Chapter 12
chapter twelve
seb
By the time I finish reading, Mia has stopped asking questions.
Not because she has none. Because the pages have answered the wrong ones first — not why me, not how did you find me, but something quieter, something that doesn't need words.
My father did not write about rescue. He wrote about dignity.
About a stranger's body between him and a stranger's phone.
About a kindness that didn't wait to be witnessed before it counted.
The journal stays closed on the desk when we finally leave the room, but I feel its weight following us down the private stair regardless — three pages, my father's hand, the woman beside me carrying the knowledge of exactly what she meant to a man she never learned the name of.
"I want air," she says, at the bottom of the stairs. "Not the terrace. Somewhere quiet."
"I know somewhere."
I take her through a service exit Pascal has used twice to get me out of buildings undetected, into a part of Monaco the postcards don't bother with — narrow stone lanes climbing the hill behind the harbour, laundry strung between shuttered windows, a cat regarding us with total indifference from a doorstep.
The noise of the party fades within thirty seconds.
By the time we reach the small square at the top of the lane, it's gone entirely, replaced by something older — stone holding the day's warmth, a single working streetlamp, a café long since closed for the night with its chairs stacked and chained.
"This isn't the Monaco anyone photographs," she says.
"No. It's the Monaco that existed before anyone thought to photograph it.
" I sit on the low wall at the square's edge; she sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch.
"My grandmother used to bring me here. There was a woman who ran the café — not this one, the one before it, before the building changed hands twice.
She made lemon ice in the summer and never once asked who I was. "
"You miss that."
"I miss being a person nobody had decided anything about yet."
She's quiet for a moment, looking out at the lane, at the stacked chairs, at the cat that has relocated to a sunnier patch of stone despite the late hour and total absence of sun.
"The journal," she says. "I keep thinking about one line. I do not know her name. I find I would like to." She looks at me. "You gave him that. Eventually. Even though he was already gone."
"I gave him a name on paper. I don't know if that's the same thing."
"It's not nothing."
"No," I say. "It's not nothing."
We talk until the party below becomes someone else's evening — easy, unforced, the kind of conversation that happens between two people who have run out of reasons to perform for each other.
She tells me about the first event she ever ran solo, a corporate gala that nearly collapsed when the catering truck broke down on the motorway and she rebuilt the entire menu from a petrol station and sheer will.
I tell her about my father's silence in the garage when I was a boy, a silence I didn't understand as love until considerably later than I should have.
At some point her hand finds mine on the stone wall between us. Neither of us comments on it.
"Can I ask you something," she says, eventually.
"Always."
"Why thirty-seven documents. Not five. Not ten. Why did it become that many."
I think about this honestly, the way I've tried to answer every question she's put to me since the hospital corridor.
"Because once I'd decided you mattered, I couldn't find a country where I wanted you to have less authority over my life than in any other," I say.
"Medical proxy in Monaco. Power of attorney covering the team's home jurisdictions.
Next-of-kin notification everywhere I race.
I built it the way I build everything — thoroughly, because thoroughness is the only language I trust completely. "
"That's not romantic. That's terrifying."
"It's both. I'm aware."
She looks at our joined hands. "You didn't write my name down because I was competent."
"No."
"You wrote it down because of twelve minutes in the rain."
"Yes."
"That's not the same thing as knowing me."
"No," I agree. "It wasn't. It isn't, not entirely, even now. But I have spent every hour since you walked into the hospital correcting that as fast as a person can reasonably correct it, and I find I am not interested in stopping."
She turns to look at me properly, and something has shifted in her face since the journal — softer at the edges, less guarded, the quality of a woman who has run out of reasons to keep her distance and has finally stopped pretending otherwise.
"Ask me," she says.
"Ask you what."
"Properly. You've told me the truth. You've shown me the journal. You've spent days deciding things about me without asking a single direct question." She holds my gaze. "Ask."
I understand, slowly, precisely what she's offering me — not permission exactly, something more deliberate than that. The chance to do, for the first time since this began, the one thing I have spent more than a year forgetting how to do with any woman who wasn't entirely incidental to my life.
"Mia." I take her other hand too, so I'm holding both of them, here on a wall in a square nobody photographs. "Will you come upstairs with me."
Her breath catches, soft and immediate.
"Yes," she says.
The suite is small by the standards of the hotels I usually stay in — older, the kind of room that predates the current era of glass and minimalism, with a wrought-iron balcony and a bed with a carved headboard and windows that open instead of seal shut against the climate.
She stops just inside the door.
"You already had this booked," she says.
"I booked it after I found your name. Not for this.
" I close the door behind us, the lock turning soft and final.
"I needed one place in Monaco that didn't belong to the team, or the cameras, or the version of me everyone else owns.
I didn't know if I'd ever bring anyone here.
I knew, if I did, it would be someone I wanted to remember a room with, not just a night. "
She crosses to me slowly this time — no urgency, no professional pretext, no motorhome interruption risk pressing at the edges of the moment. Just the unhurried, deliberate walk of a woman who has made a decision and is allowing her body the full length of the room to arrive at it.
"You wrote my name down," she says, stopping in front of me, "before you had the right to say it."
"Yes."
"You have the right now."
"Mia."
"Say it."
I say her name the way I have wanted to say it since a corridor in a hospital, low and entire, and she closes the last of the distance between us and kisses me with none of the urgency of the motorhome and all of its certainty.
This time, there is no interruption risk, no team nearby, no clock counting down to a race. There is only the open window letting in the smell of the sea and old stone, the lamp turned low, and two people who have finally run out of reasons to wait.
I undress her slowly — not because restraint is a performance but because I want to remember the sequence of it, the small catch of her breath when I find the zip at her back, the way she watches my hands rather than closing her eyes, the trust required to be witnessed this completely by someone who has already seen too much of her in four days to pretend otherwise.
"You're staring," she says, when the dress falls.
"I've earned it."
"That's not how earning works."
"It's exactly how earning works," I say, and kiss the curve of her shoulder where the strap has left a mark, and feel her exhale go unsteady beneath my mouth.
She undresses me in turn — unhurried, deliberate, her hands finding the same buttons she fumbled with in the motorhome and managing them now with a different kind of attention, less urgent, more curious, as though she has decided to actually look at what she's uncovering instead of simply uncovering it.
We end up on the bed without either of us deciding to, the old mattress giving slightly beneath our combined weight.
My neck protests once when I lean too far over her; I adjust before she can notice, because wanting her does not make my body any less human tonight than it was on the podium.
I kiss my way down her body with deliberate slowness, learning her — the soft gasp when my mouth finds her collarbone, the way her hands fist in the sheets when I move lower, the sound she makes, half-laugh half-moan, when I find the ticklish spot just beneath her ribs and apologize against her skin without actually stopping.
"Seb."
"Yes."
"Don't stop apologizing like that."
I don't.
When she finally pulls me back up to her, I reach for the drawer of the nightstand without being asked, and she watches me with a steadiness that makes the practical moment feel like its own kind of intimacy rather than an interruption of one.
"Good," she says, simply, when I've finished, and pulls me back down to her.
When I finally settle between her thighs, I look up at her first — checking, the same instinct that made me stop my hand at her wrist in the motorhome, the same respect that has apparently become load-bearing in whatever this is between us.
"Yes," she says, before I've asked anything aloud. "I'm certain. I told you that already."
"I like hearing it twice."
"Then you'll like this," she says, and pulls me down to her with both hands, and any remaining patience I had reserved for later evaporates entirely.
I enter her slowly, watching her face the whole time, learning every small shift in her expression — the brief catch of discomfort giving way to something else, her back arching, her hand finding my shoulder and gripping hard enough that I know, distantly, there will be marks tomorrow that neither of us will mention to anyone.
She is tight and warm and exactly as certain as she said she was, and the sound she makes when I'm fully inside her undoes something in me I have been keeping carefully wound for longer than I want to admit.
"Okay?" I manage.
"More than okay." Her hips shift beneath me, an answer with no words required. "Move."
I move.
We find a rhythm slow enough to be unbearable and unbearable enough to be exactly right — her legs wrapping around me, her mouth finding mine between breaths, the old bed announcing every motion with a creak neither of us has the composure left to be embarrassed by.
I brace one hand against the carved headboard and use the leverage to go deeper, and the sound she makes against my throat is the kind of sound I am fairly certain I will hear in memory for the rest of my career, the rest of my life, however those two things end up dividing themselves from here.
"I'm close," she says, against my ear, her voice wrecked in a way I have never heard it.
"I know. I can feel it."
"Don't stop."
"I have no intention of stopping."
I shift the angle slightly, find the place that makes her gasp my name properly for the first time tonight, and chase the rhythm that's building between us until she comes apart beneath me — back arched, my name broken into two syllables against my collarbone, her whole body tightening around me in a way that drags me over the edge half a breath behind her, the two of us finishing together in the low lamplight with the sea air moving through the open window and the old bed finally, mercifully, going still.
Afterward, she lies with her head on my chest, one hand resting flat over my heart like she's checking it's still doing its job.
"That was not the same as the motorhome," she says, eventually.
"No."
"I don't have a clever line for what it was instead."
"You don't need one," I say. "I don't think either of us needs to narrate this."
She's quiet for a while, her fingers tracing an absent pattern against my sternum.
"I have to call Farrow tomorrow," she says. "I still don't know what I'm going to tell him."
"Tell him the truth. Tell him whatever version of it you're ready to give."
"That's very unhelpful relationship advice."
"I'm not your relationship advisor," I say. "I'm considerably more invested than that."
She laughs against my chest — quiet, real, the kind of laugh I've been collecting evidence of since the corridor and intend to keep collecting for as long as she'll let me.
The sea moves somewhere below the open window.
Tomorrow, London would ask her for a clean account of all of this.
Tonight, there was no clean version left to give.