Chapter 14
chapter fourteen
seb
The article is live before I've finished the morning debrief in Barcelona, the same day Mia is due in Farrow's office.
Pascal finds me in the garage, tablet already in hand, his expression doing the careful neutral thing he does when he's about to tell me something he'd rather not.
"Hartfield Director's Monaco Scandal: Inside the Romance That's Costing Her Career," he reads. "Sunday Ledger. It's not subtle."
I take the tablet.
The photograph is the terrace one — Mia and I leaving the party, both fully dressed, not even touching — but the article built around it has none of that restraint.
It quotes an unnamed "source close to Hartfield" suggesting Mia's position is "under review.
" It describes our relationship as "a calculated career move" in one sentence and "a reckless personal entanglement" in the next, apparently uninterested in choosing between contradictory narratives as long as both of them are damaging.
Something cold settles in my chest.
"Where did the source quote come from?" I say.
"We don't know yet. Could be internal at Hartfield. Could be someone who attended the party." Pascal's jaw is tight. "I can find out."
"Find out later."
"Seb, this is the kind of thing that's better handled immediately?—"
"I said later, Pascal."
He looks at me, silent for a moment, a man visibly recalibrating what he thought he knew about how I operate.
My first instinct, reading it again in the quiet of the motorhome twenty minutes later, is to fix it.
This is what I do. This is what I have always done — assess the problem, deploy the resources, eliminate the variable causing damage.
I could have Pascal's contacts at three different outlets running a correction within the hour.
I could have my lawyer draft something formal enough to make Hartfield's legal team nervous about the "under review" language.
I could call Farrow myself and explain, calmly and precisely, exactly what will happen to Hartfield's reputation if they let an unnamed source damage one of their own directors over an article with no named sources and no actual evidence.
I have the number already pulled up before I stop myself.
I sit with the phone in my hand and think about a garage, days ago, and a woman telling me no to being managed with the clarity of someone who has had to say it before and intends to mean it every time after.
I think about terms. I won't appear, arrange, or intervene in any part of your actual life unless you ask me to.
I put the phone down.
"You've gone quiet," Renzo says, twenty minutes into the simulator session, three screens lit in front of him with numbers I am currently failing to focus on. "That's not your usual quiet."
"I'm listening."
"You're not. I just told you the brake-by-wire calibration needs revisiting and you said interesting in a voice that suggests you were thinking about something else entirely."
"It's been a complicated few days."
"It's been a complicated stretch," Renzo says, not looking up from his screen. "I've noticed."
"You notice everything."
"It's the job." He finally glances over. "Is she all right?"
"I don't know yet."
"Have you asked her?"
I don't answer that immediately, because the honest answer — no, because I've been sitting here deciding whether asking counts as managing — is not one I'm prepared to defend out loud.
"Seb." Renzo's voice has gone unusually direct.
"You can solve almost anything by throwing money, lawyers, or your own stubbornness at it.
I've watched you do it for eleven years.
It's why you're good at your job and occasionally insufferable as a person.
But this isn't a problem you solve. It's a person you check on. "
"That's a remarkably direct thing for you to say."
"I'm an engineer. We're not known for subtlety once we've decided something needs saying."
I look at the phone again.
"Text her," Renzo says, already returning his attention to the screens. "Not a statement. Not a plan. Just text her."
I saw the article, I type, and delete it, because it sounds like I'm asking her to manage my reaction to it.
Are you all right sounds better, except it still puts the weight on her to reassure me, which is precisely backward from what I actually want.
In the end, I write the only thing that's actually true.
I'm not going to fix this without you. I just wanted you to know that.
I send it before I can revise it into something more careful.
Her reply comes after I check the time twice.
Farrow's seen it. He's moved the meeting to this afternoon.
Then, a second message:
Thank you for not fixing it.
I read that twice. Something tight in my chest finally loosens.
How are you, I type.
Functional. Operational, technically. Not entirely fine.
Can I call you?
A pause — longer than the gap between her previous replies.
Yes.
I take the call outside the motorhome, in the strip of shade along the wall where the paddock noise is muted enough to hear her properly.
"Hi," she says, when she picks up, and something in the single syllable tells me more about how this day has gone than any article could.
"Hi."
"I'm walking into his office in twenty minutes."
"I know."
"I don't know exactly what he's going to say."
"Whatever it is," I say, "you'll have the right answer for it. You've had the right answer for everything else this week."
A breath, audible even over the distance. "That's an alarming amount of confidence to have in a woman about to be lectured about optics."
"I have an excellent track record with my confidence in you."
"Don't make me laugh before I go in there. I need to look serious."
"You always look serious. It's one of your more alarming qualities."
I hear something that might be a laugh anyway, quickly suppressed.
I think about every version of help I could offer right now — a lawyer on standby, a statement Pascal could have ready within the hour, a single phone call to Farrow that would end this entire conversation before it starts.
The old instinct rises, fast and familiar, the same one I put down twenty minutes ago.
I let it pass again.
"What do you need from me?" I say instead. "Not what I want to do. What you actually need."
There's a pause on her end, and I understand, somewhere underneath it, that this might be the first time anyone in this situation has asked her that question rather than telling her the answer.
"I need you to keep doing exactly what you're doing right now," she says, eventually. "Which is, apparently, nothing. Which is, apparently, the hardest thing for you to do."
"You have no idea."
"I have some idea." Something warmer moves into her voice. "I have to go. I'll call you after."
"I'll be here."
"I know," she says, and there's something in the way she says it — certainty, not assumption — that settles something in my chest more thoroughly than any version of fixing this would have.
She hangs up.
Renzo finds me there eventually, watching the paddock without seeing much of it.
"Well," he says.
"She's walking in now."
"And you're sitting here instead of being on a plane."
"I'm aware of the contradiction."
"I didn't say it was a contradiction," Renzo says. "I said you're sitting here. That's new."
I think about the article, about Farrow's office, about the version of myself that has spent eleven years solving problems with precision and resources and the kind of decisive action that wins races.
I think about a woman telling me no to being managed, and the discipline it has taken, all day, not to override that.
The next thing was not management.
The next thing was her — but only if she wanted it to be.
"I want to go to London," I say. "Not to fix anything there. Not to be in the room with Farrow." I look at my phone, the screen still dark, no message yet. "I want to ask her if she wants me to come. And then I want to wait for the answer like it's actually a question."
Renzo looks at me for a long moment, something almost like approval moving through his usual dry composure.
"That's new too," he says, and goes back to his screens.
I pick up the phone.
I don't send anything yet. I just hold it, waiting — for her to walk out of that office, for her to decide what she needs next, for the answer to a question I haven't asked yet but am finally, for the first time in my entire life, prepared to actually wait for.