98

Marianna POV

He arrives at the Kinetic space, still in team kit, hair slightly damp from the post-qualifying shower. He closes the door behind him and reads the room in approximately two seconds—me sitting on the edge of Table 3, hands in my lap, the specific quality of someone who has been waiting and has used the waiting time to organize her thoughts rather than spiral through them.

He sits in the chair across from me. Oliver's sprawling chair. Alina's chair, from this afternoon.

"Tell me," he says.

So I do.

I keep it clean, the way McCartney delivers information. Alina's visit. What Luca has been saying. The word that's been circulating through paddock conversations. The probable chain of transmission from his apartment hallway to Alina's careless dinner conversation to Luca's deliberate distribution of something that was never his to touch.

He listens without interrupting. His face does the controlled thing, the mask settling into place, but underneath it something is happening—I can see it in the quality of his stillness, the way his jaw works once and then stops.

When I finish he's quiet for a long moment.

"How long have you known?" he says.

"Since this afternoon. Alina came here between Q2 and Q3."

"Alina told you."

"Yes."

He absorbs this. "Who else knows?"

"Oliver. I told him before qualifying. He was going to—" I pause. "He said he'd be in the media pen. Redirect certain conversations. I don't know if he did anything or what the result was."

"Oliver," Duane says, in the tone of someone filing new information about a person they thought they already had comprehensively filed.

"He was helpful," I say.

"I'm sure he was." A pause. "I need to talk to the team principal."

"I know."

"Tonight."

"I know." I look at my hands. "Before you do—I need to tell you something first."

He waits.

"I'm not—" I start. Stop. Try again. "I've been sitting here for the last forty minutes and I've been thinking about what Luca is saying. The word he's using. And I want to be clear, before you go do whatever you're going to do about it, that I've decided it doesn't define me." I look up. "It hurt. It still hurts, hearing that it's been passed around like that. But I know what I've built here. I know what I can do. And I'm not going to let Josh's word, or Luca's use of it, become the story of who I am in this paddock."

Duane looks at me.

"Okay," he says.

"That's it? Okay?"

"What else would I say?"

"I don't know. Something—more."

"You just told me you've decided who you are," he says. "What would more add to that?"

I think about it. "Nothing," I admit.

"Then okay is right." He leans forward slightly, elbows on knees. "I'm still talking to the team principal."

"I know."

"Not because you need defending. Because what Luca did is a professional conduct violation and it needs to be addressed professionally." His voice is even. Precise. "Those are two separate things."

"They are," I agree.

He stands. Doesn't move toward the door yet—just stands, looking at me with that quality of attention.

"The fragment," he says. "At Spa. And the other ones."

"What about them?"

"Have you found a therapist yet?"

"I've been in Monza for four days."

"There are phones in Monza."

"Duane."

"There are phones in Monza, Marianna." Not unkind. Just persistent. "What Luca did doesn't change what you said on the beach. That you wanted to understand it. That you thought it might be—" He stops. Chooses. "That there might be something there."

I look at him. The Italian evening outside the motorhome walls. The paddock doing its post-qualifying wind-down, the organized chaos of a weekend that's still going.

"I'll call someone when I get back to Miami," I say. "I meant it."

"Good."

He moves to the door. His hand on the frame—the pause that belongs to him, the one that means there's one more thing that arrives last because it's the heaviest.

"What he said," Duane says, to the door. "Broken." A beat. "He doesn't know what he's talking about."

He leaves.