I watch the ceiling crack.
I don't sleep.
The race, the next morning, is almost ordinary.
I get ready. I eat something small from the tray outside my door — how they knew I was awake at six I don't ask — pull on the team kit, walk down to the lobby. The car is waiting.
He's already in the garage when I arrive. This does not surprise me. He's in the suit, visor up, talking to the engineer in the low, technical Russian that I understand maybe thirty percent of and am writing down phonetically whenever I can catch the relevant words. He doesn't look up when I come in. This also does not surprise me.
I take my position with the performance engineers at the screens and watch and learn. I know more now than I knew in October — I know the lap delta, the tyre compound strategy, which corner is the one they're monitoring most closely this morning (turn seven, the engineers keep annotating it, their voices doing the specific neutral thing that meansconcern we're not naming yet). I watch and learn. I don't look at the cockpit again after the first time.
He drives brilliantly. That's the thing I can't not know, watching the screens — the specific quality of someone operating at maximum capability and making it look controlled. The times come up and the engineers' voices go quiet in that particular way and I understand from the quiet that what I'm watching is exceptional.
Turn seven: clean. Every lap.
When he comes in for the final stint I'm standing at the edge of the pit wall and he climbs out of the car and he scans the crowd the way he always does — not looking for anything specific, just taking inventory — and his eyes find me and hold for exactly the same three seconds they held last night in the garage.
Then the team is around him and I'm at the edge of it, the way I always am.
You undo me,he said.
He goes to debrief. I go to the hospitality suite.
We don't speak about the garage.
But the words are still with me when we fly back to New Hampshire, and they're still with me when we land, and they're still with me three days later when I find Mara in the library and try to tell her the shape of it.
Some words don't file.
Some words just stay.
15
ALEKSEI
Iheard her footsteps in the corridor twenty minutes before she appeared.
The garage is three levels below the main building, acoustics compressed by the concrete and steel of a structure that was built for function rather than comfort. Sound carries differently down here — flattened, close, stripped of the ambient noise that fills the floors above. I know the sound of every person who uses these stairs. The cleaning staff: deliberate, uniformly paced, no hesitation. The engineering team when we have them in: heavy-footed, tool bags shifting. My own footsteps: even, faster than most people expect given my height.
Sofia's footsteps are distinctive. A deliberate rhythm, slightly too controlled, like someone who learned to walk quietly at some point — home, maybe, or the kind of childhood that required vigilance — and never fully unlearned the awareness behind it. Even when she's not trying to be quiet, she's quiet. I've noticed this. I notice most things about her now without deciding to, which is itself a thing I've noticed and am not addressing.
I kept working.
The car was not the point.
The car is a 2019 chassis I've been running through a handling rebuild for two weeks — suspension geometry, brake balance, damper calibration. It doesn't need me at 1 AM on a Wednesday. The engineers have it scheduled for a proper service run next week. What it needs is nothing I can provide at 1 AM with my hands in the wheel assembly.
I was in Miami three days ago. Three days and a thousand miles and a twelve-hour drive back and I still haven't processed what happened in the garage there — not the car, not the race debrief, not the telemetry review I sat through for two hours while my lead engineer talked about turn seven data and I heard approximately half of it.
What happened in the Miami garage: Sofia. Standing in the pit lane corridor in the blue silk she wore to the party and the specific way she looked at me through the visor — the look that has been building since October, or maybe since before October, maybe since the moment she walked into the suite with her chin up and called me on being late in four seconds flat. The look of someone who has been watching something very carefully for a long time and has decided to let you see that she's been watching.
I said something in that corridor. I said it because the three weeks of constructed distance — the careful management, the deliberate coldness, the walls I've been maintaining — came apart momentarily in the face of that look and what came out of me was true.
You distract me. You exist. And I can't stop noticing.
I recovered. I walked away. The distance reasserted itself.
But I've been in the garage at 1 AM twice this week, which is not recovery. That's avoidance, and avoidance means the thing being avoided is still operative.
