“It won’t work out, Dad. Let it go.”
“Why won’t it work out?” His voice got louder. “What kind of ride?”
“Let it go!”
Wes stood up surprisingly fast for a man who had limited use of his right leg. “What kind of fucking ride?”
“The Indy 500!”
Shock highlighted Wes’s face and he fell back into the chair. Mack felt her cheeks turn hot and she hastily cleared the table to avoid facing him. She didn’t know which would be more devastating to see on his face, pity or excitement. Wes had always been her biggest cheerleader, but he knew better than anyone why she couldn’t accept Janet’s proposal. “I have no business thinking I can handle an IndyCar. And we have races booked at the track every other weekend until October and Shaw has the end-of-year field trip and you’ve got that new physical therapy assessment—”
“Don’t you dare use me and Shaw as an excuse!”
Mack turned and held out both hands. “It’s not an excuse, Dad, it’s reality.” Even if they didn’t have the track, even if she hadn’t taken almost a decade away from full-time racing, there would always be Shaw. Her daughter deserved a childhood of calm stability. “I’m not Kelley. I can’t leave everything behind on a whim.”
They fell silent, both waiting each other out. Mack wanted her dad to agree with her, to tell her he understood she couldn’t take Janet’s offer. She wanted his complicity, not his blessing to chase an impossibly wild idea. Her life changed direction ten years ago and she saw no point reversing course now.
At least that’s what she tried to make herself believe.
“The daughter I raised would have left rubber streaks on the driveway on her way out of town. Wouldn’t have even said goodbye. Like that time you were already racing at Sebring by the time I knew you were gone. Always such a spectacle.”
Mack bit her lip. She’d thought about taking off in the night, getting on the road before she thought over the details. Instead, she’d crept into Shaw’s room and watched her daughter sleep to remind herself that she was steady now. Sturdy. Not someone who rushed off on a whim. “I’m still the daughter you raised, just less stupid.”
Please tell me not to do this, she begged him silently. His words threw gasoline on the spark that had started in her chest last night when Janet had thrown the wordsIndy 500at her. A long-buried wildness, the restlessness she could never quite kill off, kindled inside her.
Wes jabbed a careless hand toward the center of her chest. “Shaw has everything she needs right here. You love that girl. You’d give her a good life whether it’s here or in Indianapolis. Hell, you’d probably give her a better life there.”
Panicked, Mack tried to throw cold water on the fiery hope curling in her body. “You think it’s better for Shaw to leave the only home she’s ever known? During the last month of school? To live ... geezus, where would we live?”
Why was she even talking about this? It couldn’t happen.
Wes grinned wickedly. “Ain’t that somethin’? You got a sister who lives in Indianapolis now.” Mack shook her head. Following this lark and uprooting her daughter was one thing; asking for a favor from Laurie was another. “Anyway, Shaw can stay home with me and Billie. She’s an easy kid. We can manage her for a few weeks while school wrapsup. You’ve got to take this chance, Spec. Might be your only shot at the Indy 500.”
Mack frowned even as her heart rate picked up. Was her dad really considering this as a real opportunity? Did he believe she could make it all the way to the Indy 500?
No. It was impossible.
“Stop it,” she snapped at Wes. Her body was so overheated now that she felt her forehead for fever. Moisture dotted her hairline.
It had been too long. She couldn’t just dive back in, going from cleaning urinals to driving an IndyCar.
She couldn’t.
Could she?
Ten years ago, she’d been young, aggressive, and the daughter of legendary Wes Williams. People in the racing community had whispered that Mackenzie Williams hadIt: The rare combination of physical stamina and mental acuity that seemingly reacted to the car before it even moved. By the time she was twenty, she’d won some of the biggest sprint races in the country and topped podiums at sports car endurance races, but she pursued one dream with single-minded focus: a chance to race at Indianapolis. And by January of her twentieth year, she almost got what she wanted when Ampersand Autosport invited her to test drive for their IndyCar team.
As bold as she’d been on track, she’d been even wilder in her free time. As a teenager, she regularly spent late nights playing euchre and drinking Jack and Cokes with men three times her age. She laughed as she rode on the back of motorcycles with no helmet, swam with friends in abandoned strip mines, and drag raced down city streets. At nineteen, she’d started hooking up with motorcycle bad boy Kelley Caruthers. They didn’t even try to keep it quiet, and when Mack canceled her IndyCar test because she was sixteen weeks pregnant, no one was surprised except herself. She’d been hot-blooded, living for the moment, and stupid enough to trust a man ten years her senior to wear a condom properly.
That choice irrevocably changed her life. She’d spent years working to retrain herself: She was no longer impulsive, taking hours or days to make decisions on the smallest things. She didn’t drink, didn’t date. Her life was about Shaw and preventing her from making the kinds of decisions Mack had made herself.
She walked to the sink and washed her hands in cold water, an old trick her dad had taught her when she needed to calm her heart rate. It pissed her off that he knew exactly what she was doing. He always knew because he’d always been by her side. She dried her hands and turned to face him. “That door closed a long time ago, Dad.”
Wes squinted at her. “Because you closed it, Spec.”
She used to love the nickname he’d given her, but right now shehatedit. Her hands were already hot again, her armpits damp with the anxiety of the conversation. She gave into the anger, let herself be pissed off. It felt so much better than the swirling terror of possibility her dad’s words had caused.
Shaw was only five weeks old when Wes had the accident that left him with headaches, seizures, memory loss, and a pinned and patched body. Mack spent the first years of Shaw’s life in a day-to-day subsistence of single parenting, caring for her father, and learning how to run a small business. By the time Shaw was three, Wes’s health had mostly stabilized, but those first years had been so stressful that when Kelley offered to bring toddler Shaw to Spain for two weeks, Mack jumped at the chance to have a break. She would never make that mistake again.
