Mag-log in~Katia~Sam walked into my room at ten PM without knocking. She never knocked when something was urgent. She put her phone in my face and let me read the headline myself.Windsor Wife Claims Catwoman Identity — Exclusive.There was a photograph of Delia in a borrowed racing suit, smiling at every camera like she had spent her life earning the right to stand in front of one. The article was three paragraphs long and quoted her directly. Some people call me Catwoman. Between us.I read the whole thing. Then I handed Sam her phone back."Okay," I said.Sam stared at me. "That's it? That's all you have to say?""What would you like me to say, Sam?""She just told the entire racing world she's you, Kat. She is sitting in Dubai in a suit she borrowed from the WEG hospitality wardrobe, claiming to be Catwoman.""She told them she's Catwoman," I said. "In three hours Catwoman is going to get in a car and race. The world will work out the rest on its own."Sam looked at me for a long moment. T
~Delia~I booked the flight to Dubai myself.Julian didn't know. Nobody knew. I used my personal card, packed a bag while the housekeeper was out, and was in the air before anyone thought to check where I was. Let them wonder. Let them scramble. I had spent eight months being the woman who waited in the east wing and said nothing and wore the right dress and smiled for cameras that never looked at her anyway.I was done with that version of myself.Dubai hit me like a wall when I stepped off the plane. The heat, the light, the specific arrogance of a city that had decided to be extraordinary and charged you for the privilege of standing in it. I didn't care. I checked into the Atlantis, not the Burj Al Arab where Julian was. I wasn't stupid, and I sat on the bed in my room, and I thought about what I was going to do.The pre-race press gathering was that evening. I had found it in Julian's Dubai itinerary — the one I had photographed on my phone three weeks ago when he left his laptop
~Delia~I saw the first Dubai post at seven in the morning.I was in bed, half asleep, doing what I always did when I couldn't sleep, which was scroll through my phone pretending I wasn't looking for something specific. I was absolutely looking for something specific.His Instagram had been silent since France. Two posts. Hands at a restaurant. Hands at a jazz bar. Both of them had broken the internet for forty-eight hours and then settled into the permanent record of Julian Windsor doing something nobody could explain.The desert post stopped me cold.Two shadows on a dune. Heads together. The Dubai location tag. No caption just like France.I sat up in bed.What the fuck!I zoomed in. Two people; that much was obvious. One taller, which of course was my fucking husband Julian; it had to be Julian, the height and the shoulders. The other, smaller, slender, their shadow leaning into his like it belonged there. Like it had always been there. Like this was not a business trip at all.I
~Julian~Breakfast was at six. Just us, a corner table, the hotel restaurant empty at that hour. We talked about nothing important, Aiden's go-kart league, the Amsterdam office timeline, and whether the Burj Al Arab's coffee was as good as it thought it was. It was the most ordinary hour we had spent together, and it felt, inexplicably, like the most significant.At seven thirty I told her where we were going.She looked at me across the table. "The Autodrome.""The Dubai Autodrome," I said. "WEG has a hospitality partnership with the facility. Private track time this morning. No public."She was very still for a moment. "A racing experience.""Formula Two cars. Instructor-led. The track is one of the best in the Middle East." I watched her face. "You said at the showcase that you follow motorsport. I thought you'd appreciate it."Something moved in her expression – a flicker of something she managed quickly. "I follow it as a spectator.""Then you'll enjoy seeing it from a different
~Katia~The message came at eight PM. Desert. Hassan is outside.No question mark. No explanation. I looked at it for ten seconds, then put my phone in my bag and told Sam I was going out."Where?" she said. "Desert," I answered.She looked at me over her laptop. "Again." "Yes." "Katia." "Sam."She looked back at her laptop. "Be back by midnight. The race briefing is at seven AM."I was already at the door.Hassan drove us out past the city limits in comfortable silence. The sky changed the moment the city lights fell away — the difference between a sky with stars and a sky full of them was not gradual. It was immediate. Like someone had turned something on.Julian was looking up before the car had fully stopped.We sat on a blanket Hassan had laid out on the flat desert floor, far enough from the road that the silence was complete. No traffic. No wind. Just the desert and the sky and the specific cold that crept into desert nights after the heat released."Do you know them?" I as
~Julian~The car collected her at four thirty.She was already in the lobby when I arrived. Light jacket, hair down, and that look of a woman who was awake and functional but had reserved judgement on whether the hour warranted it."Four thirty," she said."Sunrise doesn't negotiate," I said.She looked at me for a moment. Then she walked to the car.The balloon launch site was forty minutes outside the city, a flat stretch of desert that the company used specifically because it had no light pollution and no obstacles. The crew was already there when we arrived, the envelope half-inflated, the burners throwing heat into the dark in controlled bursts that lit the immediate area gold and left everything else black.Katia watched the inflation process with the focused attention she gave to things – how it worked, the physics of it, and the logic of hot air and fabric and lift. She asked the pilot one question about wind patterns at altitude. He answered properly, and she nodded, satisfie







