91

Marianna POV

He's twenty-four, Luca. Second season in Formula 1. Italian, from Turin, with the kind of face that the internet has decided belongs in a different kind of profession—all sharp lines and easy confidence, the magnetic quality of someone who grew up being told he was extraordinary and has not yet been given sufficient evidence to doubt it.

He also has genuinely terrible hip flexor flexibility, which is the most neutral thing I can say about him and which is also, technically, the only thing that currently matters.

"Left hip first," I say. "You had restriction through the psoas attachment at our last Miami session. Let me see if that's changed."

It hasn't changed. If anything, it's worse—the psoas is locked in a way that tells me he's been sitting in sim rigs for more hours than is advisable without adequate mobilization work between sessions.

"How many hours in the simulator this week?" I ask, pressing into the anterior hip.

"A lot." He doesn't specify.

"I'm going to need a number."

"Why?"

"Because the tissue quality tells me a story and I need the data to confirm it. How many hours."

He looks at the ceiling, doing the calculation. "Fourteen? Maybe sixteen."

Fourteen to sixteen hours in a seated position with minimal hip extension, precisely calibrated to lock up the psoas and externally rotate the femur in ways the human body was not designed to sustain for extended periods. Great. Wonderful. Peak professional athletic conditioning.

"You need recovery protocols between sim sessions," I say. "Twenty minutes of targeted hip flexor lengthening for every three hours in the rig. It's not optional—it's the difference between your hip flexors working correctly and your lower back compensating for them not working correctly, which leads to a very specific pattern of lumbar tightening that affects your braking position."

He's quiet for a moment. "You could tell all of that just from—"

"Palpation, yes." I adjust my hand position. "The body tells you things if you know how to listen."

He goes still. Then: "Is that why you're good at this? Because you listen?"

It's a different kind of question than the ones he used to ask. Not probing for operational data. Just—curious. The way a person is curious when they've dropped the strategy and are actually paying attention.

"Partly," I say. "And I was trained by a therapist who'd been doing this for thirty years and had no patience for anyone who wasn't paying complete attention. So—learned behavior."

He nods. Lets me work.

For fifteen minutes we exist in professional peace—me pressing through the hip flexor sequence I've designed for his particular restriction pattern, him breathing through it with better body awareness than I expected. Drivers have unusual proprioception. They're calibrated to physical sensation in ways that most people aren't, because their profession requires understanding what their body is doing at speeds where normal perception is inadequate.

"The Spa result," Luca says, eventually.

I keep working. "Mm."

"His shoulder," he says. Not Richter's shoulder. Just his, like the referent is assumed. "It held up better than I expected. Given Silverstone."

This is the first mention. The first direct acknowledgment, in any of our professional interactions, of anything adjacent to what the previous nine sessions were actually about.

I don't look up. "His team's medical staff did good work." Which is true. Which is technically all that's true in this clinical context.

"He's going to push for the championship," Luca says. "He's going to push hard. Even if it costs him physically."

"Most athletes in title contention do." I finish the left hip. Move to the right. "Turn your knee out. Slight external rotation."

He complies. "I just mean—I know how he drives. When the stakes are high, he doesn't manage risk the same way."

I press into the psoas attachment on the right side. He makes a sound.

"That's the restriction," I say. "Breathe through it."

He breathes.

"You're a good practitioner," he says, after a moment. It lands differently than the same words would have from almost anyone else, weighted by the history of what he did and the fact that he's saying it anyway.

"Thank you," I say. Evenly. Professionally.

"I know things got—complicated. With the Lindholm conversation." He's still looking at the ceiling. "I want you to know I didn't—" He stops. "It wasn't meant to cause you problems."

I pause the tissue work. Look at him.

"I know," I say. Which is not the same as it's fine. Not the same as don't worry about it. Just: I know. The fact of it acknowledged and set aside, because we're professionals in a treatment room and the session has twenty minutes left and his hip flexors are not going to fix themselves during this conversation.

He nods. "Okay," he says.

"Okay," I say, and resume.

The call comes at ten PM. The post-race debrief for Spa apparently runs long when you've won, which I hadn't considered—the winning debrief takes longer because there's more to learn from, more to understand about what worked and why and how to replicate it and what the championship table looks like from the top rather than from the chase.

P1. Fifty points in two races. The standings have shifted.

"The data geeks have been at it for six hours," Duane says, when I answer. His voice has the quality it gets when he's tired in the specific way of someone who has been thinking intensely for a long time—slightly slower, the edges of his usual precision softened.

"Are they still going?" I ask.

"Patrick is still going. The rest of us have accepted that Patrick will be going until he reaches a conclusion or his coffee runs out, whichever comes first."

I'm on the bed in the Zandvoort hotel room, which is smaller than the Spa one and smells like the sea. The window is closed against the coastal wind, but I can hear it anyway—the low persistent note of the North Sea doing what it does.

"McCartney says the shoulder responded well to the race load," I say.

"She's thorough."

"She's excellent." I pause. "You should trust her with the ongoing work."

"She's not you," he says.