87

Marianna.

"The setup parameters," he said.

"Sit," I said. "I finished the analysis an hour ago."

He sat on the end of the bed. I pulled the chair around and put the tablet between us, and for a few minutes we were just two professionals with our heads bent over the same screen, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him, close enough that I had to actively choose, sentence by sentence, to keep talking about steering torque.

"Option B," I told him. "Lower steering sensitivity. You lose maybe two tenths of downforce, but the corrective input through Raidillon drops enough that your cumulative shoulder load falls by about thirty percent over race distance. The joint holds. That's the trade."

He scrolled through my methodology, and I watched his engineer brain work—the small frown, the eyes moving down the load projections, the absolute stillness of a man doing math. Then he set the tablet down and looked at me.

"Patrick is going to want to hire you."

"I have a job."

"He won't care." The corner of his mouth threatened something. "It's good work, Marianna."

"You haven't finished reading—"

"I've read enough to know." He said it simply, the way he says the things he means most, and I looked down at the tablet so he wouldn't see exactly how far that landed, which was somewhere around my sternum and still sinking.

"Okay," I said. "Now the real question. The shoulder. Not the number—how does it actually feel? Your words."

He was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, the Ardennes pressed its dark trees close to the hotel, and the first rain had started, soft against the glass.

"Different than before," he said. "Less sharp. More—pervasive. Like it's part of the landscape now instead of an event. Like the terrain has a grade and I navigate around it."

"That's a good description of chronic inflammation," I said. "And it's the dangerous kind. When pain stops being sharp, you stop treating it as information."

"I'm not ignoring it."

"I know you're not." I stood up. "Sit forward. Give me ten minutes on the AC joint and you'll sleep better."

He moved to the edge of the bed without arguing—without arguing, this man, who six months ago requested a different therapist rather than let me touch his shoulder—and I stood behind him and got to work.

The rain on the window, the lamp low, his breathing slowing under my hands as the tissue let go. His body doesn't guard against me anymore. It hasn't for months. There's a specific kind of trust that lives below words, in muscle, and he'd given it to me so gradually that I could no longer find the moment it happened—only the fact of it, warm under my palms, in a hotel room in Belgium with the rain coming down.

I worked through the shoulder, the trapezius, and up into the neck—the suboccipitals, the small stubborn muscles at the base of his skull that he hates having touched and breathes through anyway, for me.

That's where it happened.

It wasn't much. A flicker. A sensation more than a thought—the warmth of skin under my hands, and then, out of nowhere, the warmth was wrong. A pressure that didn't belong to this room. Hands that weren't his, weren't right, weren't—

My hands lifted off his neck. Half a second. Maybe less.

Then I put them back. Adjusted my pressure. Kept going.

Whatever it was, it was already dissolving—the way a dream dissolves when you grab for it, leaving nothing behind but the shape of its absence. No picture. No name. Just a cold residue somewhere under my ribs, and the rain on the glass, and my own hands, steady again, finishing the work.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. He notices everything his body does; it's half his profession.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. "Sorry. Hand slipped."

I finished the neck. Stepped back. He rotated the shoulder, took his private inventory, gave the single nod that from him is a standing ovation.

"Thank you," he said. He says it now. It lands somewhere specific every time.

Then he stood and looked at me, and his attention did its quiet, thorough thing, reading me the way I read him.

"You went somewhere," he said. Not an accusation. Just a fact, set gently on the table between us, with room around it for me to pick it up or not.

I didn't know where I'd gone. I genuinely didn't. There was no memory to report, no shape to describe—just a half-second of wrongness that had already sunk back into whatever dark water it came from. What was I supposed to say? Something touched me from inside my own head and I can't tell you what it was?

"Just tired," I said. "Long day."

I told myself it was nothing.