“Bash quit because your mom died and he didn’t want to have something happen on the track that orphaned you and Lucia,” Billy says and frowns. “When he told me that, you could see it still pained him. It remains to this day one of the most amazing sacrifices for love I’ve ever known personally. And it’s not one I’m making.”
“I’m not your kid, Billy. I’m an adult who will accept the risks,” I argue. “But you aren’t brave enough to make them, are you?”
“It’s not about being brave.”
“Yeah it is. Or else it’s that you don’t love me enough.”
He blinks. He opens his mouth. But he says absolutely nothing.
Someone taps his shoulder. “Billy James?”
“Yeah mate.Oui.” He nods and tried to turn back to me but of course they ask for a photo. With a clenched jaw he nods and gives them what they want and I turn and leave.
Billy catches up to me around the corner from Sacre Coeur, halfway down a winding cobblestone street. “Did someone drug you?”
Oh my God. How does he know about that. “I don’t talk about that.”
His eyes widen. “Frankie… why? My God, if it was someone on the team…”
“What Billy? What can be done about it?” I ask, angrily and hurt. “I have no idea who did it, or even what they used. Telling my dad would have just made things worse. I wasn’t assaulted, I had them check at the hospital. I was just drugged. I think. It’s my word against a hundred party guests. And my dad, he was struggling so hard to be a good single parent and he would have taken it like a personal failure. And he would have ripped apart his own race team until he found out who did it. And I don’t even know if it was someone involved in racing.”
He shakes his head, like he doesn’t approve, and rage spikes inside me. “You don’t get to judge me for keeping secrets. You have your own, remember?” I feel one tear slide down my cheek. “And besides, you’re not brave enough to let yourself love me so don’t judge me for being a coward about this.”
I keep walking. Billy doesn’t follow.
* * *
The restof the two weeks between the race in Mexico and the race in Japan feel like the longest of my life. It makes no sense because I’m so damn busy. I barely have time to brush my teeth or get six solid hours at night, but somehow, I’m sad. Lonely. I stare out the living room window of Jennie’s Paris apartment from the sofa where I’m curled up with a cup of mint tea. The day outside is as dreary as my mood. Gray skies and wet pavement from a rain shower that just finished. Not a great day for the photoshoot we did earlier, with the prototypes of my shoe line, but it matches my mood perfectly.
“You really need your own place here already,” Jennie surmises as she walks back in from the kitchen. “I worked hard with my designer on re-doing this entire place last spring, and your depression is clashing with the design esthetic.”
“I should laugh at that. It’s funny.”
“But you can’t because you’re heartbroken,” Jennie replies and plops down on the navy-hued leather wingchair in the corner.
“No. I’m over-worked and exhausted,” I argue, but it only makes her laugh.
She points to her own face. “Oh sorry, that was pure sarcasm escaping. I’m sorry.”
I ignore her and check my messages on my phone. I need to be at the airport by nine tonight to catch the private jet Dad and Dario rented for the trip to Japan. I’m dreading it so much I spent half of last night trying to find a commercial alternative so I wouldn’t have to spend eleven hours hurtling through the sky in a small confined space with Billy James. But there was nothing that worked time-wise.
I swear I would have sat in a center row, middle seat in economy on any commercial airline if I could avoid this. “Lucia is doing well,” I murmur as I read my sister’s latest message. “She’s going stir-crazy and she’s excited Dad is going to Japan for the race because he’s been suffocating her with love.”
“And the thing with Nick,” Jennie asks.
I shrug with heavy shoulders. “I think she ended it, which is why he took vacation. Mick, Lucia’s bodyguard, is meeting me in Tokyo.”
“Fucking men,” Jennie sighs.
“I think that I have to give up one of my jobs,” I confess, changing the subject to something even shittier than my dumpster fire of a love life. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, but I’ve been thinking it for a while now. It started as a little nagging thought and became a full-fledge worry. I am running on empty.
“If you keep working for Mirabella, you definitely need to start scaling back the influencer stuff,” Jennie says after a long pause where my words seem to sit between us on the herringbone patterned floor. “And you also won’t need a manager anymore.”
“I didn’t say I was keeping the Mirabella job,” I counter.
Jennie smiles softly and smooths back her hair, which has grown longer since the last time I saw her, and she’s added some lighter highlights. “Honey, we both know no matter how hard it seems, the job you were born for is Mirabella.”
“I can’t work with him every day for the rest of my life,” I say, and I’m fighting tears. “Because I won’t be able to move on.”
