The Formula One Billionaire's Replaced Wife

CHAPTER 1

AURORA

Fourteen years of marriage teaches you exactly how long a man can hold a microphone before his hand starts looking for yours.

William’s finds mine at minute eleven, right on schedule, in front of four hundred guests and a drone the size of a washing machine hovering over the harbor.

His fingers slide between mine without him looking, without him pausing, mid-sentence about aerodynamic philosophy and the future of Decker Velocity Racing.

I know his launch speech better than he does.

I wrote the first version of it eleven years ago, on a napkin, in a workshop that smelled of burned coffee and other people’s doubt.

“And none of it,” he says, “happens without the people who believed first.”

He squeezes my hand on believed. The cameras catch it. That’s fine. It’s also real, which is the part the cameras never get right.

Below the stage, Monaco does what Monaco does.

Yachts stacked in the harbor like a rich man’s Jenga.

Champagne moving in circuits. Somewhere down there is a prince, three sheikhs, and a man who once tried to buy our team with a briefcase of actual cash, which tells you everything about motorsport and most of what you need to know about that man.

William finishes to applause that has actual warmth in it.

He earned that. Two world championships as a driver, one near-bankruptcy as an owner, and a team that now wins often enough to be hated properly.

He steps back from the mic and kisses my temple, right there under the lights, and murmurs, “How was I?”

“You’ll do,” I say.

“Fourteen years and that’s still the review.”

“It’s gone up. You used to get a shrug.”

His laugh is the one I married, the unguarded one, and for a second the whole waterfront shrinks to the two of us and a napkin with coffee stains. Then Miles appears at his elbow with a phone and a crisis face, and the second ends.

“The driver reveal is in twenty,” Miles says. “And she’s not here.”

I glance at the stage, where a car-shaped object waits under a silk cover with a second, empty podium beside it. Saskia Yoder. Twenty-four years old, fastest rookie anyone’s measured, signed three months ago to the second seat alongside Luca. William talks about her the way men talk about comets.

“She’ll come,” William says.

“She was supposed to land at six.”

“She’ll come,” he repeats, and goes to be pulled apart by sponsors.

Miles hovers, doing the calculation out loud. I stop hovering near him before he starts doing it at me.

I do the rounds instead, because somebody at this team still remembers that launches are where next year’s money gets drunk enough to commit.

The watch people want a photo with the car before the cover comes off.

The tire sponsor’s wife wants to know if I’m still running the foundation, and I am, and I tell her about the engineering scholarships until her husband physically steers her away, which is the highest compliment a sponsor’s wife ever pays me.

This used to be my whole job. I raised the first eight million for Decker Velocity with a laptop and a landline, and half the people holding champagne on this waterfront signed their first contract across a table from me. These days I do it from the board, from a height, with nicer shoes.

From the dock comes a murmur that builds into a wave, and I know, before I turn, that the girl has arrived.

Forty minutes late is an eternity at a launch.

Forty minutes late at your own unveiling is a statement, and when Saskia Yoder finally makes hers, she makes it from the water, because nothing about this woman was going to involve a door like a normal person.

A tender slides up to the dock in full view of the entire party, engine throttled back at the last possible moment, and she steps off in red.

Not team red. Her red. A dress that gets photographed before it gets described.

Every head turns.

I watch her cross the dock with the unhurried balance of someone who has never needed to hurry, and I’ll give her this: the girl understands staging. The silk cover, the waiting car, the hush. She climbs the stage steps and the photographers start burning through memory cards.

William goes to greet her with a hand extended, professional, the boss welcoming the hire.

Saskia ignores the hand and hugs him.

Not a press hug. Not the two-second shoulder tap these events run on.

She goes in full, arms around his neck, and stays there long enough that I find myself counting.

Four. Five. Six. William’s hands do the polite hovering thing men do when a hug has outlived its paperwork, then settle briefly at her back before he eases her off with a laugh.

“You have no idea,” she says into his shoulder, loud enough for the front three rows, “how long I’ve wanted this.”

“That sounded ominous,” I say.

The people nearest us laugh, because I’m the wife and the wife is allowed to be funny.

Saskia turns and looks at me for the first time.

Up close she’s even younger, which is annoying, and even prettier, which is worse, and there’s a flat, bright assessment in her eyes that doesn’t match the giggle she produces.

“Mrs. Decker.” She takes my hand. Her grip is firm and held a beat past greeting. “I’ve read so much about you.”

“Nothing good, I hope.”

“Everything good.” She smiles. “You built all of this.”

It’s a nice line. It’s also, I note, a line that puts me firmly in the past tense, but the press conference is starting and there’s nowhere to put the observation, so I let it go.

I shouldn’t.

The press conference runs the usual gauntlet.

William at the center, Luca on one side being charming and unbothered, a man who has survived eight seasons and four teammates, and Saskia on the other side, lit up from inside.

The questions are softballs until a British journalist asks her what it means to drive for William Decker.

“When I was fourteen,” Saskia says, “I had his poster on my bedroom wall. The one from the championship season. My mom used to say I was going to wear a hole in it.”

Laughter. Cute. Humanizing. The room loves her.

“And now?” the journalist asks.

She turns her head and looks at William. Not at the reporter. At William, for three full seconds, while every camera in the harbor catches it.

“Dreams get upgraded,” she says.

The room half laughs, half gasps, and William grins, flattered, the way you grin at a compliment you haven’t examined. I examine it. I file it under things to mention later, in that casual way wives mention things that are not casual at all.

Then comes the photo call, and this is where I learn something about photographers.

They herd you. Politely, with many gestures, but they herd you. I start where I always start, at William’s left, the place I’ve stood at launches since the launches were in a rented tent with folding chairs. Saskia is on his right, Luca beyond her. Fine. Sensible. The drivers flank the boss.

“Could we get Saskia more central?” a photographer calls. “The new signing, yeah?”

She slides closer. Fine.

“Little tighter, tighter, William, arm around, lovely.”

Fine.

“Mrs. Decker, could you just,” and the gesture is small, apologetic, a step and a half to the side, “just for the drivers’ shot, the sponsors want the three of them.”

I step. It’s a drivers’ shot. That’s legitimate.

Except the drivers’ shot becomes the William-and-Saskia shot, and the William-and-Saskia shot becomes fifty frames of just the two of them, and somewhere in frame twenty Saskia puts her palm flat against William’s chest, fingertips spread, proprietorial as a branded label, and tilts her face up at him, and the shutters go wild.

William doesn’t move her hand. Why would he? It’s a photo. It’s nothing.

I stand at the edge of my own husband’s photo call with my champagne and my very good posture, and I tell myself it’s nothing, and I almost all the way believe it.

Later, in the car back to the hotel, I say, “She was flirting with you.”

William is loosening his tie with one hand, head back against the seat, exhausted and pleased with the evening. “Who?”

“Saskia.”

He laughs. It’s a genuine laugh, which stings more than a dismissive one would. “She’s twenty-four. She had my poster on her wall. She’s the kid who idolized me.”

“She isn’t fourteen now.”

“She beat Luca’s lap time in her second test,” he says, like that’s an answer to what I said, and maybe to him it is. “Aurora, she looks at me like fans look at me. It’s sweet. It’s harmless.”

“Her hand was on your chest.”

“It’s a photo call. Half the grid’s had their hands on me at photo calls. There are pictures of me and Luca that would start rumors in smaller sports.”

I let it go, because it’s the first night of the season and the man had a good launch and there’s a version of this conversation where I’m the paranoid wife who can’t share her husband with a lens. I’ve met that wife at these events. I promised myself I’d never be her.

So I file it. Again.

The after-party is on a yacht the size of a city block.

Decker Velocity’s sponsors don’t do rooms. I do my rounds, the handshakes and the remembered names, the foundations and the watch people and the energy drink man who insists on calling me the power behind the throne, which I hate for reasons I’ve stopped unpacking at parties.

I’m crossing the deck with a fresh glass when Saskia materializes out of the crowd going the other way, and her shoulder hits mine.

A full, deliberate body-check, delivered with the precision of someone who knows precisely where her mass is, and my champagne goes straight down the front of my dress. Cold, immediate, dripping into places champagne has no business being.

“Oh.” She puts a hand over her mouth. Her eyes do not apologize. Her eyes are doing something else entirely, something satisfied. “Sorry. Racing reflex.”

I look at my dress. I look at her. The deck is loud and nobody saw, which was also, I suspect, deliberate.

“Those reflexes seem strangely selective,” I say.

“You’ll get used to me.”

“Don’t count on it.”

She smiles. It’s a very good smile. It should be on a toothpaste ad or a wanted poster. Then she moves past me into the crowd, unhurried, and I stand there in three hundred dollars’ worth of ruined silk, wet from collarbone to hip, while a server hurries over with napkins and sympathy.

I blot what can’t be blotted. I decline a rescue cardigan. I put my shoulders back.

Across the deck, William is laughing with the watch sponsors, one hand in his pocket, head tipped back. He hasn’t seen any of it. He never saw any of it; a sponsor had him by the elbow the second it happened, which is either bad luck or good aim on her part, and I’m not ready to decide which.

And then I watch Saskia Yoder cut through that crowd in her red dress, not drifting, not mingling, moving in a straight line with a purpose you could navigate by, directly toward my husband.

She stops beside him. She touches his arm to get his attention, light as a gull landing. He turns, and smiles, and introduces her to the sponsors, and she shines for them.

I finish my ruined champagne anyway, standing at the rail with the harbor lights doing their expensive twinkle, and I don’t look away.

Let her shine.

I’ve got my eye on her now.