Dominic #2
I cut the engine and stepped out, the cool night air hitting my face, but it didn't do anything to kill the static crawling under my skin. I moved toward the hedge line and stopped.
No glance was necessary to know what waited behind the glass. I looked anyway.
There it was. Right on cue.
Light spilled from the tall windows of the main dining room, warm and theatrical against the dark.
Inside, framed like a scene on a stage, my father was performing his favorite role.
He was laughing—that booming, practiced laugh he used to charm sponsors and bury scandals.
Across from him sat a woman who looked barely older than the girl currently living in my pool house.
New face, same shimmer-dress. Same performative lean.
His hand brushed her arm with a gesture so smooth it made my stomach turn.
Candles. A silver bucket. An expensive vintage sweating in the ice.
It was a script he’d perfected while the rest of us were still trying to figure out how to breathe in the silence of this house. I watched him smile, that wide, carefree expression of someone who had successfully scrubbed the memory of my mother out of the floorboards, one "date" at a time.
I stood there for five minutes, maybe twenty, watching the reruns. It was the same ending every time: he got to be the hero of his own story, and we were just the background noise he’d learned to tune out.
The anger was a thick, suffocating weight in my gut. Anger at him for the ease of it. Anger at Landon for showing up today with that look of someone who still believed in a comeback. Anger at Luka for thinking a lecture could fix a foundation that was already on its way to being crumbled.
I was a liability. I was a tantrum in an expensive machine. I was the only thing in this estate that he couldn't curate into a dinner party. I was everything they all told me I was.
"Wow."
The voice was soft, cutting through the dark to my left. I didn't startle; I was too far gone for a jump-scare. I didn't even look over as a slow breath fogged in the air before me.
"You weren’t kidding about your dad liking them young," Carter said.
I exhaled, the sound catching on the edges of my throat. “I know,” I said eventually.
I tilted my head, just enough to catch the blur of her in the periphery.
She was wearing a cotton shirt with a faded SHIFT logo on the chest and a smudge of something dark and grease-thickened near the seam across the top.
Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that looked like it had lost a quiet fight with the wind, strands slipping loose to frame a face that looked even more exhausted than mine.
She looked like she’d spent hours dodging orders and cleaning up after people who didn't see her.
And yet, my eyes lingered on the column of her throat, tracing the steady, stubborn pulse beneath the skin.
There was a raw, frantic energy to her—a sharp contrast to the curated, static dolls my father kept at the table.
Even with the smell of a kitchen line clinging to her skin, she looked more alive than anyone I’d spoken to in years.
It was a realization that felt like a localized engine failure.
"You smell like cheese and cholesterol," I said, the bite of my voice returning to its sheath to cover the sudden, unwelcome pulse in my chest. "It’s aggressive."
She didn't flinch. She just held up the greasy paper bag, the bottom already translucent with oil, and gave me a look that was as flat as a stale soda.
"It’s a burger, Valerio. Not a perfume sample," she said, her voice gravelly from a long shift. "And they’re for my dad, so unless you're planning on eating one, back off."
My gaze flicked past her, cutting through the dark toward the pool house.
Inside, Landon was hunched over the kitchen island.
He wasn't nursing a drink anymore. Instead, a pen was moving frantically against a stack of race diagrams, his brow furrowed in that same hyper-focused stare I’d seen at the track today.
He looked like he was trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing, his shoulders carrying a weight that my father’s designer suit wouldn't even recognize.
I watched him longer than I intended. There was something about the sight of a guy fighting for his dignity in a glorified shed that felt more offensive than the wine and candlelight inside the mansion.
"Does he actually think he’s going to find a second's worth of pace in a stack of paper?" I muttered, my voice tight with a cynicism I didn't quite feel. "He should just take the payout and stop pretending."
She stiffened, her shoulders squaring as she turned to follow my line of sight. The softness I’d noticed a second ago vanished, replaced by a fierce, protective edge.
"He knows what he’s talking about," she said, her voice low and dangerous. "He’s trying. He doesn't know how to stop, even when it kills him a little."
I didn't reply. I couldn't. I wanted to tell her that her father’s trying was exactly what made my chest ache.
My father had stopped trying the moment he realized he could just buy a new version of his life whenever the old one got too heavy.
He had the luxury of a clean slate; Landon Hayes was still in the garage, midnight after midnight, trying to scrub the bloodstains off a career that was already dead.
The sight of it made the laughter coming from the main house sound like glass breaking.
"He isn't just pretending," she said, her voice dropping an octave, the exhaustion from her job finally bleeding through the anger. She stepped closer—just enough that the scent of the fryer oil on her shirt was eclipsed by something else, something softer, like rain on hot asphalt.
"You think he’s the only one who survived that crash untouched?
Look at him." She gestured toward the glow of the pool house window. "He’s a person who lost his entire world in one corner, and he’s still showing up for the post-race.
He’s human, even if you’ve decided he’s nothing.
So can you stop being so stubborn for five minutes and maybe give him a shot? "