Chapter 5
chapter five
seb
They release me from the hospital with a brace, three warnings, and the assumption that I understand the difference between medical advice and obedience.
I am in the garage before anyone on my team has finished pretending to be surprised.
The brace stays. I have agreed to that much.
Everything else is negotiable, and I have already begun negotiating it by the time Matteo gets me through the paddock gate, walking slightly slower than usual, which he notices and says nothing about, because Matteo has worked with me long enough to know which battles are worth the air.
The paddock at midmorning is its own kind of weather system — heat coming up off the tarmac in visible waves, the low engine-hum of a dozen garages running diagnostics, photographers stationed at intervals like sentries who have long since stopped pretending to be casual about it.
A group of fans presses against the fence near the team entrance, three deep, phones already up before I've fully cleared the gate.
"Seb! Seb, over here!"
I don't stop walking. I do turn my head slightly, enough to be seen turning it, and lift two fingers off the strapping on my wrist in something between a wave and an acknowledgement, and the sound that produces — the particular pitch of a crowd that has just been given something, however small — follows me the rest of the way to the garage doors.
This is not vanity. This is logistics. A driver who ignores his crowd entirely creates a story; a driver who engages too much creates a different one.
The two fingers are calibrated. Everything out here is calibrated, which is most of what people don't understand about fame at this level — it isn't chaos. It's a very precise kind of physics.
Inside the garage, the air changes. Cooler.
Quieter, in the way of a space full of serious people doing serious work — mechanics moving around the chassis with the unhurried efficiency of men who have done this exact sequence a thousand times, screens running data nobody outside this room could read at speed, the smell of hot metal and rubber and the ozone tang of electronics working hard.
Conversations don't stop when I walk in. They adjust.
A mechanic shifts half a step to let me pass without either of us acknowledging that he's done it. Someone reaches for a clipboard a half-second before they would have anyway, because I am now in the room and the room runs faster when I am in it.
Renzo doesn't look up from his screen, but he says, without turning, "You were told forty-eight hours."
"I was told a number of things."
"By people whose job is keeping you alive."
"By people whose job is covering themselves if I'm not."
He looks up at that. Considers it. Goes back to the screen. "Sit," he says. "If you're going to disobey medical advice, at least do it sitting down. I don't need the headline."
I sit. The chair catches more of my weight than I intend to give it. I notice it. I don't let it show — except that some small involuntary tightening must reach my face anyway, because Renzo's eyes flick to me, once, and away again, filing it without comment.
I do not enter the garage so much as feel it correct around me.
I have been aware of this happening — the small adjustments, the half-steps, the room full of professionals organizing itself around my presence without appearing to — for eleven years, long enough that it has stopped feeling strange and started feeling like the baseline condition of my life.
It is only now, with the brace digging slightly into my collarbone and my neck reminding me with every small movement that I am, technically, supposed to be in bed, that I find myself wondering how it would look from outside it.
What it looked like, for instance, to a woman watching two men in lanyards stop talking because Matteo walked past.
She arrives a little while later, and I see her before she sees me, because I am watching the gate.
The fans at the fence notice her first. Not all of them — most are still watching for me, for the team principal, for anyone with a lanyard who might confirm something — but two of them turn, and one says something to the other behind a raised hand, and I watch the recognition travel down the fence line like current through a wire. That's her. The one from the photo.
Mia doesn't flinch.
I watch her register it — the slight stillness, the half-second where her pace could falter and doesn't — and then she keeps walking, exactly the same speed, exactly the same posture, the charcoal coat and the composed face of a woman who has decided, somewhere between the hotel and the paddock gate, that she is not going to give them anything to photograph except a person walking calmly toward a door.
A camera lifts. I shift my weight in the chair, enough to draw the angle toward me instead. Pain catches at the base of my skull. I keep my face clean.
Matteo, three steps ahead of her, does the same without needing to be told.
She crosses the threshold into the garage, and the garage does the thing it does — not stopping, never stopping, but registering.
A mechanic's eyes move to her and back to the chassis.
Renzo's do not move at all, which is its own kind of attention, the deliberate non-look of a man cataloguing something he intends to comment on later.
She stops a few feet inside the doors and looks around with the composure of a person determined not to look as overwhelmed as the situation warrants. Her hand tightens briefly on the strap of her bag. Just once. Then it stops.
I know that look. I have built a career on performing the appearance of being unaffected by things that are, in fact, affecting me considerably.
"Ms. Callahan," I say.
"You're not supposed to be standing," she says, by way of greeting.
"I'm not technically standing." I gesture at the chair. "This is sitting, conducted vertically, for very short intervals."
"That's not a real distinction."
"It's the distinction I'm using."
Something moves through her expression — not quite a smile, the same way mine wasn't quite one yesterday. We seem to be developing a shared vocabulary of expressions that decline to complete themselves.
Renzo, who has been monitoring this exchange with the open interest of a man who considers gossip a legitimate engineering input, finally turns fully around.
"You must be the person," he says.
"The person," Mia repeats.
"Seb's person." He says it simply, like a job title, like something already settled and filed. "I'm Renzo. I do the numbers that tell him when he's lying to himself about the car."
"Frequently," I say.
"Constantly," Renzo agrees. "He says the balance is fine. The data says the balance has opinions. I am required, by my contract, to relay the opinions."
Mia looks between us. "Is this a regular dynamic."
"Eleven years of it," Renzo says.
"And he still listens to you?"
"He pretends not to. Then he changes the setup anyway, two hours later, and claims it was his idea.
" Renzo's expression doesn't change, but something in his voice shifts register, goes slightly warmer.
"Sector three this morning, by the way. He stopped protecting it for the first time in four months.
Lost half a tenth doing it. Didn't seem to mind. "
I don't look at either of them.
"That's not relevant data," I say.
"Everything is relevant data," Renzo says. "That's the whole job."
She finds me by the car not long after, while Matteo and Renzo are occupied with the kind of technical conference I have learned to let happen without my input.
The garage is loud around us in the way that creates privacy — too much ambient noise for anyone nearby to easily overhear, too much activity for anyone to focus on watching us instead of their own work.
"Your team likes me," she says. "That's unexpected."
"Renzo likes data. You're an unusual variable. He finds that interesting rather than threatening."
"And you?"
"I find you considerably more than an unusual variable."
She looks at me for a moment, weighing that — content, evidence, whether it survives scrutiny.
"Touch the rear wing," I say.
"Excuse me?"
"The rear wing. There's a sensor cable running along the underside. Touch it."
She looks at me like I've suggested something faintly improper, which, in a garage full of people who would very much like an explanation for why she's touching my car, it slightly is. But she steps closer, reaches under the edge of the wing where I'm pointing, and her fingers find the cable.
The reaction is small. A flinch, barely visible, her hand pulling back half an inch before she steadies it.
"It's live," she says. "There's a current in it."
"Telemetry runs through it during sessions. Residual charge." I watch her face, the slight furrow of someone recalibrating a fact she didn't have a category for. "Most people don't feel it. The sensors are calibrated low."
"But I felt it."
"Yes."
Her eyes come to mine too quickly. That is how I know she felt more than the current.
"Why did you want me to touch it," she says.
I could give her several true answers. I have decided, watching her cross a garage full of professionals who reorganize themselves around me without meaning to, that I wanted to know whether something in my world would notice her because I cannot stop noticing her — whether some small mechanical thing, indifferent to fame and PR and whatever the internet thought it knew, would register her the way I have spent more than a year registering her.
"I wanted to see if you'd feel it," I say instead, which is also true, just smaller than the whole truth.
"And if I hadn't."
"Then I'd have learned something else about you."
"That's an alarming amount of testing for one cable."
"I am an alarming amount of testing," I say. "You should prepare yourself."
She almost laughs. I watch her decide not to, in real time, the same way I have watched myself decide not to smile at her twice now, and I find I am becoming very interested in the catalogue of things this woman declines to let herself do.
Her phone rings while we are still standing by the car.
She checks the screen. Something tightens at her jaw before she's even answered it.
"Farrow," she says, by way of explanation.
"Take it outside," I say. "I'll wait."
"You don't need to wait."
"I'm aware I don't need to. I'm choosing to."
She looks at me for a beat longer than the sentence requires, then answers the call and walks toward the garage doors, toward the strip of shade along the wall where the noise is slightly less.
I cannot hear the conversation. I can see her shoulders, though, and her shoulders tell me enough — the set of them, refusing to soften for the entire call.
She comes back with the expression of someone who has just successfully defused something that wanted very badly to detonate.
"Twenty-four hours," she says. "I have twenty-four hours to be back in London, in his office, with what he's calling 'a clear account of the situation.'"
"And if you're not."
"Then he starts a conversation about my position at Hartfield that I would prefer not to have."
I look at her. The garage moves around us, indifferent, full of its own noise and urgency, and somewhere underneath the diagnostics and the engine-hum and Renzo's monitor and the fans still pressed against the fence outside, I am aware of exactly one thing with total clarity: I have twenty-four hours to give her a reason good enough to survive Gerald Farrow's office.
"Then we have twenty-four hours," I say, "to make sure what you tell him is true."
She looks at me.
"Tonight," I say. "Not the garage. Not the hospital. Somewhere I can actually tell you, instead of giving you nineteen minutes at a time."
Something passes through her face — caution, and underneath the caution, something that isn't caution at all.
"Tonight," she says.
Renzo, from somewhere behind us, calls out without looking up from his screen: "If this is a date, I want it noted I introduced you."
"It's not a date," Mia says.
"It's logistics," I say, at exactly the same moment.
We look at each other.
"We have twenty-four hours," I say. "Tonight is when I stop giving you pieces and give you the truth."