94

Marianna POV

"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."

"Doesn't make it smaller."

"No," he agrees. "It doesn't." He turns slightly, facing me rather than the water. "You understand that."

It's not quite a question.

"Some of it," I say. "The way things that happened a long time ago stay—spatially close. Even when the timeline says they shouldn't be."

"Spatially close," he repeats. Like he's holding the phrase to see how it fits.

"Like they're in the room," I say. "Even when the room is different. Even when everything else has changed."

The wind does something to his hair that would make Oliver's mum's banner feel inadequate as documentation. He watches me with the attention that I've learned to receive without flinching—the quality of it, the way he looks at me like the information matters.

"The session at Spa," he says carefully. "When your hand slipped."

I knew it would come back. He noticed, of course he noticed, he notices everything. I'd filed it as a fragment, nothing specific, fatigue probably and then carried it through two days of professional deployment like a small stone in my shoe—present, ignorable, occasionally impossible to ignore.

"I don't know what that was," I say honestly.

He waits.

"It's not—" I start. "I don't have a clear memory of anything specific happening. When I was young. It's more like—texture. Like there are places in my memory that feel wrong without having a shape." I look at the foam edge of the North Sea. "I've had the freeze response for as long as I can remember. Longer than any boyfriend I've tried to explain it to. Longer than I understood what it was. And I always assumed it was just—me. The way some people are."

"But."

"But the fragments. The way they come during—" I choose words. "During closeness. During being touched, sometimes. There's something there that I can't see the shape of yet."

He's very still.

"I'm not saying it was anything," I add quickly. "I genuinely don't know. I might have completely ordinary childhood memories and an overactive capacity for self-diagnosis. That's also possible."

"But you don't believe that."

I look at him. The wind. The North Sea behind him, patient and grey-green.

"No," I say. "I don't."

He reaches out. His hand finds mine, warm against the beach wind, and he holds it the way he held it at Silverstone—not performing comfort, just providing contact. Warmth and contact and the fact of being here.

"Have you talked to anyone?" he says. "A professional. Not me—someone who actually knows what they're doing with this."

"No."

"You should."

"I know."

"Marianna."

"I know, Duane." It comes out softer than I mean it to. "I know I should. I've known for a while. It's—" I look at our hands. His thumb against my knuckles. "It's easier to understand other people's bodies than to figure out what's going on in mine."

"That's not—" He stops himself. Adjusts. "That's not something to be ashamed of. It's just something to fix."

"You say that like it's a brake-by-wire issue."

"Isn't it, a little?"

I look at him. The absolute steadiness of him. The unperformative pragmatism, the complete absence of pity—just: here is a problem, here is the direction of the solution, here is my hand.

"Maybe a little," I say.

He doesn't let go of my hand.

Down the beach, the dog has given up on its family entirely and is sprinting in figure-eights for the sheer logistical pleasure of it. Completely unattached to outcome. Just moving because moving is the point.

"The thing at Spa," I say. "The fragment. It was hands. The feeling of hands—and then it went away. It's been going away faster lately." I pause. "When I'm with you, it goes away faster."

He absorbs that. "Why?"

"Because you ask," I say. "You ask if I'm okay. You stop when I need you to stop. And you—" I search for the right word. "You don't need me to be different than I am. You just—work with what's there."

The wind moves between us. The North Sea foam keeps arriving and dissolving at the waterline, arriving and dissolving.

"You do the same thing," he says quietly. "With the shoulder. You work with what's there."

We stand on the Dutch beach in the post-race afternoon, his hand warm over mine, both of us apparently discovering that what we've been doing for each other professionally—working with what's there—has been doing something else entirely underneath.

"Monza next," I say, eventually.

"Monza next," he confirms.

"The shoulder's going to need—"

"Marianna."

"What."

"Not yet," he says. "Give me ten more minutes where we're just standing here."

I look at the dog, still doing its figure-eights. At the orange-inflected horizon where the circuit is somewhere behind the dunes. At his profile against the grey-green North Sea.

"Okay," I say.

We stand there for at least twenty minutes.

Neither of us counts.

The dog finally exhausts itself and collapses in a sandy heap near the waterline. Its family catches up, laughing. The offshore wind drops half a degree. Somewhere behind the dunes, the circuit is doing its post-race shutdown—trucks, equipment, the organized dismantling of a weekend that took months to build.

I become aware, slowly, that I'm cold.

His arm comes around my shoulders—unhurried, no performance to it, the simple geometry of someone who has identified a problem and solved it.

I turn into him slightly. Not a decision. Just physics.

He rests his chin on the top of my head. We stay like that while the North Sea keeps doing its patient, repetitive thing, and I think about nothing clinical for approximately the first time all weekend.

Then he pulls back just enough. His hand comes up and pushes my hair off my face—a practical motion, the wind had made a mess of it—and then he bends down and presses his lips to my forehead. Warm. Unhurried.

I reach up and pull him back down by his collar. Press my lips to his forehead in return.

We stay like that for a moment. Foreheads almost touching after. His eyes closed. Mine too.

"Oliver's going to find out we did this," I say, against his hairline.

"Oliver already knows everything," he says. "It stopped being a deterrent months ago."