Chapter 24
chapter twenty-four
mia
Iread it again on the drive back down the mountain, the document open on my phone, the headlights of the car carving twin tunnels through the dark, and the second reading doesn't soften anything. It sharpens it.
Vega Principal Account: S. Carras.
My body understands it before my mind finishes processing the words — a cold drop through my chest, my hands going numb around the phone.
"Talk to me," Seb says, beside me in the back seat, his voice careful.
"I'm reading."
"You've read it four times."
"I'm still reading it."
I'm not, not really. I'm sitting with the cold spreading through my chest, the specific dread of discovering that February — ordinary February, a month I remember as unremarkable, full of client meetings and a head cold — already had my name quietly inserted into a system that, I notice on the fifth read, doesn't just flag me for hospitality access.
There's a second field beneath the first I missed the first four times: Preferred Account Contact — Vega Partnership Events.
Not a guest list. A professional designation.
Someone had marked me as the contact Hartfield's events division should route Vega-related work through, months before I'd ever heard the name Carras spoken aloud.
"I need you to explain it," I say. "Now. All of it."
He's quiet for a moment, and I watch him decide, visibly, how to say the next thing.
"I didn't submit this," he says. "I don't know who did.
My best guess is that someone used my principal account to prioritize a Hartfield contact for Vega-related work.
But I will not ask you to trust a guess because it happens to protect me.
" He pauses. "What I won't do is pretend I didn't know your name.
I'd already had your name on thirty-seven documents for months by February.
I don't know whether that fact makes this better or considerably worse, but I'm not going to let myself say anything tonight that isn't exactly true. "
"That's the part I can't get past," I say. "Not whether you personally submitted a form. Whether the world I was already moving through had quietly adjusted itself around a name you'd already decided mattered, before I had any say in any of it."
We arrive back at the hotel in silence. I go to my room. He doesn't follow, which I notice and don't know whether to be grateful for or wounded by.
I sit on the edge of the bed and read the document a sixth time, looking for something — anything — that would change its shape, and find nothing.
Just the cold, formal language of corporate machinery, my professional designation buried inside it, his account attached to the request, February sitting there like a date I can't unknow now.
My phone rings. Priya.
"I just saw it circulating," she says, no preamble. "Someone in Hartfield's sponsor liaison team forwarded it to three people before lunch. Everyone important at Hartfield will have seen it by morning."
I tell her everything — the document, the second field, Seb's explanation, the cold certainty sitting in my chest that something fundamental has shifted.
"Do you believe him," Priya asks.
"I don't know. That's the actual problem. I don't know whether I believe him because it's true, or because believing him is so much easier than the alternative."
"That's not nothing, Mia. That's an honest answer."
There's a knock at the door twenty minutes later. I know it's him before I open it.
He's changed out of the race suit, into ordinary clothes, and he looks exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the race.
"I'm not here to convince you of anything else tonight," he says. "I came to make you an offer, and then I'll go, if that's what you want."
"What offer."
"Every record I have access to — the original thirty-seven documents, the sponsorship liaison logs, anything Pascal or Matteo can pull from Vega's side — I'll give you all of it.
Unedited. I won't read it first, I won't shape it, I won't have a lawyer summarize it for you.
You can hand it to someone you trust who has nothing to do with me, and they can verify whatever they find.
I won't contact Hartfield, or Vega's hospitality office, or anyone else about this unless you ask me to.
I'd rather you have the truth from a source that isn't me than my best explanation. "
I look at him. I believe that, at least — the offer of evidence over persuasion, the refusal to let himself be the one who decides what counts as proof.
"I want to believe you," I say. "I keep reaching for the explanation that lets you remain the man I know."
"But."
"But I don't know which parts of my life are mine when you are near them," I say, and the sentence arrives whole, fully formed, the truest thing I've said all night.
"The thirty-seven documents. The proxy. This referral, whether you submitted it or not.
Every piece of how we began has your name attached to a decision about my life that I didn't make and, in most cases, didn't even know about until afterward.
I don't know how to separate the man who's learning to ask from the architecture he built before he learned that lesson. "
"Mia—"
"I'm not finished." My voice is steady, which surprises me.
"I want to stay. I want you to know that, clearly, before I say the next part.
Every instinct I have wants to stay in this room with you and let you keep explaining until the feeling goes away.
But I think that's exactly the problem. I think I've spent too long letting you explain things to me instead of finding out, independently, whether they're true.
And I don't know how to do that while I'm standing this close to you. "
He doesn't argue. I watch him absorb it, watch something in his face go very still, the discipline of a man choosing not to fight for something in the exact moment fighting would cost the other person the most.
"What do you need," he says, quietly.
"Distance. A few days. I need to find out who actually put my name on that document, through someone who isn't you, and I can't trust my own judgment to do that while you're standing this close to me."
"Okay."
"That's it. Just okay."
"I don't agree that distance is what I want," he says.
"I want to be honest about that too. But you just told me what you need, and the entire point of everything I've been trying to learn is that your need outweighs my preference.
I'm not going to pretend I'm indifferent to losing these next few days.
I'm just not going to let that feeling override your answer. "
"That's the right answer," I say, "and I still wish you'd fight me on it slightly."
"I know," he says. "I wish that too. I'm choosing not to anyway."
He leaves after a silence neither of us fills, after a silence neither of us fills, after one final look at the doorway that says everything neither of us has the words left to say out loud.
I sit alone in the hotel room with the document still open on my phone, February sitting there in cold corporate font, my own name turned into a professional designation I never agreed to, and understand, with a clarity that feels less like relief and more like fear, that the real question was never whether Seb submitted one form.
It's whether anything I've chosen since Monaco was actually mine to choose — or whether his world had already been quietly building the road I'd eventually walk down, long before I knew there was a road at all.