73

Marianna.

Silverstone at six in the morning is fifty shades of gray, and none of them are romantic.

The sky sat low over the circuit like a lid on a pot. Everything was wet without it actually raining—the British specialty, apparently, weather that soaks into your jacket by osmosis. I stood outside Milton Keynes station with my bag and eleven hours of not-sleeping on my face, and I thought: he wasn't kidding about the gray. And then I thought: he's alive, he's fine, they said he's fine, for approximately the four hundredth time since Dr. Lindholm's call.

The black SUV pulled up at exactly six. Henri.

I could have kissed him. I didn't, because Henri is sixty-five and dignified and would have quietly died, but the sight of that familiar silver head behind the wheel undid something in my chest. He put my bag in the back, held my door, and pulled away without a single question—forty minutes of hedgerows and fog and villages that looked assembled from a kit labeled QUINTESSENTIAL ENGLAND, and Henri navigating roundabouts with the solemnity of a man defusing bombs.

Around mile thirty I couldn't stand it anymore.

"He's at the circuit medical center?"

"Was." Henri's eyes found mine in the mirror. "Released at two AM. Team hotel now." A pause, and then—because Henri knows everything, has always known everything—he added, unprompted: "Left arm in a sling. Walking fine. Not happy about it."

"The sling or the walking?"

"The sling."

Of course. I pressed my forehead to the cold window and let out a breath. Duane Richter in a sling is Duane Richter visibly limited, which is his least favorite state of being in the known universe. If he had enough energy to hate the sling, he was okay.

The fear loosened a notch. And in the space it left behind, something else flooded in—the thing I'd been shoving down since the airport, since the gate, since I'd sprinted through Heathrow like a woman in a movie. In an hour I was going to see him. Actually see him, in person, with my own eyes, for the first time since Miami.

My heart started doing the tunnel thing.

I had flown all night on a mercy flight, I looked like a raccoon that had survived a car wash, and my heart was fluttering like this was a date.

Get it together, Reyes.

The team hotel turned out to be a converted manor house—honey-colored stone, gravel drive that crunched importantly under the tires, and a front garden full of topiary trimmed into shapes so precise they looked anxious. A Veloce staffer met me at the door, checked a tablet, and led me through a lobby that smelled like old wood and very good coffee, up a staircase with a carpet runner older than my country, to a door marked 14.

"He's expecting you," the staffer said. Then, with the ghost of a smile: "He's forewarned."

Forewarned. Like I was weather.

I knocked.

"Come in."

His voice through a door. I'd been living on that voice through a phone for weeks, compressed and transmitted, and hearing it move through actual air—warm, low, real—did something to my knees that I chose not to examine.

I opened the door.

He was in an armchair by the window, and the gray English light was doing him all kinds of favors it had no business doing. Dark trousers, team polo with the left sleeve worked up around the sling. His hair was wrong—flattened on one side, the way hair gets when medical people have been near your head—and there was a shadow of exhaustion under his eyes, and the arm was strapped across his chest like a broken wing.

He was the best thing I had ever seen.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Behind him, through the window, the topiary garden held its nervous geometric shapes against the gray, and neither of us said anything for a moment, because hi is a ridiculous word for what was happening in that room.

"Hi," I said anyway.

"Hi," he said.

I closed the door and crossed the carpet, and up close I could do the full inventory my hands had been itching to do since Miami: the set of his shoulders, the quality of his stillness, the way he was holding his ribs. My brain took clinical notes. The rest of me just wanted to climb into the armchair with him, which was not a treatment protocol I could cite.

"Tell me what happened," I said instead.

"You've read the incident report."

"I want it from you."

Turn 3, FP3, lap seven, the rear stepping out earlier than the data predicted, the correction that came a fraction late, the barrier arriving on the left side at around sixty kilometers an hour. He delivered it in his debrief voice, all information and no feeling, the voice he'd used with his engineers at two in the morning. But I was three feet away now, not four thousand kilometers, and up close the debrief voice has cracks in it. I could see his jaw working between sentences. I could see, when he shifted, the wince he was editing out in real time.

"Sixty is low by most metrics," he finished.

"And here you are in a sling."

"The shoulder took the load."

"The already compromised shoulder." I set my bag down and knelt in front of the armchair so we were eye level. "Can I look at it?"

"That's why you're here," he said.

"That's one reason I'm here," I said, before I could stop myself.

He extended his right hand toward me, palm up. An offering.

I took it in both of mine.

And there it was. The tremor. Fine, almost invisible, the kind you feel more than see—the body's electrical bill for surviving something, still being paid off hours later. He'd never have mentioned it. He'd have sat in this chair with his flattened hair and his debrief voice and shaken quietly until it stopped.

"You're shaking," I said softly.

"Adrenaline residual. Normal post-incident response."

"I know it's normal." I didn't let go. His hand was warm and enormous in mine, and I could feel the tremble fading under my fingers like a chord dying out. "I know."

We stayed like that longer than the assessment required. Sue me.

Then I got to work.

Getting the sling and the polo out of the way was a slow negotiation of angles and held breath, and what waited underneath made my stomach drop: the bruising was worse than Montreal, worse than anything I'd treated on him—a deep, furious purple spilling across the back of his shoulder, the AC joint swollen and hot under my fingertips. When I asked him to rotate the arm, he made it about thirty-five degrees before his whole body went rigid, and the small controlled sound he swallowed hurt me somewhere I don't have anatomy for.

The first time I ever touched this shoulder, back in his home gym a lifetime ago, his whole body was a locked door.

"You flew through the night," he said, into the quiet.

"I slept on the plane."

"Did you."

"I dozed."

"Marianna."

"There was a baby two rows up with the lung capacity of an opera singer. I did my best."

The exhale that isn't a laugh. I felt it under my hands, moving through his ribs, and I collected it like I collect all of them.

"You didn't have to come," he said. "Dr. Lindholm asked, but the team physio could have managed through the weekend."

"Duane."

"Yes."

"You can just say you wanted me here."

The radiator ticked. The topiary stood at attention outside the window. I kept my hands moving on his shoulder, steady, giving him somewhere to put the silence.

"I wanted you here," he said, finally. Quietly. To the garden.

"Good," I managed. "Because I'm here."

I finished, I came around to face him, his good hand caught my wrist.

His thumb settled, with the precision of a man who measures everything, exactly over my pulse point.

Which was, at that moment, thundering.

"Your heart rate is elevated," he observed.

"I flew all night to an accident scene," I said. "Give me a minute and stop taking my vitals."