“Don’t apologize for doing your job,” I said, though resentment flickered anyway — not at him, at the season that never loosened its grip.
“It doesn’t feel like just a job anymore.” He set the phone down, frustration sharpening his voice. “After Hungary, everyone expected — I expected — that we’d found something. That the win wasn’t a fluke. And now we’re back to fighting for top five.”
“One race doesn’t change the car,” I said quietly. “Hungary suited you. Spa doesn’t. That’s not failure. It’s physics.”
“Physics feels personal when you’re the one losing to it.”
His phone buzzed again. He answered without hesitation.
“Shep? Yeah. Send me the overlays. I want to see where we’re killing the tires. Give me an hour.”
When he hung up, apology was written all over him. “I’m terrible company.”
“You’re racing tomorrow,” I said. “That outranks dinner.”
He reached across the table and took my hand anyway, grip tight. “After the race. However it goes, we’ll have the evening. Just us. I promise.”
I swallowed the protest that rose automatically. Promises were cheap in a paddock that never stopped moving. Watching the tension in his jaw, the way his eyes kept drifting back to the phone, I knew he was already gone. Fighting for attention he didn’t have to give would only bruise us both.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
We finished quickly. In the parking lot he kissed me goodnight — careful, public, a gesture that could pass for friendly if anyone chose to believe it. A pair of diners paused by their car, watching just long enough to register the moment.
I felt the gaze settle on my shoulders like weight.
I sat in my rental car for a few minutes before starting the engine, cataloging the evening for my disclosure report. Every word, every touch, reduced to bullet points and timestamps.
Transparency was supposed to make this easier.
Instead, it felt like turning our lives into evidence.
Race Day
The Belgian Grand Prix was torture. Not loud or dramatic, but the kind that grinds slowly into your ribs and sits there.
From the moment the lights went out, Jonathan was extraordinary. He was fifth on the grid, gaining a position at the start, matching Verstappen and Leclerc corner for corner through Sector 2, stealing back tenths wherever the car would let him. And every lap, on Spa’s endless straights, the Kemmel, the run from Blanchimont to the Bus Stop chicane, those tenths vanished like they’d never existed.
From the media center, I watched him circle that track for forty-four laps, always in reach of the leaders, never in reach of passing them. Each time he tucked into a slipstream, positioning the car perfectly for the overtake, I stopped breathing. Every time the cars ahead simply pulled away under pure horsepower, I felt my stomach drop.
Mason leaned over from the next workstation. “Hirsch is driving his heart out.”
“He is,” I said neutrally, not looking away from my screen.
“Shame the car can’t match him.”
“That’s racing.”
Mason gave me a sideways look but said nothing more.
By lap thirty, the race stopped feeling competitive and started feeling inevitable. Jonathan was driving the cleanest race I’d ever seen from him — smooth, ruthless, exact — and the car still wasn’t capable of more than fourth.
And somehow that was worse than failure.
Failure you can fix.
Perfection not being enough? That’s fatal.
A late pit stop strategy call dropped him to fifth when a Safety Car bunched the field. He fought back to fourth in the final laps, but the podium was gone.
