85

Marianna POV

"He requested Kinetic deploy someone familiar with his treatment protocol," I say, with the confidence of someone who has rehearsed this phrasing. "Continuity of care is clinically indicated for—"

"Reyes."

"Yes."

She stops walking. We're near the entrance to the paddock proper, the organized chaos of a Thursday race weekend morning assembling itself around us—trucks being unloaded, engineers moving with purpose, the first traces of the particular smell that is uniquely a Formula 1 paddock, rubber and metal and something burning that I've stopped being able to identify separately from the general sensory experience of being here.

McCartney looks at me with the eyes of someone who has been in this industry for twenty years and has seen most of its varieties of human behavior.

"I don't need the speech," she says. "Just don't let it affect the work."

"It won't," I say.

"I know it won't," she says. "That's why I'm not having the speech." She starts walking again. "Come on. Patrick wants to talk through the race-weekend shoulder protocol before lunch."

Patrick is exactly as I imagined him from six weeks of Duane's descriptions. Mid-fifties, methodical, with the specific quality of someone whose relationship with emotions is primarily mediated through data. He shakes my hand and immediately opens a laptop showing a circuit map of Spa-Francorchamps with corners annotated for steering force values.

"Turn 1, Raidillon, Pouhon," he says, pointing. "These three are the primary shoulder-load events. His grip telemetry shows compensatory adjustment starting at Raidillon—he's weighting the right hand more than the baseline from pre-season."

"I know," I say. "I've been watching the onboard feeds."

Patrick looks at me with the expression of someone recalibrating an assessment.

"The compensation pattern started at Silverstone," I continue. "It's reduced since then but it hasn't fully resolved. If the setup requires more steering input—high-downforce configuration—the right side will overload by the end of the race."

Patrick turns his laptop slightly so I can see it better. Points to a telemetry graph. "This is Zandvoort, lap thirty-two. You can see it here—"

"The grip asymmetry starts at turn six," I say. "Drops back to baseline by the straight. He's managing it but it's costing him micro-seconds."

Patrick stares at me for a moment.

"You've been reviewing his telemetry," he says.

"He sends me his session notes. I cross-reference with the shoulder data." I pause. "Is that—is that information I shouldn't have? He's been forwarding the relevant sections—"

"No," Patrick says. He closes the laptop halfway and looks at me with the expression of someone making a decision. "No, that's—" He pauses. "I've been trying to get him to share physical data with the engineering team for three years. He doesn't usually—" He stops again. "This is useful. This is very useful."

I file away the information that Duane has been sharing things with me that he doesn't typically share with anyone and decide to examine what that means later, when I'm not standing in front of his race engineer trying to look like a detached medical professional.

"The setup question," I say. "For race day. If you go high-downforce, I can modify the taping configuration to give him more support through Raidillon specifically. Lower steering sensitivity setting might also help—less input required for the same line."

Patrick looks at me. Then he writes something in his notebook with the specific emphasis of someone who considers note-taking a meaningful act.

"I'm going to email you the setup options," he says. "Tell me which configuration puts the least load on the left shoulder girdle."

"You want me to make setup recommendations."

"I want you to give me the biomechanical parameters and I'll make the setup decision." He closes the laptop fully. "But yes."

I sit across the table from a Formula 1 race engineer who is asking me to participate in car setup strategy and think: this is my life now. This is an actual thing that is happening in my actual life.

"Send me the options by tonight," I say. "I'll have answers by morning."

Patrick nods. Stands. Then, almost as an afterthought: "He's at the track already. Second garage bay. He said to tell you the shoulder is at eighty-one percent." A pause. "He said you'd want to know."

"Thank you," I say.

Eighty-one. Three points up from the last report.

I do not smile. I am extremely professional.

I smile the entire way to the garage.

The Veloce garage is a cathedral.

That's the only word for it. The organized precision of it—every tool in its place, every engineer at their station, the car gleaming in red and black under lights designed to illuminate rather than expose—has the specific quality of a space that exists for one purpose and has been perfected in service of that purpose over decades.

I've been in the Alpine garage. I've watched race weekends from hospitality suites and team areas. But the Veloce garage in the Spa paddock, on a Thursday morning with the season building toward its apex, is something different.

Duane is at the back of the garage with Patrick's number two engineer, looking at something on a screen. He's in full team kit—the Veloce Racing jacket that I've only ever seen him wear in press photos, the one that makes him look like the three-time world champion the paddock knows rather than the man who lit a vanilla candle and sat on a floor in the dark because I couldn't sleep.

He looks up when I walk in.