68

Marianna.

Normal doesn't fit anymore.

It's like trying to put on a coat you wore before something happened to you—technically the same coat, same buttons, same lining—but your body has changed shape in some fundamental way and now it pulls wrong across the shoulders and doesn't close properly in the front and you stand there in front of the mirror thinking this used to fit, I know this used to fit, why doesn't this fit.

I'm back in it on a Tuesday morning, sitting in the Kinetic break room eating a yogurt I don't taste, watching Derek argue with the coffee machine about something that is definitely the coffee machine's fault, and everything looks exactly the same as it did before Montreal and nothing feels the same at all.

"You're doing the rice thing," Priya says, from across the table.

I look down. My spoon is moving in slow circles through the yogurt.

"Yogurt thing," I correct.

"Same energy." She doesn't look up from her tablet. "Good weekend or bad weekend?"

"Good," I say. And mean it, which is still slightly surprising. "Really good."

"Hm." She makes a note on her tablet. "You look like someone who had a good weekend and is now sad it's over."

"That's very specific."

"I'm a doctor. I read people." She glances up. "Also you've been stirring that yogurt for four minutes and it's not getting any more mixed."

I eat the yogurt.

Normal doesn't fit.

But I'm wearing it anyway, because that's what you do.

Duane calls at 10 PM.

He's in London now—Silverstone prep, three weeks of European triple-header that will take him through Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands. The F1 calendar is a particular kind of cruelty that I'm learning to understand: you get someone for a weekend, maybe two, and then the season takes them back and you track their location on a race calendar like a ship's position on a chart.

Currently the chart says: London. Then Spa. Then Zandvoort.

All of which are not Miami.

"How's London?" I ask.

"Grey."

"It's always grey."

"Yes."

"How's the shoulder?"

"Seventy-eight percent."

"Up from seventy-three." I do the math automatically, the way I do now. "That's good progress. Are you doing the—"

"The band exercises. Yes."

"And the—"

"The stretches. Yes."

"Both sets? Because the internal rotation one is easy to skip and it looks—"

"Marianna."

"—unimportant but it's actually critical for the posterior capsule—"

"Both sets," he says. "Every day."

"Good." I settle back against my pillow. "Good."

Silence. The good kind. The kind that's become familiar over three weeks of phone calls, that I've learned to inhabit without filling.

"Tell me something," he says.

This is what he does now. Every call. Tell me something. Like he's collecting pieces of my day, storing them somewhere I can't see.

"Luca came in for a session today," I say.

The quality of his silence changes.

"And?" Flat. Precise.

"He spent the first ten minutes asking about the Silverstone track layout. In a way that was technically asking about the track but was actually asking if I'd talked to you recently."

"What did you say?"

"That I find all circuits equally interesting from a biomechanical perspective." I pause. "He didn't believe me."

"No," Duane agrees. "He wouldn't."

"He's very—" I search for the word. "Calibrated. Everything he says has a secondary purpose. It's like talking to someone who's always playing a game you haven't been told the rules to."

"That's accurate."

"He asked about your shoulder again. Specifically whether the posterior deltoid damage from Monaco had fully resolved."

A beat.

"He asked that specifically?"

"Word for word. Posterior deltoid. He knows the terminology."

"He's been talking to someone on the medical team," Duane says. Not alarmed. Just—noting. Filing. The way he processes information, quiet and systematic, like telemetry data. "Someone who has access to my treatment records."

"That's—" I sit up. "Duane, that's a breach of—"

"I know."

"That's a serious—"

"I know, Marianna." His voice is even. "Don't treat him differently. Don't let him know you noticed."

"I'm a medical professional. I'm not—"

"I know you're not. I'm saying keep doing what you're doing." A pause. "You press his psoas harder than necessary."

"That's completely standard technique for—"

"Marianna."

"Fine. Yes. Slightly harder than strictly necessary."

"Keep doing that too," he says, and I can hear the almost-laugh under it, the exhaled warmth that I've been cataloguing for weeks.

I smile at my ceiling.

The Virgin Mary water stain smiles back. Or the manatee. Still unresolved.

"I miss you," I say.