Chapter 21
chapter twenty-one
mia
Isaid yes nearly two weeks ago, on a Tuesday, over the phone, with no grief and no bread to blame it on, which Seb pointed out felt like cheating somehow, since the original deal had been to ask again once my judgment had recovered.
"You asked early," I told him.
"You answered early too."
"I answered when I was ready. That's different from you arranging it."
He hadn't argued the distinction, which is how I know he's actually learning it.
Now I'm standing in a private dining room above a restaurant in the hills outside the circuit, in a green dress Priya helped me choose over video call, the Hartfield review still open on my phone somewhere in my bag, watching Sebastián Carras hold court at the centre of his own team like a man who was born knowing exactly how to do this — and understanding, for the first time with real clarity, that the moment I walked into this room, I became something the press will have an opinion about by morning.
"You came," Renzo says, finding me near the drinks table with the satisfaction of a man whose prediction has been vindicated. "I had a model for this. Eighty-five percent probability by Thursday."
"You had a model for whether I'd come to dinner."
"I have a model for everything. It's a character flaw my therapist and I are working on." He hands me a glass of something pale and Austrian. "Sponsors arrive in twenty minutes. One brought his wife. She has opinions."
"That's an oddly specific warning."
"I'm an oddly specific person."
A sponsor's wife — Camille, married to the man who owns half the energy-drink contract, blonde and immaculate and entirely unbothered about announcing her opinions before being asked for them — corners me near the drinks table before dinner.
"You're the one from the documents," she says. It's becoming a kind of greeting.
"I am."
"I have to ask. Is it strange. Being chosen like that. Before he knew you, I mean."
"It was strange," I say, evenly. "It's considerably less strange now."
"I just find it fascinating," she says, in the tone of a woman who finds very little fascinating and most things merely worth commenting on. "The premise. Most women would find it rather presumptuous."
"Most women," I say, "haven't authorized emergency medical treatment for a stranger and then discovered the stranger had spent a year deciding she was worth knowing properly. The presumption, I find, is considerably easier to forgive in retrospect."
Camille blinks, recalibrates, and decides — visibly, in real time — that I'm more interesting than the conversation she'd planned to have. "Well," she says. "Aren't you sharp."
"I plan events for a living. Sharp is the entry-level requirement."
She drifts off, and I watch her find the sponsor coordinator near the windows, and watch the coordinator glance toward Seb, then toward me, and feel, with a sinking certainty, exactly where this is heading before anyone says it out loud.
Isabelle finds me not long after, settling beside me with a glass of wine for each of us.
"Camille corner you yet," she says.
"Extensively."
"She does that to everyone new." She watches Seb across the room.
"He's better tonight. Looser. He used to do these dinners like a man completing a checklist." She lowers her voice slightly.
"They'll want a photo of you both before dessert.
I'd think about what you want it to mean before they ask.
One photo, and tomorrow it's not speculation anymore. It's confirmation."
"I know."
"The world wants him loudly," I say, half to myself, watching him extract himself from a sponsor conversation. "He wants me quietly. That's worse, somehow."
Isabelle looks at me with something like genuine respect. "That's exactly it," she says.
It happens during the second course, the way Isabelle warned it would.
The sponsor coordinator — Heinrich, I learn, the man with the energy-drink contract — approaches with the easy confidence of someone who has never once had a request refused.
"Seb. Partners would love a photo. You, the new championship trophy replica, the team principals. Standard newsletter content."
"Of course," Seb says, standing.
"And—" Heinrich's eyes flick to me, then back, the question hovering. "Perhaps Ms. Callahan would join."
The table goes very slightly quiet.
Seb doesn't answer for him. He turns to me instead, fully, the cameras and Heinrich and the entire watching table reduced to background.
"You don't have to," he says, quietly, just for me. "This isn't logistics. If you say no, the photo happens without you, and nobody in this room gets to make that mean anything."
I think about Brandt, and the open review, and a junior associate whose name I'll probably never learn, and a building full of people who have already decided what my answer to this exact question should prove about me.
I think about the difference between hiding because I'm ashamed and choosing privacy because it's mine to choose — and I understand, sitting at this table, that walking into that photograph isn't shame's opposite. It's simply the truth, photographed.
"I'll join," I say. "But I'm not posing for the partners. I'm standing beside you. There's a difference, and I'd like the photographer to understand it."
"I'll tell him," Seb says. He catches the photographer's eye on the way up. "No staged positioning. She stands where she chooses. Nobody speaks for her."
The photographer nods, recalibrating his own instructions in real time.
The photograph takes four minutes. I stand beside him, not performing, not smiling on command, simply present, and when the flash goes off the last time I feel something settle in my chest that has nothing to do with cameras and everything to do with having made the choice myself, in full view of a room that would have understood either answer.
Dinner continues, loud and warm and chaotic, Renzo narrating wine pairings with mock-academic seriousness, Matteo intervening twice to redirect a sponsor's question, and somewhere around the third course a junior mechanic named Tomas gets brave enough to ask Seb whether it's true he once made Matteo cry during a debrief.
"That happened once," Matteo says, before Seb can answer. "It was justified."
"It was not justified," Seb says. "I apologized for a week."
"You apologized for three days and then claimed the data supported your original position."
The table dissolves into laughter, and I watch Seb laugh too — properly, unguarded — and understand, watching him be ordinary and ridiculous in front of people who've known him for over a decade, why every person in this room would follow him into a burning building if he asked nicely.
"He's good at this," I say to Renzo, quietly, during a lull.
"He's good at everything except admitting he wants something before he's already gotten it," Renzo says. "Tonight's the first time I've watched him ask instead."
Near the end of the evening, a small crowd has gathered outside the restaurant's front windows — fans who've tracked the dinner location, phones already up.
Seb notices before most of the table does, walks toward the window, raises a hand, and the surge of phones is its own kind of spectacle, the scale of what he is to people who've never met him laid bare in real time.
He comes back to the table, sits, and finds my hand under it without looking.
"You're allowed to be out there with them," I say. "I don't need you sitting back here for my benefit."
"I know I'm allowed to." He doesn't let go of my hand. "I'd rather be here."
"That's not strategic."
"No," he says. "It's just true."
The dinner winds down in stages — sponsors leaving first, then the junior team members, until it's just the inner circle left in the warm wreckage of a very good meal. Seb leans toward me, close enough that the rest of the table's noise becomes background.
"Come back with me," he says. "Not the team hotel. There's a place ten minutes from here. Quieter."
"Is that an arrangement or a question."
"It's a question," he says. "I've been practicing."
I look at him — Sebastián Carras, three-time champion, a man an entire restaurant's worth of strangers would trade considerable sums of money to spend ten unscripted minutes with, currently looking at me like the rest of the room has gone slightly out of focus, and I think about the photograph already moving through some sponsor's newsletter pipeline, already, by tomorrow, going to be the thing the article writers build their next headline around.
"Yes," I say.
"Good." He stands, offers his hand, and I take it in front of the whole remaining table without either of us pretending it's anything other than exactly what it looks like. "Then let's not finish the wine. I find I'm no longer interested in it."