90

Marianna POV

The universe is not particularly interested in my cardiovascular recovery.

Zandvoort is two days after Belgium. Two days, a four-hour drive, and one very significant logistical shift that Dr. McCartney delivers over what passes for dinner in the team hotel restaurant at Spa—a salad that costs twenty-two euros and contains approximately the nutritional content of a decisive opinion.

"Veloce has expanded their Kinetic deployment request for the Netherlands," she says, between precisely fork-stabbed leaves. "They want support for both drivers through race week."

"Both drivers," I repeat.

"Richter and Ferrante." She looks at me with her data-filing eyes. "You'll take Ferrante. I'll continue with Richter."

I set down my fork.

McCartney continues eating with the calm of a woman who has just rearranged a professional situation with full awareness of its implications and is giving me approximately thirty seconds to process before she expects a coherent response.

"That's—" I stop. "That's a good structure," I say, professionally. "Clean lines of responsibility. No single practitioner overextended."

"Yes," she says.

"And Ferrante's treatment history—he's been with Kinetic how long?"

"Three months. His file is in the shared system. You've reviewed it."

I have reviewed it. I reviewed it last Tuesday, after his final Miami session, after I talked to Dr. Lindholm and the information was handed to Veloce team management and whatever Luca had been doing with treatment data was presumably addressed.

Things like: he asked me questions about Duane's race preparation for nine consecutive sessions. Things like: he has the specific quality of someone who has decided that being charming is a strategy rather than a personality trait. Things like: his hip flexors are genuinely tight in a way that has nothing to do with any of the rest of it, and he's a talented driver in only his second season who probably deserves decent medical support regardless of how I feel about his information-gathering habits.

"I can handle Ferrante," I say.

"I know," says McCartney.

This is the third time she's said something like that to me.

"The shoulder protocol for Richter," I say. "If McCartney needs to consult on anything mid-week—"

"I have your documentation," she says. "It's comprehensive."

"The AC joint runs hotter than the imaging suggests. The self-reported pain scale needs the one-point-five correction—"

"Upward," she says. "You wrote that into the clinical notes." Her mouth does something that in a person with a different expressive range would be a smile. "I've read your notes, Reyes. All of them."

I pick up my fork. Return to the twenty-two-euro salad.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay," she says.

Outside the restaurant window, Spa does its evening thing—the forests dark against a darker sky, the town settling back into itself after race day. In approximately fourteen hours I'll be in a car to Zandvoort, which is flat and coastal and not Spa, and I'll be treating Luca Ferrante's hip flexors while McCartney continues with Duane's shoulder, and this will be professionally appropriate and cleanly structured and completely fine.

I eat my salad.

It does not taste like twenty-two euros.

Zandvoort is Zandvoort.

This is less obvious than it sounds. Every F1 circuit has a particular character—Spa is gothic drama, Monaco is a jeweled spectacle, Silverstone is stubborn tradition in damp clothing. Zandvoort is something else. It sits on the North Sea coast, surrounded by dunes and beach grass, and it has the unpretentious energy of a circuit that was here before Formula 1 was glamorous and will be here after the glamour has moved on.

The Dutch fans are orange. Not orange as an accent—orange as a total commitment, a collective chromatic decision made by an entire nationality and executed with enthusiastic consistency. Orange hats, orange flags, orange face paint, one man I see on the way from the car park who appears to be wearing an orange full-body suit and has committed fully to this choice despite the fact that it is seventeen degrees and breezy and the full-body suit is clearly not warm.

I respect the commitment. I write nothing clinical about it. I simply observe it and file it under: Europe is specific.

Luca Ferrante is waiting in the Veloce medical bay at 8 AM on Thursday morning. He's sitting on the treatment table with the patient energy of someone who has been told when to arrive and arrived, which is different from Duane, who arrives three minutes before the appointed time, no earlier, no later, with the precision of a man for whom punctuation is a lifestyle.

Luca is four minutes early. He's watching something on his phone when I walk in, and he puts it away with the unhurried ease of someone who doesn't feel the need to perform engagement.

"Marianna." He says my name like it's a casual reunion. Like we're two people who crossed paths over summer at someone's house party rather than two people who had a professional relationship characterized by his increasingly specific questions about another driver's physiological state. "Good to see you."

"You too," I say, with clinical warmth. The specific warmth that belongs in treatment rooms and means I am going to do my job well and our personal history is not relevant to that.