CHAPTER 3
AURORA
The opening Grand Prix of the season has a smell, and the smell is money and sunscreen and hot brakes, and I love it anyway.
The morning is all ceremony. Grid walk, anthem, the royal box, a billionaire from the boat next to ours asking me whether I still “help out” at the team, which is a sentence I’ve learned to answer with my teeth unclenched.
I do the sponsor circuit in the paddock and let several different executives tell me how exciting the new lineup is, and I agree, because it is exciting, because I built a third of the thing they’re excited about.
I stand on the pit wall for the last ten laps with a headset and a lanyard that says BOARD, which opens every door except the ones that matter, apparently, but we’ll get there.
Saskia is running second. Second, in her debut, holding off a two-time race winner with tires that gave up the will to live six laps ago.
Luca is fourth and managing his own race.
William is beside me saying “gap, gap, tell me the gap” into the radio in the flat voice he uses when his heart is doing something his voice won’t admit to.
She brings it home. The garage erupts. Down below, mechanics are climbing the fence, and I’m clapping too, because it’s a podium, because points are points, because this team nearly died eleven years ago and I don’t take podiums for granted even now.
Then Saskia gets out of the car.
She pulls her gloves off with her teeth, which is a move I will be seeing in slow motion on social media within the hour, and she scans the pit lane until she finds William. And then she runs at him. Full speed, and launches.
He catches her. He has to catch her. You don’t let a human being hit the concrete in front of that many cameras.
But her legs go around his hips for a second, her arms around his neck, her face tipped up to his, and the cameras eat it whole.
He sets her down fast, hands already moving to her shoulders to steady her, already creating distance, doing everything right a half-second too late.
By dinner it’s the photo. Not the podium.
Not Luca’s comeback drive through the field.
The photo: William Decker catching his new star, her legs around him, both of them mid-laugh.
POWER PAIR, says one headline. F1’S NEW DYNASTY, says another.
Dynasty. Fourteen years of marriage and the word they reach for is dynasty, about a woman who’s been employed by us since March.
I watch the podium from the back of the crowd instead of the pit wall.
It’s a habit from the lean years, when I couldn’t stand the cameras, and it’s stayed with me even though the cameras are mostly on my side now.
You see more from the back. You see the choreography: the champagne, the anthem, the way the photographers call Saskia’s name twice as often as the winner’s. Second place, first in everything else.
At the hotel bar afterward, a Meridian executive corners me with compliments about my necklace and questions about whether William and Saskia might do a joint appearance in Geneva, “the chemistry is extraordinary,” and I smile and say I’ll mention it to my husband, and the word chemistry sits in my mouth for the rest of the hour.
“Don’t read it,” William says, catching me with my phone at the hotel bar.
“I’m not reading it. I’m studying the enemy’s supply lines.”
“Aurora.”
“What? It’s a nice photo. Great catch. Hands high, very chaste.” I put the phone away. “How are the sponsors?”
“Thrilled.” He kisses my forehead. “Come to dinner. They’re all asking about you.”
I go to dinner. That’s where the evening gets interesting.
The team dinner is in the hotel’s private dining room, investors down one side, team brass down the other.
Place cards, because Miles’s people run these things with military precision.
I’ve sat beside my husband at every team dinner since the team dinners were eight people and a bill we sweated over.
My card is not beside my husband.
My card is six seats down, between a tire engineer and an investor’s wife, and the card beside William’s reads SASKIA YODER.
I stand there for a second, reading it to be sure, and then I pick up my card, walk to the head of the table, and switch them back. Quietly. Smoothly. The investor’s wife watches me do it and develops a sudden fascination with her napkin.
I’m seated, composed, ready to enjoy my fish, when Saskia arrives.
She reads the new arrangement without a flicker, and then, instead of taking her card’s actual seat, she simply sits down beside William’s place anyway and says to the hovering event coordinator, “I’ll sit here. It’s fine.”
“It’s not your seat,” I say, pleasantly, from directly opposite.
“It was my seat. Someone moved the cards.”
“I moved the cards. I sit beside my husband. House rule. Older than you.”
The coordinator is now holding a water pitcher and radiating the will to be elsewhere. Saskia doesn’t move. She smiles at the coordinator, not at me, and says, “Could we just get another chair? It’s fine. Honestly.”
And here comes William, mid-laugh with two Japanese investors, handshakes and bows, sliding into the evening already half-belonging to other people. He takes in the scene. Me, seated opposite his place. Saskia, seated beside it. The coordinator with the pitcher. The silence.
He could say one sentence. Saskia, your seat’s down there. A few words, and it’s nothing, and nobody remembers it by dessert.
“Can we get another chair?” he says.
They bring another chair. They wedge it in at the corner, and the table shifts, and Saskia Yoder stays beside my husband at the team dinner, and I sit directly across from them with a perfect view, which is perhaps what I deserve for thinking a place card was a weapon.
Dinner is an education.
Saskia talks. Tire deg, front wing levels, the re-style of turn nine, and she’s good, she’s sharp and funny and the investors love her.
She talks to the table but she leans toward William, and every technical point she makes is handed to him first for approval, a rhythm so smooth you’d think they rehearsed it.
Twice I start a sentence. The first time she talks over me to ask William about the Barcelona aero package.
The second time she does it before I’ve finished a clause.
“Saskia,” I say, not loudly. “I was speaking.”
The table goes quiet, glasses halfway up, everyone suddenly aware of their own hands. Saskia blinks at me, all innocence and youth.
“Sorry,” she says. “Go ahead.”
I finish my sentence. I don’t even remember what it was about. Neither does anyone else. The moment changes the air pressure at the table for the rest of the night. The investor’s wife finds me fascinating now.
She finds me more fascinating over dessert, when she leans in to tell me her husband’s fund is increasing its position and “it’s so wonderful the team has you keeping an eye on things.
” She’s being kind. She means it as a compliment, the senior stateswoman, the emeritus wife.
What I hear is that my current role, as understood by the market, is keeping an eye on things when I used to sign things.
Luca, three seats down, gives me a microscopic nod over his wine glass, and I decide I like that man more every season.
He doesn’t say anything about the seating.
He doesn’t have to; the nod says the table saw it, the table knows, and the table has chalked it up to Saskia being Saskia, and a season’s worth of small thefts is quietly being catalogued by everyone except the one man who could stop it.
William walks me up afterward, arm around my waist in the elevator, tired and happy, a podium in the books. In the mirrored elevator wall I watch us. We still look right together. That’s the cruelest trick time plays—the packaging holds long after something in the contents has started to turn.
He’s telling me about the Japanese investors, about their expansion timeline, and his thumb is moving in a slow circle on my hip, and I almost don’t say anything. That’s how it happens, incidentally. Not with a decision. With a thumb on your hip and a tired man and an almost.
I wait until the hotel room door closes.
“You should have moved her,” I say.
He’s pulling off his cufflinks. “Moved who?”
“Saskia. Out of my seat. Instead of ordering furniture.”
“A chair appeared, everybody sat down, the investors had a great night.” He drops the cufflinks in the dish. “It was a chair, Aurora.”
“Exactly,” I say. “If you can’t choose me when the stakes are a chair, what happens when the stakes actually matter?”
He looks at me then, and there’s the exhaustion of race day in his face, and under it a genuine bewilderment that I find much more frightening than anger. He doesn’t see it. He truly, structurally doesn’t see it. To him, a chair appeared and everyone sat down.
“You’re reading a seating plan like it’s a prenup,” he says. “She’s young, she’s clueless about protocol, she had the biggest day of her life. I’m not going to publicly humiliate my driver over a place card.”
“She knew exactly where her card was. She read it, and she sat in my seat anyway, in front of all those people, and you sponsored it with a chair.”
“And earlier, when she jumped on you. Her legs around you, in front of the world?”
“A podium celebration. She’s twenty-four, she just finished second in her debut, she’d have jumped on Luca if he’d been closer. She jumped on half the mechanics. Did you notice that part?”
I didn’t notice that part, because I was watching him, which I don’t say, because it sounds like the thing I promised myself I’d never become.
“And you’re my wife,” he says, “which is why you’re the one I’m in bed with at the end of it, and she’s a twenty-four-year-old with shin splints and a laptop. Where’s the contest?”
That’s the thing, though. He’s in bed with me and he’s asking where the contest is, and I can see him file the whole evening under handled. Podium: banked. Sponsors: thrilled. Wife: annoyed but present, and present has always been the same as fine.
He brushes my hair back from my forehead and goes to the bathroom, and the fight is over the way our fights always end at races, with logistics and toothpaste and the unspoken agreement that the calendar gets the last word.
I get ready for bed. I don’t start another round. There’s a point early in these things where you can still hear yourself becoming the wife who complains, and you start rationing, saving the ammunition for later, because some dumb animal part of you still believes later is when it’ll count.
I should spend it all now. Every night. I should make him hear it while it’s still a chair.
In the dark, with the city humming below and William asleep inside five minutes, lucky him, I lie awake and do the calculation I don’t want to do.
The hug in Monaco. The hand on the chest. The desk.
The seat. Four small things, each with a reasonable explanation, and my husband is a reasonable man, and reasonableness is what’s going to kill us.
I turn over and put my back against his, because it’s warm, because it’s mine, because a whole marriage doesn’t stop being a habit on the first bad night.
But I don’t sleep for a long time. Somewhere past two I give up and stand at the window with the minibar’s smallest bottle of champagne, unopened, just to hold something cold, and the street below is team trucks and barriers being packed up to be someone else’s problem in Barcelona.