93

Marianna POV

"He was looking at the circuit," I say.

"Marianna. He looked for you, he found you, and then he looked like he'd found something." Oliver is eating something fried. The conceptually ambitious vendor thing. "I've known Duane Richter for three years. He doesn't look like he's found something. Typically he looks like he's tolerating the existence of a world that is slightly slower than he'd prefer."

"That's very poetic."

"I'm a very poetic person." He offers me a piece of the fried thing. "Also, he texted me from the car asking where you were standing."

I take the fried thing. "He did not."

"He absolutely did. From the car. While presumably still being a world-class racing driver." Oliver seems deeply pleased by this information. "The man has excellent multitasking skills."

The beach at Zandvoort is accessed through a gap in the dunes about eight minutes' walk from the circuit perimeter. I know this because Duane's text, which arrives at four PM while I'm packing up the Kinetic kit, says: Beach. Gap in the dunes past the north car park. Twenty minutes.

And then, three minutes later: Please.

The please is so unexpected that I put my phone down and pick it up again to confirm I've read it correctly.

He's already there when I find the gap in the dunes. Standing with his hands in the pockets of dark jeans, back to the circuit, facing the North Sea, which is doing something grey-green and interesting in the afternoon light. He's changed out of team kit—the Veloce jacket replaced with a plain navy henley, the collar slightly open, salt air already doing things to his hair that would take a styling team significant effort to replicate.

He looks, standing in front of the North Sea in the post-race afternoon, almost like a person. Not a three-time-and-now-possibly-four world champion, not the 01 car, not the grid's most accomplished active driver. Just a person who found the gap in the dunes and waited.

I'm not sure I have a clinical term for what I feel about that.

"Nice race," I say.

He turns. "Turn 3 was the window."

"I saw it on the screen."

"Did it look right? From the outside."

The question catches me. Not did it look dramatic or did it look good for television, but did it look right—the honest calibration question of someone checking whether their internal experience of the moment matches its external reality.

"It looked inevitable," I say. "Like the gap was always there and everyone else just hadn't noticed."

He nods once. Something settles in his posture—a small release, the way tissue releases under pressure. "Patrick is going to spend three days understanding how the car found that line."

"What about you?"

"I already know how," he says. "That's not the interesting question." He starts walking toward the waterline. Not an invitation exactly—just moving, the way he moves through spaces, as though his body makes decisions and his brain ratifies them afterward. I fall into step beside him anyway.

The North Sea is not warm. I know this because the wind coming off it has decided that seventeen degrees celsius is a ceiling rather than a floor, and my Kinetic polo was not engineered for a Dutch beach in late August. I fold my arms against it.

"The shoulder," I say.

"McCartney was thorough."

"She always is. But how does it feel. Your words."

He's quiet for a few steps. The sand is firm near the waterline, packed enough to walk on properly. "The Turn 3 move—the apex is a specific load event. Hard steering input, then release. It pulled on the AC joint." He rotates his left arm slightly, the self-assessment motion I've watched so many times that I can read the range from the angle. "It held. But I felt it."

"On the scale."

"Six. Genuinely."

"Six meaning six or six meaning you're reporting it two down—"

"Six meaning six." He glances over. "I stopped rounding."

"Since when."

"Since Silverstone." A pause. "Since you told me accurate data is how you make good decisions."

I didn't quite say it that way, but the meaning is close enough that I don't correct him.

"Good," I say. "McCartney can work the AC joint tonight. Make sure she does the suboccipitals after—"

"I told her."

"You—" I stop walking. "You told her."

"The neck work matters for the drive to Monza. I told her." He keeps walking, which means I have to catch up. "You wrote it in the protocol. I read the protocol."

"You've never once mentioned the protocol to me before."

"I've been following it for two months."

This might be the most surprising thing he's ever said to me, which is competing with some significant entries in that category. I spend approximately ten seconds recalibrating my understanding of how the last eight weeks of remote compliance worked, and then I catch up to him, and we walk in silence for a while with the North Sea doing its thing beside us.

"Turn 3," he says eventually. Not changing the subject exactly. More like returning to something. "In the moment—when I found the gap—there's no thought. The thinking happens in the debrief. In the moment it's just—" He stops. Searches for it. "Like a door opening that you didn't know was there."

"Does that happen often?"

"Often enough." A beat. "Less often than it used to."

"Why less?"

He looks at the horizon. The sky where the grey-green sea meets the grey-white cloud. "When I was younger, I drove angry. Everything was reactive—" He's choosing words carefully, which is something he only does when the thing he's trying to say doesn't have a safe established route. "After my parents, there was a period where I drove like I was trying to outrun something. Faster was always the solution." A pause. "Eventually you learn that's not speed. That's something else."

I don't fill the silence. I've learned this from him—that some things need the silence to land in rather than the immediate covering-over with words.

"The gap at Turn 3," he says. "I saw it because I was looking at the whole corner. Not the thing I was trying to outrun."

We've stopped walking without deciding to. The waterline is maybe ten meters away, the foam edge of the North Sea doing its repetitive, patient work. A family with a dog is visible down the beach, the dog enthusiastically ignoring all commands. Otherwise it's just this—the dunes, the sand, the offshore wind, us.

"I'm sorry about your parents," I say.

He looks at me.

"I know I've said it before—" I stop myself. Have I? I've thought it, many times, but have I said it directly, or just worked around it? "If I haven't said it directly. I'm sorry. Losing them the way you did, and then going into a sport that—" I don't finish the sentence.

"That has cars," he says. Flat. But not closed.

"Yes."

He looks back at the horizon. "It was a long time ago."