97

Marianna POV

The thing about Alina Lindqvist is that she's very good at waiting.

I don't fully understand this until Friday morning, when she doesn't do anything. She's just—present. In the paddock, which she has credentials for because she's been a Veloce brand ambassador for two years, a fact I learn from Oliver's comprehensive source network at approximately 9 AM.

In the hospitality unit, talking to team partners with the easy fluency of someone who has been navigating these spaces since before I knew what a paddock was. Near the garage during FP1, standing with a group of sponsors in a way that puts her in Duane's sightline every time he comes off the pit wall.

Not doing anything. Just being there.

It's actually impressive. As a strategy, I mean. Clinically speaking.

I treat Luca at eight, Oliver at ten, spend the lunch hour writing up the Suzuka preparation notes for Patrick's Wednesday call. McCartney finds me at two with an update on Duane's shoulder—AC joint down to minimal inflammation, range at eighty-six, he's moving well—delivered in the same weather-service register, no editorial. I add it to the file.

The day is fine. Normal. Professional.

Alina doesn't approach me.

She approaches me on Saturday.

It's between qualifying sessions—the gap between Q2 and Q3, forty minutes of paddock limbo where everyone is either deep in strategy conversation or trying to find food. I'm in the Kinetic space doing documentation when the door opens and she's there, closing it behind her with the quiet click of someone who has thought about whether to knock and decided against it.

She looks at the room. At the treatment tables, the equipment wall, the Kinetic branding. Then at me.

"Can I sit?" she asks.

I put down my pen. "It's a treatment space."

"I know what it is." She sits anyway, in the chair across the desk—the client chair, the one Luca sits in when we discuss his session notes, the one Oliver sprawls in while describing pasta. She sits in it like she's been invited. "I want to talk to you."

"About."

"About Duane." She folds her hands in her lap. She's wearing less than last night—dark jeans, a simple white shirt, hair pulled back. The beauty is the same regardless of what she does with it, which I find both impressive and deeply inconvenient. "I want to explain some things."

"You explained things in Miami," I say. "At his apartment. And then again over the phone."

"I know." She doesn't flinch. "I know I did, and I know how it came across. I'm not here to do that again."

I look at her. She meets it—the look, the assessment, the full weight of my not particularly trusting her—without deflecting.

"What are you here to do?" I say.

She's quiet for a moment. The paddock noise filters in from outside, muffled by the motorhome walls. Somewhere nearby, an engineer is having an intense conversation about tire compound.

"I heard something," she says. "About you. Something that someone in the paddock has been—circulating."

The air in the room changes.

"Circulating," I say carefully.

"About your—" She chooses the word with visible care. "—history. With physical intimacy."

My stomach drops straight through the floor.

"Specifically," she continues, "that you have a—dysfunction. A psychological one. That you—can't." She stops. Starts again differently. "That you're broken, was the word being used."

I don't move. My hands are flat on the desk in front of me and I'm extremely aware of where they are and how still they're being.

Broken.

The word that Josh used. The word that lived in my skull for months, that I heard in Tyler's voice and Daniel's voice and Marcus's voice, each of them arriving at the same conclusion via different routes—something is wrong with her, she doesn't work properly, she's broken.

Someone in the paddock is saying it here.

"Who," I say. My voice sounds far away.

Alina looks at me steadily. "Luca."

The name lands like a physical thing.

"Luca," I repeat.

"He's been—telling people. Drivers, mostly. A few journalists he's friendly with." She watches me with something that I'm not sure how to categorize. Not pity exactly. Something more complicated. "I heard it from two separate sources yesterday. I spent last night deciding whether to tell you."

She's quiet again. Outside, the engineer's conversation has shifted—different corner, different compound, same intensity.

"Because I've done things to make your life harder," she says. "The phone call. The things I said in his apartment. I was trying to protect something that was already over. And it wasn't—it wasn't fair. To you."

I sit with this for a moment. The strange geometry of it—Alina Lindqvist, who called me honey and watched me unravel in a hallway, sitting across my desk to warn me about something worse.

I look at the desk. At my hands, which are still flat and still, which is either composure or shock and I genuinely can't tell which.

Here's what I know about Luca Ferrante: he's been in my treatment room for three months. He's been asking questions for most of those three months, and the questions shifted after the Lindholm conversation, and I chose to interpret that shift as a genuine change rather than a strategic pivot, because choosing to interpret things charitably is something I've been practicing and practicing doesn't always mean succeeding.

Here's what else I know: the information about my sexual history exists in exactly one place outside my own head. Josh knew. Jill knows. And Duane knows, because I told him in Marco's kitchen while wearing borrowed clothes, in the cracked and exhausted aftermath of a day that stripped everything else away.

None of them told Luca.

Which means Luca's information came from somewhere else. Someone else. A conversation overheard, a confidence misplaced, some chain of transmission I can't trace from here.

I think about Duane's apartment. The hallway. Alina in his doorway, and me standing in the elevator vestibule, and my face doing things I couldn't control, and her voice: You are a virgin, aren't you.

She was watching me.

And Alina and Luca exist in the same professional orbit. They've been photographed at three paddock events this season. They're not close—not that I've seen—but the paddock is small and people talk, and if Alina shared what she observed in that hallway with someone who was already looking for—

The room is very quiet.

"Okay," I say.

I look at her. Alina Lindqvist, six feet tall, cheekbones that could cut glass, sitting in Oliver's sprawling chair in my treatment room, telling me the truth. It would have been easier for her not to come. It would have been easier to stay in the paddock and let me find out some other way, or not find out at all.

"Thank you for telling me," I say.

She nods. Stands.

Then she leaves.

I sit in the treatment room for eleven minutes. I know it's eleven because there's a clock on the wall, the kind with a second hand, and I watch it go around twice and most of a third time while the noise of qualifying preparation builds outside.

Broken, Luca said. Can't. Dysfunction.

The clinical part of my brain—the part that has spent six months building a professional life out of exactly the tools that were supposed to be the problem—wants to make a list. Sources, transmission routes, potential professional damage, actionable steps. Give the feeling somewhere to go that isn't just—in my chest, heavy and hot, the specific weight of something private being handled by someone who had no right to touch it.

The other part of my brain just hurts.

I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up again.

I don't call Duane. He's in the car in twenty minutes—the Q3 session, the final qualifying runs, the championship points that make every decision this weekend load-bearing. Whatever conversation this requires is not a conversation for twenty minutes before he gets in the car.

I text Oliver instead: Are you in the paddock?