Chapter 6
chapter six
mia
Imake it as far as the shade behind hospitality before I call Priya and say, "Tell me I'm not insane."
"You called the right person for that," she says. "Go."
I give her the shape of it. The documents. The corridor. The photograph. Farrow. Twenty-four hours. Tonight.
A pause — Priya assembling an opinion she intends to deliver in full.
"You like him," she says.
My hand tightens on the phone before I can stop it.
"I don't know him," I say.
"That's not the same question, Mia, and you know it."
I look out at the paddock — mechanics, kit boxes, the occasional burst of an engine run on the stand somewhere out of sight, the whole place moving at a pitch of organized urgency that has nothing to do with me and everything, currently, to do with the man I left in the garage.
"I find him professionally inconvenient," I say.
"That is not an answer either."
"It's the only one I have today."
"Fine. Keep your structure." A pause, gentler. "Farrow does not care about your reputation, Mia. He cares about his own proximity to anything embarrassing. Walk in calm tomorrow and he'll fold. He's never once been brave without an audience."
"That's disturbingly accurate."
"I'm always accurate," Priya says, and hangs up before I can argue.
Renzo finds me a few minutes later, two coffees in hand, and sits without asking.
"You looked like you needed rescuing," he says. "Or coffee. Guessed either way."
"Thank you."
"Don't. Thank the hospitality unit. I just carried it.
" He drinks his own, watching the paddock with the comfortable silence of a man who does this often — sits with people, lets the noise do the talking.
Then: "He's not what people assume. The persona, the calibrated wave — that's real, it's just not the whole instrument.
He notices things. Most people in his position stop noticing things. He never did."
"You're very loyal to him."
"Eleven years. You get loyal or you leave." He looks at me directly. "I've never seen him do anything like this before. That's not nothing."
"That's not data," I say. "That's a feeling."
"Some things aren't data," Renzo says. "That's not a data point. That's a person." He stands, taking my empty cup before I've finished deciding whether I'm finished. "He's still debriefing with the engineers. After that, I believe you have an evening."
"I haven't agreed to the evening."
"You agreed to it in the garage. I was there." He smiles, the first full uncomplicated expression I've seen from him, and walks back toward the garage.
My phone buzzes. Farrow, again. I let it ring out, and listen to the voicemail standing exactly where I am.
Mia. I need you in this office tomorrow with a credible account, or I cannot protect your position. I am saying this as someone who has always rated your work. Call me back.
I think about four years of building a reputation out of every careful, competent thing I know how to do.
I think about the rated, credible, position-protecting version of myself that exists in that sentence, and how easy it would be, right now, to become her again.
Get in a car. Get on a flight. Walk into Farrow's office tomorrow with a story so reasonable he'd have nothing to do with it but file it away.
I open my own call screen. My thumb hovers over his name.
I could call him back right now and end this.
I am still standing there, deciding, when I notice the photographer.
He's near the paddock walkway, lens already lifting, and I understand, in the half-second before he finds his angle, that leaving will not undo this.
Whatever happens next, my face is already somewhere it didn't used to be.
A woman with a team lanyard slows half a step, glances at me, glances at her phone, and keeps walking — not unkind, just confirming something. That's her. The documents woman.
The camera rises before I can decide whether to look away.
I look away anyway, which feels, in the moment, like the smallest possible defeat.
"Ms. Callahan."
Pascal, appearing from somewhere near the hospitality entrance, his expression carefully neutral. "There's a service corridor behind the unit. I can have you out and into a car within two minutes, no further exposure."
I look at the corridor he's gesturing toward.
I look at the photographer, still adjusting his lens.
I think about how easy it would be to simply disappear through a side door, the way I've been quietly routed and protected since I landed in this city, and how much that would feel, right now, like agreeing that I am something to be hidden.
"No," I say. "Thank you, but no."
Pascal's expression doesn't change, but something in it recalibrates. "Understood."
I start walking toward the main path instead — not fast, not slow, the same pace I used crossing into the garage this morning — and I am three steps into it when Seb appears at the corner of the hospitality unit, still in the brace, having clearly heard at least the end of that exchange.
He doesn't move to intercept me. He falls into step beside me instead, matching my pace exactly, and says nothing for several seconds.
"Do you want me to handle this?" he says finally.
"No."
"Then I won't."
He says it so simply, with so little argument, that I find myself slowing for half a step before I catch it — some part of me had braced for negotiation, for a man used to fixing things deciding he knew better, and instead I am walking beside one who heard no and simply adjusted his entire next move around it.
My breath catches late, somewhere behind that realization rather than in front of it.
He doesn't notice me notice. Or he does, and says nothing about that either, which is its own kind of restraint.
We keep walking. The photographer trails us at a respectful distance, getting his shot regardless — both of us, unhurried, in the open.
I am aware of Seb beside me with a precision I would rather not examine: the angle of his shoulder, deliberately between me and the camera without ever once crowding my space; the careful economy in how he holds his neck, the cost the brace is extracting from every small adjustment he makes to match my speed instead of asking me to match his.
He should, by any reasonable medical standard, be sitting down.
He is walking through a paddock at my pace instead, and he has not once mentioned what that costs him.
"That's going to be a headline," I say.
"Several, probably."
"You don't seem concerned."
"I'm extremely concerned," he says. "I'm choosing not to let it change how I walk."
We clear the worst of the foot traffic. The paddock noise settles back into its ordinary register around us — engines, radios, the distant rhythm of people doing their actual jobs instead of watching mine unravel. Somewhere behind us, the photographer has lowered his camera, apparently satisfied.
"I almost called Farrow back," I say. "Just now. To end it cleanly."
"What stopped you?"
"I'm not sure ending it cleanly is what I want."
He looks at me. Not the calibrated public look. The other one.
"Mia."
It is the first time he has used my name instead of Ms. Callahan, and I feel it land somewhere just beneath my ribs.
"Yes," I say.
"I'll send a car," he says. "For tonight."
"No."
"No to the car, or no to tonight?"
"No to being managed," I say. "I'll find my own way there."
Something crosses his face — not offence, something closer to recalculation. "I'll send the address, then. Not the car."
"Better."
"I'm learning," he says.
"Slowly."
"I've spent most of my adult life doing it the other way," he says. "Give me until tonight."
He is close enough now that I am aware of the precise distance between us — close enough to see the bruise still fading along his cheekbone, the brace holding him still in a way that should make him look diminished and instead makes the rest of him feel more deliberate, more concentrated, like a held breath. I find I have not moved back.
"I'll be there tonight," I say. "Tell me where."
Something happens in his face — not quite relief, not quite triumph. Something quieter than either.
"Thank you for staying," he says.
"I haven't decided to stay," I say. "I've decided to find out why I'd want to."
He looks at me for a long moment, and something that is almost a smile finally completes itself.
"That," he says, "is a considerably more dangerous sentence than the one I was hoping for."
"I know," I say. "I'm coming anyway."