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Marianna POV

Monza in September is everything Zandvoort is not.

Where Zandvoort is compact and coastal and smells like the sea, Monza sprawls through a royal park north of Milan with the unhurried confidence of a circuit that has been here since 1922 and has no particular interest in impressing you. The trees are enormous. The tarmac is old in a way you can feel through your shoes. The main straight is so long that watching cars accelerate down it feels less like motorsport and more like witnessing something that should probably be illegal on principle.

The espresso is extraordinary. Italy is doing this on purpose.

My hotel is a twenty-minute bus ride from the circuit, in a part of Monza that is regular-city rather than race-weekend-city—a pharmacy, a bakery, a woman who yells something at a cat from a third-floor window every morning at seven, a specific kind of narrow street that seems designed to fit exactly one Fiat Punto and the memory of a Fiat Punto. My room has a window that looks onto a courtyard, terracotta walls, a single geranium in a pot on the sill that is either thriving or staging a very convincing performance of thriving.

Marco texts me a photo of his apartment, which he has apparently rearranged while I've been gone. The couch is in a new position. The IKEA rug with the Florida-shaped stain is visible from a different angle.

Moving furniture at midnight is self-care, he texts. Don't question my methods.

The stain is still there, I text back.

The stain is a feature, he says. It builds character.

Three dots. Then: How's Italy.

Good, I say. The espresso is life-changing.

Don't come back different, he says.

Too late, I say.

He sends a thumbs up. Which from Marco is the equivalent of a twelve-minute speech about how he's proud of me, delivered in the key of sibling sarcasm.

Thursday morning. The paddock has a different energy than Zandvoort—less intimate, more theatrical. Monza draws the Italian fans, which means tifosi, which means approximately sixty thousand people in red who have decided that Ferrari winning is their personal responsibility and are prepared to manifest it through sheer collective will. The sound of them from outside the circuit perimeter is less crowd noise and more weather event.

I'm in the Kinetic treatment space setting up for the morning when McCartney comes in, pours two espressos from the machine that the Veloce hospitality unit keeps specifically for team medical staff, and places one in front of me without being asked.

"Richter's shoulder held through Zandvoort," she says. "Better than I expected given the lateral load through the banking."

"The Option B setup helped," I say. "Less corrective steering input."

"Patrick already told me you called that." She sits down across the table, wrapping both hands around her cup. "He wants to know if you're available for a video call next Wednesday about Suzuka."

I look up. "Patrick wants to call me."

"About the shoulder data and circuit load mapping." She drinks her espresso. "I told him I'd ask."

This is the thing about McCartney—she delivers information with the clean neutrality of a weather service. Not a compliment, not a commentary, just the facts in order. Patrick wants to call you. Not isn't that impressive or you've clearly made an impression, just: the thing that is happening and the question attached to it.

"Tell him yes," I say.

She nods. Makes a note on her tablet.

The morning goes well. Luca's hip flexors have continued improving, which he mentions with the slightly amazed quality of someone discovering that professional advice, when followed, tends to work. His manner has been different since Zandvoort—less strategic, more straightforward, like the information-gathering mode has been quietly packed away and something closer to a regular client relationship has been unpacked in its place.

I don't fully trust the change. But I'm treating it as real until I have evidence otherwise, because that's what good clinical judgment looks like and also because the alternative is treating every session as a chess game, which is exhausting and bad for my hip flexor palpation accuracy.

Oliver has the afternoon slot. He arrives wearing an Alpine team polo with what appears to be a small Italian flag drawn in marker on the wrist.

"For the occasion," he explains.

"Did someone give you that or did you do it yourself?"

"Bit of both," he says, which is not an answer. He hops on the table and immediately starts describing, in significant detail, the pasta he had for dinner last night—cacio e p**e, Marianna, actual proper cacio e p**e, not the stuff they serve at that place near the circuit, the real stuff, I found a trattoria forty minutes from the hotel and the owner has been making it for forty years and I think I need to move to Italy permanently—while I work through his thoracolumbar fascia with the patience of a woman who has been doing this long enough to multitask emotionally complex feelings alongside manual therapy.

"You should bring Duane," Oliver says, mid-pasta monologue.

"To Italy?"

"To the trattoria. For the cacio e p**e." He adjusts his head position so he can look at me sideways. "He's here, you're here. It's Italy. There's forty-year pasta. The logic is airtight."

"The logic assumes we have evenings free during race week, which—"

"Thursday evening," Oliver says, with the simple confidence of someone who has already considered the schedule. "Practice is Friday. Thursday evening, you're both free." A pause. "I checked."

"You checked our schedules."

"I have resources."

"Those resources are other people's privacy, Oliver."

"They're calendars," he says, unrepentant. "Calendars that are technically accessible to paddock personnel. I was simply thorough." He turns his face back down. "Text him. Tell him about the pasta. He'll go."

"You know Duane Richter's pasta preferences?"

"I know he ate at that trattoria two years ago and described the cacio e p**e as 'acceptable,' which for Duane is somewhere between a standing ovation and a marriage proposal." Oliver sounds extremely pleased with himself. "I have sources."

"Your sources are terrifying."

"My sources are comprehensive," he corrects. "There's a difference."

I text Duane about the pasta at four thirty, which is when I've finished for the day and am sitting on a low wall outside the circuit with my shoes off because the paddock is large and my feet have opinions about that. The text says: Oliver has information about cacio e p**e. Apparently you've been here before. Trattoria forty minutes from the hotel. Thursday evening if you're free.

He responds in seven minutes, which is faster than usual: I know the place. 7:30.

Then: Tell Oliver his sources have boundaries.

Then, after a pause: The cacio e p**e is better than acceptable.

I read this three times. Show it to no one. Sit on the low wall in the Monza afternoon with the tifosi noise filtering through the perimeter trees and feel something so disproportionately warm about a man describing pasta accurately that I have to put my phone face-down on the wall and look at the sky for a moment.

Italy is doing this on purpose.