say.

A pause. Long enough to mean something.

"He's sedated," Matteo says. "They're preparing him for imaging."

"I'm not going to disturb him. I'd just—" I stop, because I don't have a way to finish that sentence that doesn't sound strange, and everything about today is already strange enough that I've given up disguising it.

"I flew here on the strength of a folder for a man I've never seen.

I'd like to know who I'm making decisions for. "

He looks at me for a long moment.

Then he opens the door.

The room is quiet and monitored, the machinery designed not to look like machinery.

He's asleep — sedated, technically, though the effect is the same.

Still, in the way people are almost never still.

The bruise along his cheekbone is already yellowing.

There's a scar through his right eyebrow I have not seen in a single photograph.

The Monza photograph had caught him before the mask came back.

Here, the mask has nowhere to go.

I don't move. The folder edge presses a clean line into my palm. I'm holding my breath the way you hold it before something, and I realize, distantly, that I haven't blinked.

I step back into the corridor.

I exhale only once I'm out of the room.

Matteo reads my face and says nothing, which I respect.

"I'm going to need somewhere to sit," I say.

He shows me to a small lounge with real coffee and a view of the harbour going gold in the late afternoon.

I sit with the thirty-seven documents and the photograph of a man unbecoming himself for one unguarded second in Monza, and think: none of them had ever put my name on a legal document before I'd met them.

None of them were waiting behind that door.

My phone buzzes.

Not Priya. A number I don't recognize, Monaco prefix again, and for one absurd second I think the hospital is calling to tell me there's been a mistake after all — that the real Amelia Callahan has been located, that I can go home.

I answer it.

"Ms. Callahan." A man's voice, low, careful, deliberately formal in a way that tells me he's rehearsed this. "My name is Pascal Devereux. I handle press for Vega Motorsport."

Something in my chest goes very still.

"There's a photographer outside the hospital," he says. "He has a clear shot of you arriving with the folder. Your name was visible on the label."

I look at the harbour.

"I labelled it at the airport," I say. "For myself."

"I'm aware," Pascal says, with the weariness of a man who already knows the answer and dislikes it intensely. "It photographs very clearly."

The line is quiet for a second.

"Ms. Callahan. I'd strongly advise you not leave through the front entrance."

I look at the door I came in through. I look at my phone, at the thirty-seven documents still open in another tab, at a name that wasn't public ten hours ago.

"Tell me which exit," I say.

He tells me.

I had come to Monaco because my name was inside his documents.

Now it was outside the hospital.