86

Marianna.

He crossed the garage toward me the way he crosses every room—unhurried, like the room will wait. Around us, the Veloce garage did its cathedral thing: tools in gleaming rows, engineers at their stations, the car sitting under the lights in red and black like a held breath.

"Eighty-one," I said, before he could speak.

"Eighty-one," he confirmed.

"That's up from seventy-eight."

"I'm aware. I live in the shoulder."

"Seven AM tomorrow. I'm assessing it properly before practice."

We stood there in team kit, three feet apart, being extremely professional. Nobody in the garage was obviously watching us. Which, I've learned, is different from nobody watching us—there's a specific art to not-watching in a Formula 1 garage, and everyone in that room had mastered it years ago.

I'd take it. I'd take anything. That's the embarrassing truth about being in love with someone whose face is public property: you learn to live on crumbs.

"McCartney," he said quietly. "She said something to you."

"She said don't let it affect the work."

"And?"

"I told her it wouldn't." I met his eyes. "And it won't. This—" I gestured at the tiny space between us, meaning here, this garage, these three feet. "This is separate. I keep the lines clean."

He held my gaze one second longer than the conversation required. Then he nodded once and went back to his engineer, and I went to find my kit, and the garage swallowed us back into its machinery like nothing had happened.

Everything had happened. It just fit inside a half-degree.

Thursday evening, I walked into the town near the circuit, because I'd promised Marco chocolate and because I needed air that didn't smell like rubber.

The town was small and painted and unbothered—the kind of place that hosts the racing circus three times a year and spends the rest of its time being quietly Belgian. I found the chocolate shop on the third street I tried, bought the dark kind with sea salt that Marco had demanded, ate a piece on a bench outside, and had to close my eyes for a second because it was that good. Marco was going to be insufferably right about this, and I was going to have to tell him so, and he was going to bring it up for the rest of our natural lives.

I sat on that bench with my chocolate and my paper bag。

Six months ago I was standing in a baggage claim with a dead phone and fourteen dollars. Now I was on a bench in Belgium, deployed to a Grand Prix because a race engineer wanted my biomechanical parameters, eating expensive chocolate I'd bought with money I earned, waiting to see a man who folds me paper airplanes.

Jill would say: that's called happiness, Mari.

And she'd be right, and it was alarming, the way happiness is always slightly alarming the first few times—like walking on a floor you keep expecting to give way. But I sat there anyway. Ate another piece. Let the floor hold.

The air smelled like rain coming. The Ardennes builds its own weather in the hills and sends it down whenever it feels like it, forecasts be damned. Tomorrow's practice would be interesting.

I bought too much chocolate—I always buy too much of things I love, some part of me never trusts that the good thing will still be there tomorrow—and walked back to the team hotel with the bag swinging against my leg.

He knocked at nine.

Two beats, a pause. I've memorized his knock the way I've memorized everything else about him—without deciding to, one detail at a time, until the accumulation became a language.

I opened the door, and there he was: dark jeans, gray henley, hair still damp, holding two bottles of water like a peace offering. The post-debrief version of him. Three hours of engineering, all of it still sitting in the set of his shoulders, and he'd chosen to bring the last of his evening here. To me.

I stepped back to let him in and pretended my heart wasn't doing the tunnel thing. My heart does the tunnel thing every single time now. It's degrading.

I love it.