🦋

Group Chat: Team 33

(Members: Max Verstappen, Jos Verstappen, Raymond Vermeulen)

Max: Serious question.

Raymond: I already regret this.

Jos: If this is about tyres, ask GP.

Max: It is not about tyres.

Raymond: That’s worse.

Max: What do you do with a woman who is not impressed when you win races?

Jos: …

Raymond: …

Jos: What do you mean not impressed?

Max: I mean she said congratulations and then went back to work.

Raymond: Like immediately?

Max: Yes.

Jos: Good.

Max: What do you mean good?

Jos: It means she has eyes.

Raymond: Max.

Max: What.

Raymond: You have a crush.

Max: I do not.

Jos: You absolutely do.

Max: This is not helpful.

Raymond: You’re asking two men who watched you grow up how to impress a woman who does not care that you win races.

Jos: That’s new for you.

Max: She is very smart.

Raymond: Oh no.

Jos: Oh dear god.

Max: Stop.

Raymond: She works with you, doesn’t she?

Max: …

Jos: She’s not a fan.

Max: No.

Raymond: She’s not impressed by money.

Max: No.

Jos: She’s not impressed by trophies.

Max: Correct.

Raymond: Max.

Jos: Son.

Max: What.

Raymond: This is serious.

Jos: You really like her.

Max: I am just asking for advice!

Raymond: You never ask for advice.

Jos: Who is she?

Max: No.

Raymond: Tell us.

Max: Absolutely not.

Jos: Does she have a name?

Max: …

Raymond: Max.

Max: She fixes the simulator.

Jos: ENGINEER.

Raymond: ENGINEER.

Jos: This keeps getting worse for you.

Max: Why?

Raymond: Because you can’t impress her by being Max Verstappen.

Jos: You have to impress her by being a person.

Max: I am a person!

Jos: Does she laugh at your jokes?

Max: Sometimes.

Raymond: Oh you’re finished.

Jos: What have you done already?

Max: I brought her groceries once.

Raymond: YOU WHAT.

Jos: MAX.

Max: She had a migraine!

Raymond: …

Jos: …

Raymond: Okay. That’s actually decent.

Jos: Don’t ruin it.

Max: How do I not ruin it?

Raymond: You stop trying to impress her.

Jos: You listen.

Raymond: You show up.

Jos: You don’t talk about winning.

Raymond: And you don’t scare her off by being intense.

Max: I am not intense.

Jos: You texted us for girl advice.

Raymond: At midnight.

Max: I hate both of you.

Jos: We want to know her name.

Raymond: Yes.

Max: No.

Jos: Is she tall?

Max: Yes.

Raymond: Dark hair.

Max: I’m muting this chat.

Jos: You’re in love.

***

Charlotte did not plan to tell him.

That was the important part.

She had spent too many years being private for privacy to be accidental. 

Silence was not a habit with Charlotte Fischer. It was architecture. Carefully designed. Structurally sound. Reinforced in all the places people usually tried to enter.

So no, she did not plan it.

She simply returned to work two days after the migraine, found the sim wing behaving with its usual mix of competence and mild chaos, and saw Max Verstappen standing near the simulator with his race suit unzipped to his waist, talking to GP with the distracted intensity of someone pretending to listen while watching the room for something else.

Her, apparently.

Because his eyes found her almost immediately.

Charlotte stopped just inside the doorway.

Max straightened.

Not much.

Enough.

GP noticed too, because of course he did. His gaze flicked from Max to Charlotte and back again with the unbearable calm of a man filing away evidence for later use.

Charlotte ignored him.

Mostly.

She crossed the room, tablet tucked beneath one arm, and set her coffee down at her workstation. The far console lit automatically as she woke it, screens filling with data, graphs, the clean language of things that could be measured.

Work first.

Always.

Max waited.

She felt him do it.

That was new.

People usually either approached too quickly or avoided her entirely after finding out something unpleasant. They overcorrected. Softened their voices. Watched her like she might break, as if cancer were a ghost that could be summoned by the wrong tone.

Max did not do that.

He simply waited until GP walked away to terrorise someone else about track limits, then came over with his hands in his pockets.

“Hey,” he said.

Charlotte looked up.

“Hi.”

A pause.

His eyes moved over her face, quick and careful. Not searching for damage. Just checking.

“Better?” he asked.

That was acceptable.

Not are you okay?

Not how are you feeling?

Not the soft, unbearable voice.

Just better.

Charlotte nodded once. “Better.”

“Good.”

Another pause.

He glanced toward her screen. “You are not going to work through lunch because you missed two days, right?”

Charlotte raised an eyebrow.

Max looked back at her with infuriating steadiness.

“I was told to ask.”

“Hannah?”

“And GP.”

“Traitors,” Charlotte said.

His mouth twitched. “They seemed very proud.”

She should have left it there.

A normal conversation. Almost easy. Enough to acknowledge the groceries, the flat, the fact that he had seen her at less than full operating capacity and had somehow not become strange about it.

Instead, Charlotte looked at him, really looked, and felt the small loose thread of it tugging.

He knew some of the story.

Not because she had given it to him.

Because someone else had.

Because he had turned up at her door with crackers and electrolytes and terrible ginger chews, and because he had earned, inconveniently, the right not to stand in half-information.

Charlotte hated half-information.

It made systems unstable.

“Max,” she said.

He went still immediately.

Not alarmed.

Attentive.

“Yes?”

She glanced toward the corridor beyond the sim room, then toward one of the small meeting rooms off the side. Empty. Glass-walled, but quiet enough, and nobody in the department was foolish enough to interrupt her when her face looked like this.

“Do you have five minutes?”

Max nodded. “Yes.”

Max followed her into the meeting room and closed the door behind them. He did not sit until she did. Another small, irritatingly thoughtful thing.

Charlotte placed her tablet on the table, aligning it with the edge because her hands needed something precise to do.

“You found out about the tumour,” she said.

Max’s expression changed.

Only slightly.

“Yes.”

“From the sim team.”

“Yes.”

“They should not have had to tell you.”

His brow furrowed. “They didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” Charlotte folded her hands together on the table. “I’m not angry.”

“Okay.”

“But I dislike half-information,” she said. “And you have been very careful around me.”

Max opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Then, because apparently he had some sense of self-preservation, said, “Yes.”

Charlotte almost smiled.

Almost.

“I don’t need careful,” she said.

“I know.”

“It was an oligodendroglioma,” she said.

Max went completely still.

The word sat between them, clinical and ugly.

Charlotte had always preferred the clinical names. They were less slippery than euphemisms. Less dramatic than mass. More honest than health scare.

“Low-grade,” she continued. “Slow-growing. Which sounds comforting until you realise slow-growing also means it can take a very long time for anyone to notice.”

Max did not interrupt.

Good.

“The first symptoms were easy to dismiss,” Charlotte said. “Headaches. Fatigue. Some visual disturbances. I was working too much, sleeping too little, living mostly on coffee, so it was not a very difficult conclusion to reach.”

“Stress,” Max said quietly.

“Yes. That was the first assumption. Stress. Then migraines. Then possibly hormones. Then dehydration. Then, eventually, I had a seizure.”

His jaw tightened.

Charlotte looked down at her hands.

“That clarified things.”

“Charlotte.”

She lifted her eyes.

He looked like he wanted to say something and was fighting himself not to.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” A beat. “Keep going.”

That, too, was acceptable.

She leaned back slightly.

“They did imaging after that. MRI first. Then more imaging. Then a biopsy. It was in a difficult place, but not impossible. I was lucky.”

The word tasted strange in her mouth.

Lucky.

It was true, technically.

Also obscene.

“They operated,” she continued. “Removed as much of it as they safely could. Which was most of it. Not all. With that kind, sometimes removing everything is less important than not destroying the rest of the person in the process.”

Max’s face had gone very calm.

Too calm.

Charlotte recognised controlled anger when she saw it. She had lived around men with versions of it long enough to know the shape.

But his was not directed at her.

That helped.

“After that, radiation,” she said. “Then chemotherapy. Monitoring. Endless scans. Endless bloodwork. Endless people saying the word ‘support’ as though it was something one could simply collect from a shelf.”

His eyes flicked to hers.

She looked away before he could see too much.

“I have a titanium plate,” she said, tapping two fingers lightly just above and behind her ear. “Here. It keeps everything where it is meant to be.”

Max inhaled slowly.

“You have a metal plate in your skull.”

“Yes.”

“Most days, I am fine,” she said. “I work. I think. I drive. I crochet hats for my cat. I function normally.”

“Except the migraines.”

“Except the migraines,” she agreed. “And the scans.”

“How often?”

“Less often now.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the answer you are getting.”

Max considered pushing.

She watched him decide not to.

That mattered more than she wanted it to.

“The important thing,” Charlotte said, “is that it is stable. Boringly stable. I like boring. Boring is excellent.”

Max nodded once.

“Okay.”

She studied him.

No pity.

No horror.

No flinch at the word cancer, though she could see the weight of it in him. He did not rush to reassure her. Did not tell her she was brave. Did not say something useless about strength, as if survival were a personality trait instead of a sequence of medical interventions and stubborn luck.

He simply sat with it. With her.

“You dealt with all of that on your own.”

It was not a question.

Charlotte’s shoulders tightened anyway.

“I had doctors,” she said.

Max nodded.

“And Tilly.”

His mouth softened.

“Yes. And Tilly.”

“She was very helpful.”

“I believe that.”

“She has a better bedside manner than most consultants.”

That pulled a small laugh from him.

Charlotte looked up.

His face was still serious underneath it.

“You shouldn’t have had to do it alone,” Max said.

There it was.

The sentence she had been waiting for and dreading.

Her spine straightened automatically. “I didn’t ask for help.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t want anyone carrying that. It would have been unfair.”

“To who?”

Charlotte opened her mouth.

Stopped.

Max’s gaze held hers. Not pushing. Not letting her escape easily either.

That was annoying.

“It was mine,” she said eventually.

Max shook his head once.

“Cancer is not something you own because it happens to you.”

The sentence landed with unexpected force.

Charlotte looked at him.

He looked almost surprised by his own certainty, as if he had not planned to say it.

She swallowed.

“I survived,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m fine.”

“Most of the time,” he said, using her own words against her.

Charlotte narrowed her eyes.

“That was rude.”

“It was accurate.”

“GP has been a bad influence on you.”

“No,” Max said. “You have.”

That made her pause.

His expression shifted as soon as he realised what he had said. Not regret, exactly. More like awareness that something had slipped out from behind the guard.

Charlotte stared at him.

Max stared back.

The air in the room changed.

Very slightly.

Enough.

She looked away first.

“That is the information,” she said, briskly, because she had apparently decided to survive this by becoming insufferably administrative. “Oligodendroglioma. Surgery. Radiation. Chemotherapy. Titanium plate. Migraines. Stable.”

Max nodded slowly.

“Okay.”

“I don’t want pity.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want people treating me like glass.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want this to become the most interesting thing about me.”

“It isn’t.”

The answer came too quickly.

Charlotte looked at him.

Max did not look away.

“It’s not,” he said again. “It is something that happened to you. It is not all of you.”

Her throat tightened.

That was unfortunate.

She picked up her tablet to give her hands something to do.

“Well,” she said, voice dry enough to recover some dignity. “Good. Because the simulator is still more interesting.”

Max’s mouth twitched.

“Is it?”

“Infinitely.”

“I am also more interesting than cancer.”

“Debatable.”

He laughed.

A real one. Quiet, surprised, warm.

Charlotte felt something in her chest loosen and immediately distrusted it.

Max stood when she did.

Still careful.

Still not too close.

At the door, he paused.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said.

Charlotte looked at him.

There was no demand in his face. No triumph at being trusted. No expectation that this changed what he was owed from her.

Just gratitude.

That was almost worse.

“You showed up,” she said.

Max’s brow furrowed slightly.

“What?”

“With the groceries,” Charlotte said. “You showed up. I dislike loose ends.”

He studied her for a moment.

Then his expression softened.

“Right,” he said.

It was not right.

They both knew that.

Still, he let her have it.

Charlotte opened the door and stepped back into the sim room.

GP looked up immediately.

Hannah, from the far side of the room, did the same.

Charlotte ignored both of them with great dignity.

Max followed her out, and though he said nothing, he stayed near enough that she could feel the steady fact of him without being crowded by it.

She returned to her workstation and pulled up the data.

The model was still wrong.

Good.

That, at least, was easy.

Behind her, Max said quietly, “Lunch later?”

Charlotte did not look at him.

“Maybe.”

A pause.

Then, because she could feel him smiling and found that intensely irritating, she added, “If you don’t bring ginger chews.”

Max laughed under his breath.

“No ginger chews.”

Charlotte kept her eyes on the screen.

The data blurred for half a second.

She blinked it clear.

She had not planned to tell him.

But she had.

***

Gianpiero Lambiase considered himself a man of logic.

Correlation.

Cause and effect.

Input, output, consequence.

A car behaved badly because something was wrong. A driver complained because the car behaved badly. An engineer fixed the thing that was wrong, or at least found a more interesting way for it to be wrong.

Simple.

Predictable.

Manageable.

Human beings, unfortunately, were not.

Which was why, after several weeks of watching Max Verstappen orbit Charlotte Fischer with all the subtlety of a safety car deployment, GP reached the only rational conclusion available to him.

If the system would not naturally converge, he would have to intervene.

Professionally.

Strategically.

With alcohol.

The pub night was, officially, a team morale thing.

That was the phrase he used, anyway.

Morale. Bonding. A low-pressure environment. A chance for everyone to stop glaring at sim data and remember that they were all, allegedly, people.

Unofficially, it was an operation.

GP had suggested it in a meeting with the exact tone he used when proposing a setup change he already knew was correct: calm, neutral, uninteresting enough that no one thought to question it.

Hannah had understood immediately.

Too immediately.

Her eyes had lit up with an expression GP did not trust at all.

“Oh,” she had said. “That’s a very good idea.”

GP had looked at her.

Hannah had smiled.

That was when he knew this was either going to work beautifully or become his fault forever.

Possibly both.

He arrived early.

Of course he did.

A good engineer inspected conditions before committing to a strategy.

The pub was decent enough. Warm lighting. Sticky tables. A bar that looked as if it had seen several generations of bad decisions and retained all of them in the carpet. The beer was passable in the sense that it existed and was cold.

GP did a slow sweep of the room.

Too close to the door: bad, Charlotte would escape.

Too near the bar: too much traffic, Max would get distracted by strangers.

Corner table: ideal. Limited exits. Good visibility. Natural grouping. High probability of interaction.

He selected the table.

Then the chairs.

Max here.

Charlotte there.

Hannah across, to prevent immediate retreat.

GP at an angle where he could observe without appearing to observe.

Race engineering, he had found, transferred surprisingly well to social manipulation.

Max arrived first.

Naturally.

He came in with the wary expression of a man approaching a damp street circuit on tyres that had not quite reached temperature.

“This is unnecessary,” Max said, even as he sat exactly where GP indicated.

GP took a sip of his drink.

“No one forced you to come.”

“You texted me three times.”

“I reminded you.”

“You said it would be good for morale.”

“It will be.”

Max narrowed his eyes. “Whose morale?”

GP did not answer.

That, in retrospect, may have been a mistake.

Max looked around the pub, clocked the empty chair beside him, and frowned.

“Why am I sitting here?”

“Because that is where the chair is.”

Max stared at him.

GP stared back.

A lesser man would have cracked.

GP had survived several championship campaigns with Max Verstappen. He could survive one suspicious look in a pub.

Ten minutes later, Charlotte arrived.

Or, more accurately, Hannah delivered her.

Charlotte came through the door with her coat still on, shoulders slightly hunched against the evening chill, expression polite in the way people were polite when they had been promised this would be brief and were already preparing to hold everyone to that promise.

Hannah walked beside her, looking entirely too pleased with herself.

GP made another mental note.

Co-conspirator: enthusiastic. Possibly dangerous.

“You made it,” Hannah said brightly, guiding Charlotte toward the table with the kind of subtle pressure normally used to direct drivers toward media obligations.

Charlotte gave her a sideways look. “I was promised one drink.”

“You were promised the option of one drink.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“You can have water,” Hannah said. “At a pub. Like a criminal.”

Charlotte opened her mouth to reply.

Then she saw Max.

GP watched the exact moment it happened.

A tiny pause.

Barely anything.

Her gaze flicked to Max, then to the empty chair beside him, then to Hannah, whose expression had become aggressively innocent.

Charlotte understood at once.

Good, GP thought.

Smart enough to know she had been ambushed. Polite enough not to make it everyone’s problem.

Max, meanwhile, had gone very still.

Not visibly to most people, perhaps. To most people, he probably looked normal. Maybe a little reserved.

GP was not most people.

Max’s shoulders had shifted. His attention had sharpened. His face had done that infuriatingly blank thing it did when something mattered enough that he did not want anyone to know it mattered.

“Hi,” Max said.

Charlotte’s mouth twitched.

“Hi.”

She sat.

Directly beside him.

The operation entered its most delicate phase.

GP took another sip of his drink.

No sparks. No dramatic music. No immediate disaster.

Just two people sitting next to each other with enough tension between them to power a small generator.

Excellent.

Conversation began badly, which was to say normally.

Work first.

Work was safe. Work was neutral. Work allowed Charlotte to answer questions without appearing to reveal anything and allowed Max to pretend he was simply interested in the latest simulator adjustments rather than the woman explaining them.

Hannah did most of the heavy lifting early.

Bless her.

She asked Charlotte about the model update. Asked Max about the last run. Asked GP something deliberately annoying about a correlation note so he could complain for ninety seconds and give everyone time to settle.

Charlotte kept her coat on for the first fifteen minutes.

That was data.

Max noticed too. GP saw his glance flick briefly to the coat, then away.

Interesting.

Max did not ask her if she was cold.

Good.

He was learning.

Instead, he shifted slightly when someone opened the door and a draft moved through the room, positioning himself between Charlotte and the worst of it without making a production of the gesture.

Charlotte noticed.

She said nothing.

But ten minutes later, she took off her coat.

GP made a mental note.

Nonverbal adjustment accepted. Continue.

Max was trying not to look at her.

He was terrible at it.

Charlotte was trying not to respond to him more than necessary.

She was somewhat better at it.

Not perfect.

GP caught the small things. The way her gaze returned to Max when someone else was speaking. The way Max’s attention changed whenever she said something dry under her breath. The way Charlotte answered him with one extra sentence when one would have been sufficient.

This was not flirting.

Not quite.

This was two heavily guarded people standing on opposite sides of an invisible line, pretending neither of them had noticed the line was there.

GP had seen worse starts.

Frankly, with Max, he had expected worse.

At some point, conversation shifted from work to cats.

GP did not know how.

He suspected Max had engineered it badly and Charlotte had allowed it because cats were one of the few subjects she seemed to accept without suspicion.

Max said something about cats being better than most people.

Charlotte replied, “That is an insult to cats. They are better than all people.”

Max laughed.

Not the quick public laugh he used when something was mildly amusing.

A real one.

Low. Surprised.

Charlotte looked pleased for half a second before she caught herself.

Then Max, emboldened by what GP could only describe as a dangerous increase in confidence, said something about Tilly’s mushroom hat looking aerodynamic.

Charlotte snorted.

Actually snorted.

Short. Inelegant. Completely unguarded.

GP nearly inhaled his beer.

Hannah’s eyes snapped to his from across the table.

There it is, GP thought. Repeatable condition achieved.

Max noticed too.

Of course he did.

He went still for the space of a heartbeat, then smiled down at his drink like an idiot.

Charlotte, realising she had betrayed herself by showing amusement, immediately reached for her glass and took a sip with excessive dignity.

Too late.

The data had been recorded.

GP leaned back in his chair, deeply satisfied.

He had watched Max win races for impossible positions. Had heard him describe understeer with the fury of a man personally betrayed by physics. Had talked him down, wound him up, managed him through rain, strategy errors, questionable stewarding, and cars that deserved to be pushed into the sea.

This, somehow, was more stressful.

Because with the car, GP could make changes.

Here, all he could do was create conditions and hope the driver did not bin it at Turn One.

So far, Max was keeping it on track.

Barely.

But he was.

Hannah lifted her glass slightly from across the table.

GP met her eyes.

A nod passed between them.

Wingman confirmed.

He hated that this was his life.

He also, privately, thought that he was very good at it.

After that, GP stopped intervening.

A good engineer knew when to stop touching the setup.

Push too hard and the whole thing became unstable. Leave it alone once it started working, and sometimes the system found balance.

So he let the evening run.

People moved seats. Someone ordered another round. A debate broke out about whether the simulator room coffee was technically drinkable or merely warm punishment. Hannah laughed at something one of the performance engineers said. GP argued for five solid minutes about tyre model assumptions because he was, at his core, still himself.

And Max and Charlotte stayed beside each other.

That was the important part.

They were not obvious about it.

Charlotte was too controlled for that. Max was too unused to wanting something without immediately knowing how to win it.

But slowly, almost imperceptibly, the space between them changed.

Charlotte angled slightly toward him.

Max stopped trying to force the conversation into something impressive and simply listened.

She told him something about Tilly refusing to wear the strawberry hat.

He told her one of his cats once fell asleep in his sim rig and refused to move.

Charlotte laughed again.

Softer this time.

Less surprised.

Max smiled like he had no idea what to do with being happy about something so small.

GP looked away.

Some things, even for a race engineer, were not for constant observation.

By the time the night began to wind down, Max and Charlotte were still talking.

Not loudly.

Not flirtatiously in any obvious way.

Just close enough that they did not have to raise their voices.

Their heads inclined toward each other, the rest of the pub blurring around them. Charlotte’s posture had lost some of its careful rigidity. Max had stopped checking the room every few minutes. For once, neither of them looked like they were waiting for the next problem.

They looked present.

GP stood, collecting his jacket.

Hannah appeared beside him, far too smug.

“Well,” she said quietly.

GP did not look at her. “Do not say it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were.”

“I was going to say excellent strategy.”

GP sighed.

Across the table, Max said something that made Charlotte’s mouth curve again.

Not quite a smile.

Close enough.

GP felt, to his own irritation, a flicker of warmth.

Race engineer. Problem solver. Occasional unwilling architect of human connection.

Honestly, this job had far too many transferable skills.

As he stepped toward the door, he glanced back once.

Max was listening to Charlotte with the same intense focus he usually reserved for explaining what the car was doing wrong at high speed.

Charlotte was letting him.

That mattered.

Maybe more than either of them understood yet.

GP smiled faintly to himself and pushed open the pub door into the cool evening air.

Sometimes, all a system needed was the right setup.

The correct conditions.

And one very tired race engineer willing to put two stubborn idiots exactly where they needed to be.

***

Slack Channel:  #general-racing-not-business-definitely-not-gossip

Members: far too many Red Bull Racing employees

Comms_Jess: morning after pub night check ARE THEY DATING YET

Aero_Matt: good morning to you too

Comms_Jess: answer the question

Sim_Ruby: no

Comms_Jess: how do you know

Sim_Ruby: because Charlotte arrived alone, on time, with coffee, and looked like she had slept exactly five hours and filed the evening under “manageable social exposure”

Garage_Pete: so romantic progress

Composite_Tom: massive romantic progress

Powertrains_Nina: Max arrived twenty minutes early

Aero_Matt: for what

Powertrains_Nina: unknown

Strategy_Leah: he has no meeting until 10

Comms_Jess: WHERE IS HE

Powertrains_Nina: guess

Aero_Matt: sim wing

Powertrains_Nina: sim wing

Comms_Jess: I AM ALIVE

Strategy_Hannah: Before this becomes unbearable: no, they are not dating.

Garage_Pete: yet

Strategy_Hannah: Pete.

Garage_Pete: sorry

Composite_Tom: but spiritually?

Strategy_Hannah: What does that even mean?

Aero_Matt: spiritually Max is already co-parenting the cat

Comms_Jess: Tilly’s Stepdad remains canon

Engineering_GP: Nothing about last night is canon.

Sim_Ruby: GP, you made a seating chart.

Engineering_GP: For logistical efficiency.

Strategy_Hannah: You put them beside each other in a corner table with limited escape routes.

Engineering_GP: Correct. Efficient.

PR_Sophie: Reminder that workplace relationships are a sensitive topic and should not be discussed in official channels.

Aero_Matt: this channel has “not business” in the name

PR_Sophie: That is not legally meaningful.

Garage_Pete: what if we discuss it as a theoretical regulatory framework

PR_Sophie: I am begging you to do work.

Comms_Jess: okay but last night they left at the same time same direction he walked her out she did not look like she wanted to file a complaint that is something

Sim_Ruby: Charlotte not looking like she wants to file a complaint is not the same as dating

Composite_Tom: for Charlotte it might be

Powertrains_Nina: she laughed twice

Aero_Matt: three times if you count the Tilly reference comment

Strategy_Hannah: We are not counting laughs like sectors.

Engineering_GP: Thank you.

Strategy_Leah: Sector 1: snort Sector 2: soft laugh Sector 3: “I’ll be the judge of that”

Engineering_GP: I take back my thanks.

Comms_Jess: wait what happened with the grocery thing

Aero_Matt: what grocery thing

Garage_Pete: YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE GROCERY THING?

PR_Sophie: Why is there a grocery thing.

Sim_Ruby: Oh no.

Powertrains_Nina: this is the moment Ruby finds out

Comms_Jess: FINDS OUT WHAT

Strategy_Hannah: Careful.

Garage_Pete: not gossip way just context way

Comms_Jess: I am seated

Sim_Ruby: Charlotte had a bad migraine a while ago and called in sick

Aero_Matt: okay

Powertrains_Nina: Max found out

Aero_Matt: of course he did

Comms_Jess: continue

Sim_Ruby: and he brought groceries to her flat

Comms_Jess: HE WHAT

Composite_Tom: there it is

Comms_Jess: HE WENT TO HER FLAT???

Strategy_Hannah: With permission-adjacent intent and no pressure. Before anyone makes this weird.

Engineering_GP: It was surprisingly well executed.

Aero_Matt: GP praising Max’s flirting logistics. Historic.

Engineering_GP: I am praising his lack of stupidity in a delicate situation. Different.

Comms_Jess: what groceries

Powertrains_Nina: migraine things

Comms_Jess: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN

Sim_Ruby: crackers electrolytes peppermint tea instant soup eye mask ginger chews

Comms_Jess: oh my god

Aero_Matt: oh that’s actually very sweet

Composite_Tom: ginger chews is insane detail work

Garage_Pete: man came prepared like a pit stop

Strategy_Leah: migraine-safe grocery strategy

Engineering_GP: He did ask questions beforehand.

Comms_Jess: HE ASKED QUESTIONS BEFOREHAND

Strategy_Hannah: Quietly. Respectfully.

Comms_Jess: I am going to climb the walls

PR_Sophie: I am choosing to believe none of this is real.

Aero_Matt: denial is not a comms strategy

PR_Sophie: It is today.

Comms_Jess: so let me understand Max Verstappen who cannot be normal about a cat in a mushroom hat brought migraine-safe groceries to Charlotte’s flat then sat beside her at the pub then listened to her talk about Tilly’s strawberry bonnet for five minutes and they are NOT dating?

Sim_Ruby: correct

Comms_Jess: that is offensive

Composite_Tom: to whom

Comms_Jess: me. romance. narrative structure.

Powertrains_Nina: Did Charlotte let him in?

Strategy_Hannah: Yes.

Aero_Matt: OH

Garage_Pete: HUGE

Strategy_Hannah: For five minutes.

Comms_Jess: still huge

Sim_Ruby: For Charlotte, yes.

Strategy_Leah: Charlotte allowing someone into her space voluntarily is basically a podium

Engineering_GP: Do not compare emotional vulnerability to podiums.

Aero_Matt: but it helps us understand

Engineering_GP: That is sadly true.

Comms_Jess: did Tilly meet him

Powertrains_Nina: yes

Comms_Jess: AND?

Sim_Ruby: Tilly tolerated him

Aero_Matt: that’s approval

Composite_Tom: from cats that is marriage consent

Strategy_Hannah: Do not make this weird.

Garage_Pete: too late

***

The file was too thin.

That was the first thing that irritated him.

Not because thin files were unusual. Most people, if they were sensible, left less of themselves behind than fiction suggested. Lives did not always resolve into neat public records and searchable histories. Privacy still existed, occasionally.

But this was different.

This file had the shape of something deliberately emptied.

Charlotte Wolff.

Born in Austria.

Educated in the United Kingdom.

Cambridge graduate.

Then nothing.

No professional profile worth mentioning. No public social media beyond the kind of abandoned accounts people made at sixteen and forgot existed. No conference appearances. No consulting firm biography. No start-up footprint. No neat, high-achiever progression from Cambridge into a visible career.

Just a clean drop after graduation.

As if she had stepped out of the record and closed the door behind her.

He leaned back in his chair, the desk lamp catching on the edge of the file.

Interesting.

People did not disappear like that by accident.

Not people with money behind them. Not people with the kind of education that left fingerprints everywhere. Not people whose fathers could make a phone call and have half of Europe answer.

He had been asked to locate and confirm wellbeing.

Simple brief.

Discreet.

Professional.

But simple briefs were rarely simple when they came from men like Toto Wolff.

He turned back to the screen.

Cambridge was the first thread.

That, at least, opened easily enough.

Charlotte Wolff had graduated with honours. Quietly excellent marks. No disciplinary history. No scandal. No gaps. No drama. Just the clean academic record of someone who had arrived, worked relentlessly, and left with the kind of results people described as impressive because calling them obsessive felt rude.

Then he found the amendment.

Reissued records.

Different surname.

Charlotte Fischer.

Her mother’s maiden name.

He sat with that for a moment.

Not a marriage name. Not a clerical correction. Not some harmless administrative preference.

A choice.

A clean one.

A person did not take their dead mother’s name after university because it was convenient. They did it because the other name had become too heavy to carry.

Or too dangerous.

Or too much of someone else’s.

Once he had Fischer, the trail opened with almost insulting ease.

Employment paperwork.

Address history.

A visa update.

Internal motorsport directories that were never meant to be interesting to anyone outside payroll and compliance.

Red Bull Racing.

Simulator department.

Milton Keynes.

He stared at the line for a second.

Then he laughed once under his breath.

“Well,” he muttered. “That is pointed.”

Of all the places in Formula One she could have gone, Charlotte Fischer had chosen the rival.

Not Mercedes.

Not one of the satellite circles. Not a technical supplier. Not somewhere neutral and dignified where her father’s name would still have opened doors quietly.

Red Bull.

And not in a public-facing role either.

No cameras. No paddock walk. No glamorous engineering feature. No easy narrative about Toto Wolff’s brilliant daughter crossing enemy lines.

She had gone into the bowels of the machine.

Simulator work.

Hidden. Crucial. Unseen by design.

That choice told him more than any diary could have.

She had not wanted to be found.

She had wanted to be useful somewhere no one would know why she mattered.

He should have stopped there.

He had, technically, fulfilled the brief.

Charlotte Fischer existed. She worked. She paid rent. She had a National Insurance trail, employment records, bank activity, utilities, a life assembled neatly enough to satisfy the question of whether she was alive.

But he was good at his job because he disliked unanswered questions.

And Charlotte Fischer was full of them.

So he dug.

Not clumsily. Never that.

He knew the difference between intrusion and pattern. Knew what not to touch. Knew how to read around sealed doors without kicking them open.

Colleagues described her in the same handful of words.

Brilliant.

Quiet.

Private.

Unshowy.

Unfailingly competent.

That last one appeared so often he began to wonder if it was a kind of affection. Some people were loved loudly. Some people were loved by a room full of engineers saying, with absolute certainty, she knows what she’s doing.

There were other words too.

Careful.

Stubborn.

Self-contained.

Protected.

That one interested him.

Protected, but not fragile.

Protected in the way people spoke about someone who would hate the word protected being used about her. Protected in the way a department quietly adjusted itself around a boundary without ever naming it.

No one seemed to pity her.

But they all seemed to know not to push.

That contradiction stayed with him.

So he kept going.

The medical trail was harder.

As it should have been.

Protected. Fragmented. Buried behind the appropriate walls.

But lives left pressure marks even when records stayed sealed.

A gap in work history that did not appear on the official profile.

Specialist appointments.

A hospital admission years back.

Neurology follow-ups.

Oncology referrals.

Monitoring that continued long after the kind of scare people dismissed and moved on from.

He pieced it together slowly.

Then, all at once.

Brain tumour.

Cancer.

Surgery.

Radiation.

Recovery.

He went very still.

The office around him seemed to quiet.

He had seen ugly things in this job. Marriages collapsing under surveillance. Heirs hiding addictions. Executives burying scandals under enough money to make morality feel optional.

But this was something else.

A young woman, estranged from one of the most powerful men in motorsport, had changed her name, disappeared into a rival team, and survived cancer without making a claim on any of the safety nets arranged for her.

No withdrawals from the trust.

No contact with the father.

No leverage.

No public sympathy.

No noise.

He exhaled slowly and sat back.

That explained the migraines noted in fragments of workplace gossip.

It explained the guardedness.

It explained why people around her sounded protective without sounding sentimental.

It explained the absence.

Not all of it.

Enough.

Charlotte Fischer had not vanished because she was lost.

She had endured.

That was different.

He looked again at the brief.

Locate. Confirm wellbeing.

A neat instruction.

A simple sentence designed to make this feel clean.

He now knew where she worked.

Where she lived.

What name she used.

What she had survived.

He knew enough to satisfy his client.

He also knew enough to understand that handing it over without restraint would be its own kind of violence.

Because this was not a missing person.

This was not a vulnerable adult wandering without support.

This was a woman who had built a life with intention. A woman who had removed herself from a family name, a family home, and a father’s financial reach with such precision that the silence itself should have been treated as an answer.

He opened the report template.

For several minutes, he did not type.

Then he began.

No embellishment.

No speculation dressed as insight.

No unnecessary address details beyond what the client’s legal authority allowed. No intimate reconstruction of the illness. No dramatic prose, though God knew the story invited it.

Just facts.

Charlotte Fischer was alive.

Professionally successful.

Employed in a senior technical capacity at Red Bull Racing.

Financially independent.

No indication of immediate danger.

No indication of criminal involvement.

No indication of instability.

No evidence of financial need.

He paused.

His fingers hovered above the keyboard.

Then, because professionalism did not have to mean cowardice, he added one final paragraph.

Subject appears to have deliberately and consistently structured her adult life to avoid contact with the client. Further inquiry or direct approach through her workplace is unlikely to be welcomed and may be perceived as intrusive.

He read it twice.

Then he added:

Recommendation: no further investigative action without subject’s consent.

There.

Not emotional.

Not moralising.

Clear.

He closed the report and leaned back in his chair.

For a long moment, he stared at the screen without seeing it.

Some mysteries were not meant to be solved.

Some people disappeared not because they wanted someone to follow, but because every previous form of being known had cost too much.

Charlotte Fischer had not fallen through the cracks.

She had found one.

And for the first time in a long career of finding people who did not always want to be found, he hoped his client understood the difference.

Because she had not vanished.

She had chosen herself.

Charlotte knew the migraine was bad when the apartment started to feel hostile.

The flat was quiet.  She had made sure of that. Curtains drawn. Overhead lights off. Kettle abandoned. Phone face down on the coffee table with every notification silenced. The world had been reduced to low amber light, soft fabric, and Tilly’s warm weight pressed against her hip.

Still, everything had edges.

The clock on the wall ticked too sharply. The refrigerator hummed with spite. Even the air seemed to press against her skin as if it had mass.

Charlotte lay very still on the couch, one hand resting over Tilly’s ribs, counting the cat’s slow, steady breathing.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

The migraine pulsed behind her eye, dull and insistent. Not the worst kind. Not the kind that made her vision fracture or sent nausea crawling up her throat.

Bad enough.

Bad enough that she had given up pretending she could work from home. Bad enough that she had closed the laptop after eleven minutes and stared at the ceiling in grim defeat while Hannah’s final message sat on her phone like a reprimand.

Do not log back in. I will know.

Charlotte had not logged back in.

This, apparently, was personal growth.

Tilly shifted against her side, purring faintly, as if pleased with this display of compliance.

“Yes,” Charlotte murmured. “You win.”

The doorbell rang.

Charlotte did not move.

For several seconds, she simply stared toward the hallway, offended by the very concept of visitors.

Wrong door, she thought. It had to be.

No one came to her flat unannounced. That was one of the reasons she liked it. People at work knew better. Delivery drivers left things downstairs. Hannah would text first. 

The bell rang again.

Tilly lifted her head.

Charlotte closed her eyes. “No.”

The universe, predictably, did not apologise.

She pushed herself upright with slow, careful movements, one hand braced against the arm of the couch until the room steadied. The migraine objected immediately, pressure blooming behind her right eye.

“Stay,” she told Tilly.

Tilly did not stay.

She followed Charlotte into the hallway, tail raised, already prepared to inspect whatever disturbance had entered their carefully managed ecosystem.

Charlotte opened the door.

And stopped.

Max Verstappen stood in her hallway.

For one long, surreal second, Charlotte’s brain refused to assemble the image properly.

Max Verstappen, four-time world champion.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull’s gravitational centre, the man half the factory treated like a temperamental national treasure.

Max.

Hoodie. Trainers. Hair slightly flattened like he had run a hand through it too many times. A paper bag clutched in one hand with the awkward solemnity of someone delivering classified materials.

Charlotte blinked. The hallway light stabbed directly into her skull. “…What are you doing here?”

It came out flatter than she meant it to.

Not rude. Not quite.

Just entirely without the energy required to make confusion sound polite.

Max straightened slightly. “Hi.”

Charlotte stared at him.

That was apparently all he had.

“Hi,” she repeated slowly.

He winced, as if aware of the poor start. “I heard you were sick.”

Charlotte closed her eyes for half a second.

Of course. Of course someone had told him. Of course her carefully contained absence had somehow become information that travelled.

“I have a migraine,” she said, because if people were going to discuss her, they could at least be accurate.

“I know,” Max said quickly. “I mean, I know now. They told me. Not you.”

That made her open her eyes again.

There was something in the way he said it. Not defensive, exactly. Careful. Like he understood there was a difference between being told and being trusted with something.

Charlotte looked at the bag.

Then at him.

Then back at the bag.

Max noticed and lifted it slightly.

“I brought things.”

“Things.”

“For migraines.”

The situation, already strange, tipped fully into the impossible.

Charlotte stared at him.

“You brought migraine things.”

“Yes.”

“To my flat.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Max’s mouth opened.

Closed.

Then he said, very plainly, “I googled.”

Charlotte was almost certain the migraine had made her start hallucinating.

“You googled.”

“The internet was very aggressive,” Max said, with the faint defensiveness of a man who had spent too long reading contradictory medical advice on his phone. “But Hannah said no scented things. So there are no scented things.”

Charlotte’s throat tightened before she could stop it.

That was irritating.

She should have told him to go home.

She should have said, thank you, that is kind, but unnecessary. She should have taken the bag, shut the door, returned to the couch and the dim, curated safety of being alone.

Instead, she stepped back.

“Come in,” she said.

Max looked so visibly relieved it would have been funny if her head did not hurt so much.

“But,” Charlotte added, lifting one finger, “if anything in that bag makes noise, smells strongly, or flashes, I will throw it into the street.”

Max nodded solemnly. “That is fair.”

He stepped inside like he had been given temporary diplomatic clearance.

Charlotte shut the door behind him, blocking out the cruel hallway light. The flat fell back into its low-lit quiet, though it felt different now. Not louder. Not crowded.

Altered.

Max stood in her small kitchen area and looked briefly too large for it, which was absurd, because Charlotte was not short and the flat was not tiny. Still, there was something about him that changed a room by entering it. Usually Charlotte found that kind of presence exhausting.

Today, he seemed to be trying very hard not to take up space.

That was worse. Or better.

She did not know.

He set the bag on the counter and began removing items with careful precision.

Electrolyte drinks. Plain crackers. Peppermint tea. Ginger chews. An eye mask. A small packet of instant soup. Something labelled low-sugar.

Charlotte stared.

“All of this is migraine-safe,” she said quietly.

Max glanced up, suddenly uncertain. “I checked.”

“I can see that.”

“I did not know what would help,” he admitted. “So I bought options.”

Options.

Not flowers. Not some dramatic gesture. Not something meant to make him look thoughtful in a way she could compliment.

Useful things. Quiet things. Things she might actually need.

Charlotte folded her arms, mostly because she did not know what else to do with her hands. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know.” The answer came immediately.

Not apologetic. Not defensive. 

“I wanted to,” he added.

Charlotte looked away.

That sentence was becoming a problem.

Tilly chose that moment to emerge from the hallway and inspect the intruder. She approached Max with the slow, imperious caution of a customs official.

Max went very still.

Not afraid. Respectful.

Charlotte watched him watching the cat.

“This is Tilly,” she said.

Max nodded gravely. “Hello, Tilly.”

Tilly sniffed his shoe.

Then his ankle.

Then flicked her tail, which Charlotte knew meant provisional tolerance.

“She is judging you,” Charlotte said.

“I understand.”

“You should. She’s very experienced.”

Max’s mouth twitched.

Tilly brushed once against his leg and then abandoned him, leaping back onto the couch as if her work was done.

Max looked after her. “She’s the cat from the hats.”

Charlotte’s head turned slowly.

“You know about the hats?”

Max froze. A beat too late. “I might have seen the account.”

“The account has thirty-eight followers.”

“Thirty-nine now.”

Charlotte stared at him.

The migraine pulsed.

Somehow, against all reason, she almost laughed. “You followed my cat’s Instagram?”

“It is a good account.”

“It is a terrible account.”

“No,” Max said seriously. “The mushroom hat is very good.”

Charlotte closed her eyes.

“I cannot believe I am having this conversation with a migraine.”

“Sorry.” But he sounded a little pleased.

She hated that she liked it.

Charlotte walked back toward the couch before the standing became too much. Tilly immediately rearranged herself to make room, because she was benevolent when she felt like it. Charlotte sat down carefully, one hand pressing briefly to her temple.

Max stayed where he was.

That, more than anything, made her look back at him.

He did not assume the invitation extended further than the doorway. Or the kitchen. Or the groceries. He had come all the way here and still waited to be allowed nearer.

Something softened in her chest.

It was very inconvenient.

“You can sit,” she said.

Max nodded and moved to the armchair instead of the empty space beside her.

Good. Terrible. Thoughtful.

“Five minutes,” Charlotte added.

“Okay.”

“I mean that.”

“I know.”

He sat carefully, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped. He did not look around the flat with obvious curiosity. Did not ask questions about the books stacked by the window or the yarn basket half-hidden under the side table or the framed photograph turned just slightly away from the room.

He simply sat.

Quietly.

Charlotte sank back against the cushions, Tilly warm against her thigh.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

The silence should have been awkward.

It wasn’t.

That unsettled her more than the visit.

Most people treated silence like a problem to solve. They filled it, tripped over themselves inside it, tried to make it comfortable by making it cease to exist. Max did not. He sat in it like he understood that today, noise was expensive and Charlotte had none of herself to spare.

After a few minutes, he nodded toward the bag.

“The crackers are plain,” he said quietly. “Not the ones with salt everywhere. I wasn’t sure.”

“Salt is fine.”

“Okay.”

A pause.

“The ginger things are maybe bad.”

“They are always bad.”

“Yes,” Max said. “I thought so.”

This time, the laugh slipped out before she could catch it.

Small. Rough at the edges. But real.

Max looked at her like he had just watched something rare happen.

Charlotte immediately regretted laughing.

Not because it was wrong. Because it had been easy.

She looked down at Tilly and stroked the soft fur between her ears.

“She’s my cancer cat,” Charlotte said.

The words came out before she had decided to say them.

Max went very still.

Charlotte kept her eyes on Tilly.

“I got her after the diagnosis,” she continued, voice low. “I thought I was being practical. Something alive in the flat. Something to feed. Something that would notice if I disappeared.”

Tilly purred, oblivious to the enormity of her own biography.

“She was the reason I wanted to survive for a while,” Charlotte said. “Which sounds dramatic, but it’s true.”

Max said nothing.

For one second, Charlotte thought she had made a mistake.

Then he said, softly, “She looks like she took that very seriously.”

Charlotte’s breath caught.

Not sympathy. Not horror.

Not I’m sorry said in that careful voice people used when they were trying to decide how tragic she was.

Just acceptance.

Tilly had a job. Tilly had done it.

Charlotte’s hand stilled on the cat’s back.

“Yes,” she said. “She did.”

Another silence.

This one felt different.

Closer.

The migraine was still there. Still pressing. Still turning the room faintly sideways.

But some of the sharpness had eased.

Not because Max had fixed anything. He hadn’t. He couldn’t.

He had simply come with crackers and electrolyte drinks and no demand to be useful beyond what she allowed.

“What are you doing here, Max?” Charlotte asked again.

This time, the question was quieter.

Less bewildered. More dangerous.

He looked at her.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “And I didn’t know how to do that properly, so I decided to do it badly but honestly.”

Charlotte stared at him.

“That is an alarming sentence.”

“Yes.”

“At least you know.”

“I know many things.”

“You googled migraines and followed my cat’s Instagram.”

“Those are also things.”

The laugh came again.

Barely.

But enough.

Max smiled, small and pleased and trying not to be.

Charlotte looked away before it did something irreversible to her.

She had survived alone for a long time.

Not entirely alone, perhaps. There had been colleagues eventually. Hannah, in her sharp way. The sim department, with their quiet protective instincts. Tilly, most of all, warm and stubborn and alive when Charlotte had needed a reason to remain the same.

But this was different.

Max sitting in her dim living room, holding himself carefully still so the world would not hurt her more, was different.

He had chosen to come.

Not because she asked.

Not because he owed her.

Not because there was anything in it for him.

He had simply noticed she was gone and decided that mattered.

Charlotte closed her eyes, one hand resting on Tilly, the other curled against the blanket.

The migraine still pulsed.

The flat still hummed.

The world still had edges.

But for the first time all day, she did not feel like she had to hold all of it by herself.

That was not dependence.

Not need.

Not yet.

Just the fragile, disorienting realisation that someone had shown up at her door and, somehow, made being found feel less like an intrusion than a kindness.

And that felt more dangerous than the pain.

***

Lunch should have been safe.

That was what made it dangerous.

The debrief was over. The sim session had not yet started. There were sandwiches, bad coffee, and the familiar comfort of listening to GP complain about correlation curves in a tone that suggested the laws of physics had personally disappointed him.

Normal things.

Manageable things.

Max sat across from GP and Hannah, unwrapping his sandwich with great concentration, doing his best impression of a man who had absolutely not spent part of the previous afternoon standing outside Charlotte Fischer’s flat with a bag of migraine-safe groceries and the emotional instincts of a raccoon that had learned to use Google.

He was fine. Very normal.

Not thinking about drawn curtains. Or an orange cat. Or Charlotte in an oversized hoodie, pale with pain, looking at him like she could not decide whether he was a hallucination or a logistical problem.

Hannah watched him for exactly twenty-seven seconds.

Then her mouth twitched.

“So,” she said.

Max froze with his hand halfway to his drink. “No.”

Hannah blinked innocently. “I haven’t asked anything yet.”

“You were going to.”

GP did not look up from his coffee. “Because you did.”

Max shot him a glare. “I did not say anything.”

“You don’t have to,” GP said. “You’re sitting like someone trying very hard to look innocent.”

“I always sit like this.”

“No,” Hannah said, delighted now. “You sit like that when you’ve done something and you’re hoping nobody noticed.”

Max looked between them.

This, he realised, was a trap.

Unfortunately, he had already entered it, sat down, and unwrapped a sandwich.

Hannah leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes bright with the kind of professional curiosity that made her so dangerous on a pit wall and unbearable in personal matters.

“You went, didn’t you?”

Max looked down at his sandwich.

It suddenly seemed very interesting.

GP finally glanced up. “Oh, mate.”

Max exhaled through his nose.

Slowly.

Defeated before the first corner.

“…Yes.”

Hannah’s face changed at once. The amusement stayed, but something softer came in beneath it. Something almost fond. “Oh my god,” she said. “You actually went.”

“It wasn’t a big thing.”

“You went to her apartment,” GP said.

“I brought things.”

“Things,” GP repeated.

“Migraine things.”

Hannah pressed her lips together.

Max pointed at her. “Do not laugh.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You are internally laughing.”

“I am internally screaming,” Hannah corrected. “There is a difference.”

GP leaned back in his chair, arms folding. “Did you Google it?”

Max said nothing.

Hannah’s smile widened. “You googled it.”

“The internet had opinions,” Max muttered.

“Of course it did,” GP said. “And you obeyed them?”

“I bought crackers.”

Hannah made a small, strangled sound.

“And electrolytes,” Max added, because apparently he had lost control of his own mouth.

GP stared at him.

Max glared back. “She had a migraine.”

“Yes,” GP said slowly. “And you handled that by assembling an emergency care package like you were preparing for a small natural disaster.”

“It was not like that.”

“What was it like?” Hannah asked.

Max looked down again.

He remembered Charlotte opening the door, squinting against the hallway light, hair soft and slightly disordered, her expression completely blank with disbelief.

What are you doing here?

He remembered the dimness of her flat. Tilly brushing against his leg like he was being assessed by a very small committee. Charlotte looking into the bag and going quiet when she realised he had actually tried.

He shrugged, because explaining any of that felt dangerous.

“She asked why I was there.”

GP’s eyebrows rose. “Reasonable.”

“I told her I wanted to check she was okay.”

Hannah softened again.

“And?”

“She let me in.”

GP looked genuinely surprised. “She did?”

Max frowned. “Yes.”

Hannah sat back, impressed. “That is huge.”

“It was five minutes.”

“Still huge.”

“She told me five minutes,” Max clarified. “Very specifically.”

GP nodded gravely. “Ah. A formal audience.”

Max kicked him lightly under the table.

GP did not react.

Hannah rested her chin in her hand. “If Charlotte Fischer did not want you there, you would have been out of that doorway in under ten seconds.”

Max considered that.

It sounded true.

Charlotte was polite, but Max had already learned that her politeness was not softness. It was a locked door with excellent diction.

“She let me sit,” he said after a moment.

Hannah’s eyes narrowed happily.

“Where?”

“In the armchair.”

“Good choice.”

“What do you mean good choice?”

“It means you didn’t immediately sit next to the woman with a migraine and no energy to remove you physically.”

“I am not stupid.”

GP made a noise.

Max looked at him. “Do not.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You made a noise.”

“It was a tactical noise.”

Hannah laughed into her coffee.

Max tried to focus on his sandwich again.

It did not work.

“So,” Hannah said, softer now. “Was she okay?”

Max hesitated.

The jokes had made it easier, for a moment. Easier to stand slightly outside the thing and let GP and Hannah tease him until it became absurd instead of frightening.

But the memory of Charlotte on the couch, one hand on the orange cat curled against her side, returned with uncomfortable clarity.

“She was in pain,” he said. “But she said it wasn’t alarming.”

Hannah nodded once. “That sounds like her.”

“She said Tilly was her cancer cat.”

The table went quieter.

GP’s expression shifted, the humour draining back into something more careful.

Hannah looked down at her mug for a second.

“She told you that?”

Max nodded.

“She said she got her after the diagnosis. That she needed something alive in the flat.”

Hannah exhaled slowly.

“Well,” GP said after a beat, quieter than before. “That’s something.”

Max looked between them. “What?”

Hannah met his eyes.

“Charlotte doesn’t usually give people the story behind things.”

Max sat very still.

“Oh.”

“She gives facts,” Hannah said. “Migraine. Tumour. Treatment. Stable. Fine. She doesn’t usually give the part where it hurt.”

Max thought of Charlotte saying it without looking at him.

She was the reason I wanted to survive for a while.

His chest tightened.

GP watched him with an expression that was almost sympathetic, which somehow felt worse than the teasing.

“Mate,” he said.

Max immediately scowled. “No.”

“You have it bad.”

“I was worried.”

“Yes,” GP said. “That is one of the symptoms.”

Hannah snorted.

Max groaned and leaned back in his chair. “You are both impossible.”

“You bought electrolyte drinks for a woman who did not even clap when you won Imola,” GP said.

“She said congratulations.”

“Professionally,” Hannah added.

“She said good drive later.”

GP pointed at him. “Listen to yourself.”

Max folded his arms. “She is interesting.”

Hannah smiled.

“Oh, we’re saying interesting?”

“She is.”

“She’s brilliant, private, stubborn, has a cat, survived cancer, doesn’t care about your trophies, and somehow let you into her flat for five whole minutes,” Hannah listed. “Yes, Max. Very interesting.”

Max stared at her.

“That was too many details.”

“I’m an excellent strategist.”

GP nodded. “She is.”

Max looked away, ears warm.

“This is not how this usually goes,” he muttered.

“No,” GP agreed. “Usually they are impressed by the winning.”

“She is not impressed by anything.”

“That’s not true,” Hannah said.

Max looked back.

Hannah tilted her head, thoughtful now. “She’s impressed by competence. By consistency. By people doing what they say they’ll do. By not making a mess she has to clean up.”

GP added, “By models that don’t lie.”

“And cats in hats,” Max said before he could stop himself.

Hannah’s face lit up.

GP closed his eyes. “Oh no.”

Max realised his mistake too late.

Hannah leaned forward again. “You brought up the cat hats.”

“I was making a point.”

“You were thinking about the cat hats.”

“I follow the account.”

“We know,” GP said with a long suffering sigh.

Hannah was laughing now, but not cruelly. More like she had just watched a puppy walk into a glass door and wanted very badly to help while also enjoying the spectacle.

Max sighed.

“She has a cat,” he said weakly, because apparently he had chosen surrender.

“Yes,” Hannah said warmly. “And you are doomed.”

GP picked up his tray, standing. “I am leaving before you ask whether crochet hooks come in sizes.”

“I am not asking about yarn.”

“Not today.”

Max pointed at him. “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

GP walked away, far too pleased with himself.

Hannah stayed seated, still smiling, but her expression gentled once GP was out of earshot.

“For what it’s worth,” she said, “you did fine.”

Max looked at her.

“With Charlotte,” she clarified. “You didn’t push. You brought useful things. You left the choice with her.”

“I didn’t know what else to do.”

“That’s usually when people do the most damage.”

Max absorbed that.

His lunch sat untouched in front of him.

Somewhere between the sim room, the empty console, the paper bag in his hand, and Charlotte’s dim living room with the curtains drawn, something had shifted.

He had crossed a line.

Not with her, maybe.

With himself.

A few weeks ago, Charlotte Fischer had been interesting because she did not react to him the way people usually did.

Now she was interesting because he wanted to know if she was okay even when there was nothing he could do about it.

That was much worse.

Hannah watched the realisation arrive and smiled like she had seen it coming from several kilometres away.

“You really do have it bad,” she said.

Max picked up his sandwich at last.

Took one bite.

Chewed.

Swallowed.

Then said, very quietly, “Yes.”

Hannah’s smile softened.

She did not tease him for that.

Which was how Max knew he was truly in trouble.

***

Text Messages: Max Verstappen & Victoria Verstappen

Max: Hypothetically.

Victoria: I already don’t like where this is going.

Max: If you had a crush on someone.

Victoria: YOU DO. 😂😂😂 Oh my god who is it.

Max: I said hypothetically.

Victoria: You only say hypothetically when you’re already doomed. Is she pretty.

Max: Yes.

Victoria: TALL pretty or annoying pretty.

Max: Tall. Smart. Does not care when I win races.

Victoria: Oh no. That’s a serious one.

Max: She works with us.

Victoria: OF COURSE SHE DOES. Let me guess. Engineer.

Max: Sim engineer.

Victoria: I’m screaming. You fell for the one woman in the building immune to your charm.

Max: She didn’t even blink after Imola.

Victoria: I love her already.

Max: I went to check on her the other day.

Victoria: YOU WHAT.

Max: She was sick.

Victoria:Max.

Max: I brought groceries.

Victoria: MAX.

Max: Migraine-friendly ones.

Victoria: I cannot wait to tell mum. This is incredible.

Max: Don’t. Please.

Victoria: Fine. So what’s her deal?

Max: She had a brain tumour.

Victoria: …what.

Max: A few years ago. Cancer. She survived. Gets migraines sometimes.

Victoria: Oh.

Victoria: Okay. No jokes. That’s serious.

Max: Yeah.

Victoria: Does she have support?

Max: Her colleagues are very protective. She lives alone. Has a cat.

Victoria: Of course she does.

Victoria: Is that why you went?

Max: I think so.

Victoria: Okay. Then listen to me.

Victoria: Be kind. Don’t make it about you. Don’t rush her. And don’t treat her like she’s fragile unless she asks you to.

Max: I don’t think she’d tolerate that anyway.

Victoria: Good. Then you’re already doing better than you think.

Victoria: I take back laughing. You’re allowed to like her. Just… do it properly.

Max: I don’t know how this ends.

Victoria: You never do.

Victoria: But I’m rooting for you. And for her.

***

Susie knew something had shifted the moment Toto stopped looking broken and started looking efficient.

That was never a good sign.

Grief made him restless. Guilt made him quiet. Panic made him sharp around the edges, all pacing and half-finished sentences and hands dragged through his hair until it stood up in every direction.

But this was worse.

This was Toto with his jaw set and his laptop closed with deliberate finality. Toto picking up his phone. Toto scrolling through contacts with the stillness of a man who had already made a decision and was now simply carrying out the logistical consequences.

Susie watched him from the other side of the dining table, unease settling low in her stomach.

“Toto,” she said slowly. “What are you doing?”

He did not look up.

“Reaching out.”

Susie waited.

He kept scrolling.

That should have told her everything.

Unfortunately, she made the mistake of assuming he meant reaching out like a normal person. Emotionally. Vulnerably. Perhaps writing the letter Susie had suggested, or asking for advice on how to begin an apology he was terrified Charlotte would never read.

That was Susie’s first mistake.

Her second was leaving him unsupervised.

She discovered this an hour later, when he appeared in the kitchen and said, with the casual seriousness of a man announcing he had booked a dental appointment, “I’ve hired someone.”

Susie froze with her mug halfway to her mouth.

The silence lasted long enough that Toto finally looked at her.

She lowered the mug very carefully. “You’ve hired who exactly?”

“A private investigator,” Toto said.

For a moment, Susie simply stared at him.

There were points in marriage when a person had to decide whether to respond with love, rage, or the kind of controlled calm used around live explosives.

Susie chose the third option.

“You hired a private investigator,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“To look for Charlotte.”

“To find out if she’s alright.”

“To look for Charlotte,” Susie said again.

Toto’s mouth tightened. “She blocked my number. She doesn’t answer emails. I don’t know where she lives, what she does, whether she’s safe—”

“That is because she does not want you to know.”

He flinched.

Only slightly.

Susie saw it anyway.

“I’m her father,” he said.

The words were low. Defensive. Desperate.

Susie set her tea down on the counter before she did something regrettable with it.

“And she is an adult woman who chose not to have contact with you,” she said. “Those things can both be true.”

Toto looked away.

That only made her angrier.

Not because she did not understand him.

She did.

That was the problem.

She understood the guilt. The fear. The way not knowing had started to eat through him the moment he realised Charlotte’s trust had sat untouched for years, compounding interest around her absence. 

Susie understood why his mind had gone straight to worst-case scenarios, to danger, to illness, to the unbearable possibility that his daughter might be suffering somewhere and he would not even know.

She understood.

She simply refused to let understanding become permission.

“You cannot outsource intimacy,” she said.

Toto’s eyes came back to hers.

“What?”

“You heard me.” Her voice sharpened. “You cannot hire someone to do the frightening part for you and call it reaching out.”

“I’m not trying to frighten her.”

“No,” Susie said. “You’re trying to avoid being frightened yourself.”

That landed.

She watched it land.

Toto went still.

For all his height, all his presence, all that famous Wolff severity people mistook for invulnerability, in that moment he looked almost unbearably tired.

“I just need to know she is alive,” he said.

The words came out rough.

Susie’s anger faltered for half a second.

Only half.

“She is alive,” she said. “She did not survive everything she survived just to vanish quietly because you stopped watching.”

His face tightened.

“That’s cruel.”

“It’s true.”

His jaw worked once, but no answer came.

Good, Susie thought. Let it hurt. Maybe it needed to.

She stepped closer, not enough to comfort him, but enough to make sure he had to hear her.

“Charlotte did not leave because she wanted to become a mystery you could solve,” she said. “She left because she wanted distance. She wanted a life that did not require her to keep waiting for you to choose her. And now, instead of respecting that, you are paying a stranger to cross the boundary she made because you don’t like how it feels.”

Toto looked down at his hands.

“I failed her,” he said quietly.

The admission no longer surprised Susie.

It had been sitting between them for days now. Weeks, perhaps. Years, if she was honest. Only recently had Toto found the courage to say it out loud without immediately burying it beneath explanations.

“I know I failed her,” he continued. “But not knowing—” He broke off, gesturing helplessly. “Susie, I don’t know anything. I don’t know where she lives. I don’t know if she’s happy. I don’t know if she needs help. I don’t know if she is alone.”

Susie took a slow breath.

“And whose fault is that?”

He closed his eyes.

She regretted the sharpness immediately.

Not because it was untrue.

Because it was too easy.

Still, she did not take it back.

“Toto,” she said, softer but no less firm, “you are trying to soothe your guilt without risking rejection.”

His eyes opened.

There it was.

The thing he had not wanted named.

The reason the private investigator had felt easier than a letter. A report could not ignore him. A report could not return unopened. A report could not look him in the eye and say, too late.

Charlotte could.

That was what terrified him.

He sank into one of the kitchen chairs, suddenly older.

“I don’t even know what I would say to her,” he admitted. “If she answered.”

Susie looked at him for a long moment.

There were versions of this conversation where she yelled. Where she told him exactly what she thought of his instinct to manage emotional pain like a corporate problem. Where she reminded him that Charlotte had been a child in his house, and all the investigators in the world would not change the fact that he had seen enough and still stayed quiet.

But he already knew.

That did not absolve him.

It only meant cruelty would serve no one.

“Then start there,” Susie said.

He looked up.

“Write that down. Don’t send it yet. Just write it. ‘I don’t know what to say because I know I failed you.’ Start with the truth.”

Toto’s mouth twisted. “And if she never wants to hear it?”

“Then you live with that.”

His face tightened.

Susie held his gaze.

“Like she had to live with you not choosing her.”

Silence fell.

It was not comfortable.

It was not meant to be.

Outside, Monaco glittered beyond the windows, all polished glass and distant lights, as if the world could be made beautiful enough to distract from what people did to each other inside expensive rooms.

After a while, Toto said, very quietly, “I already paid the retainer.”

Susie closed her eyes.

Of course he had.

Of course he had gone from remorse to wire transfer without stopping anywhere near emotional common sense.

“Toto.”

“I know.”

“No,” she said, opening her eyes again. “I don’t think you do.”

He looked up at her, helpless and stubborn all at once.

“I can cancel it.”

“You should cancel it.”

“I just wanted—”

“I know what you wanted,” Susie said. “That’s what makes this so frustrating.”

She picked up her mug, more for something to hold than because she wanted the tea.

“You run one of the most successful teams in the world,” she said, shaking her head. “You negotiate contracts worth millions. You manage drivers, sponsors, engineers, shareholders, crisis after crisis. And this is how you handle emotional repair? You hire surveillance?”

“It’s not surveillance.”

Susie gave him a look.

He had the grace to wince.

“It is discreet,” he muttered, but weakly now.

“It is still a violation.”

His shoulders dropped.

For a moment, he looked so much like the man she had married — brilliant, impossible, wounded in places he covered with competence — that Susie’s anger softened into something sadder.

She came closer and rested a hand on the back of the chair beside him.

“Toto,” she said quietly, “if you want to be part of Charlotte’s life again, you cannot begin by proving she was right to leave you out of it.”

That broke through.

She saw it.

The pain moved over his face before he could hide it.

He looked down.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

This time, he did not answer quickly.

Good.

Susie turned toward the doorway, then stopped.

Behind her, Toto said, almost inaudibly, “What if she needed me?”

Susie closed her eyes for a moment.

There it was.

The rawest part.

Not control. Not pride. Not even guilt.

Fear.

What if she had needed him, and he had not known?

What if she had suffered?

What if she had been alone?

What if the answer was yes?

Susie turned back.

2024, August,Oxford.

Margaret didn't close her eyes even for a second that night. She laid wide awake in her bed staring at the ceiling, replaying in her head all the little things she had noticed the night before.

The way his curls looked longer.

The way his fingers twitched around the glass of his drink. His smile when she talked about her work. 

At the cracks of down, she couldn't take it anymore. She sat up, back against her pillows, and reached for her phone. 

Her thumb hovered over his contact. She hesitated, stared at the screen for a minute. Then, finally, she started typing.

Margaret

Hope you got to London okay.

She hit send quickly, looked at the text for a second then added something else.

Margaret

I had fun last night. I'd like to do it again some time soon.

She cringed inwardly as she hit send again. She locked the phone and let it face down on the sheets. 

Margaret stared at the wall before for way too much time. 

Half an hour later, her phone buzzed softly. Her pulse jumped at the sound and unlocked her phone with shaking hands.

Her stomach dropped when she read it.

Lando

Yeah. Busy next week.

Not even twelve hours before he was looking at her in the hallway like she was something he had been starved for and now that was his answer? 

Her chest ached. Her fingers trembled again as she typed her reply.

Margaret

Of course. 

She hit send. A shiver ran through her. What was this? Why was he acting like that? She sighed.

Maybe he hadn't meant last night like she had. Maybe she was reading too much into it. 

So she didn’t text him again. She told herself she wouldn’t. She told herself she wouldn’t even think about it. Which meant she thought about it constantly. 

Her phone stayed face-down on her desk while she tried to study, the muscles in her shoulders knotted so tight they ached.

Every time it buzzed, from group chats, university emails, nothing important, her pulse jumped anyway. She hated herself for it. Because even if she didn’t want to, she was waiting for his texts, she was waiting for him to reach out.

But he didn’t text. He didn't reply. 

And she tried to swallow the disappointment like medicine.

The next day Lando opened and closed their chat three separate times, thumb hovering over the keyboard.

He typed “How’s Oxford?” and deleted it at least four times.

Then he typed “About the other night”. He stopped and deleted it instantly. What was he going to say? 

He couldn't tell her that seeing her again had messed his mind up more than his first win. That he couldn't stop thinking about her and the way she had looked at him just a hundred of a second before pulling away from their almost-kiss. That he had wanted to… 

He had answered. Just not great. 

He hated how he’d answered her. Hated the hollow, clipped tone in his own words. He wasn’t cold. He didn't mean to be dismissive. He was scared and tired and stupid. And he didn't want to crowd her or push her. He had thought it was for the best, so he didn't want to come out too strong.

He kept rehearsing an apology in his head but every version sounded too intense, too revealing. What if she really had only meant it casually? What if he was the one reading too much into it?

He didn’t message her.

And he hated himself for it.

Of course Margaret cracked not even after 24 hours. 

Not much. Not obviously. Just… a small text, something harmless.

Margaret

Saw an article about the new aero regs  McLaren is introducing. Thought you’d have opinions.

It was safe. Professional themed. Neutral ground.

But she stared at the message long after sending it, wishing she’d been brave enough to write what she wanted, that she missed him.

Lando opened the message in the middle of a meeting. He smiled, genuinely, because of course she’d send him something smart, something that told him she still thought about him.

Lando

Thought you would think that.

He stopped, panicked and deleted it. He took a deep breath.

Lando:

Yeah, interesting stuff. Let's see if they work.

He pressed send.

As soon as the message was delivered, his stomach dropped.

It looked dismissive. Flat. Like he didn’t care. And he didn’t know how to fix it now.

Margaret read it on her way to class, a hollow breath leaving her chest.

No emoji. No warmth.

Nothing to let her know he had appreciated her reaching out.

Just… the minimum.

So she responded in kind. With nothing

Lando winced on his side of the world. 

He wanted to write more. He wanted to tell her everything. To fly to her and hold her like he had restrained himself for too many years. 

He didn’t.

After that they didn’t speak for two days.

Two full days. Not because they were angry. Because every time one reached for their phone, the fear stopped them cold.

Margaret told herself she wasn’t going to chase someone who clearly didn’t want her.

Lando told himself she needed space because he’d overwhelmed her and she'd run again.

Both were wrong.

And both doubled down.

Margaret watched his race from her laptop, headphones in, lights off.

She told herself it didn’t matter if he never knew.

She told herself she had no right to want more.

But when he overtook someone on lap 31, she smiled. When he finished P2, she clapped quietly alone in her dorm.

But she didn’t text him and he noticed.

He checked his phone between interviews, hoping, stupidly,  for her message.

But nothing came through.

His chest tightened. He made the first step

Lando

I had a long day. Hope yours has been better.

He read it back once.

It sounded like a message you send your cousin when you're sick and confined in bed with a cold. 

But he didn’t know how to make it better, so he sent it anyway.

Margaret got it as she was brushing her teeth. She stared at the neutral phrasing.

She typed carefully, her heart pulsing in her throat.

Margaret

Busy here too.

And he read busy as don’t have time for you.

She meant as I don’t want to bother you.

They were both wrong.

He finally called her after a few days. Late. It was almost midnight.

She answered immediately and hated herself for how fast she did.

“Hey,” he said, soft.

“Hi,” she said, even softer.

There was a long pause, the kind where both feel the weight of what isn’t being said.

He joked about something silly in the paddock.

She listened, smiled, but kept her voice careful. Guarded.

She told him about her research.

He listened as always but his replies were too measured, too gentle.

Neither asked the questions hanging in the air. Are we okay? Did that night mean something to you? Why does it feel like you’re slipping away?

Neither one of them dared to, afraid of what the answer could be. 

When they hung up, they were both wide awake in separate cities, staring at ceilings, wondering why their hearts hurt like this.

He sent her a meme the next day.

Something stupid. Something they used to send each other constantly.

She laughed when she saw it.

Really laughed. Warmly. Unexpectedly.

But she couldn’t let herself be too open.

Margaret

lol

One word.

Tiny. Safe.

But it hit him like a wave of cold water.

He tried to tell himself she was just busy.

He tried to tell himself she was tired.

But the ache pushed deeper.

Maybe she just didn't want to talk to him.

Maybe he had misread that night altogether. 

The days bled into each other. Every message, every half-hearted reply, was another thread pulled taut between them.

Margaret’s texts became minimal. Professional references, small jokes, neutral comments she told herself were “safe.”

Lando’s replies were always measured, careful, like he was tiptoeing on glass. Not cold, not cruel, just distant enough that she could read a thousand different meanings into them.

Every time her phone buzzed, her stomach twisted. A friendly text from a classmate made her jump. A notification from Lando made her chest lift and then sink as she read his clipped words.

Lando

Yeah, that’s interesting.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for minutes. What did that mean? Did he care at all? Did he even want to talk to her?

She sent nothing.

He stared at her last message on his phone and cursed under his breath.

She’s pulling away.

He hadn’t meant to.

He wasn’t trying to.

But every time he typed something that felt honest, “I miss you,” “I can’t stop thinking about you”, he deleted it before she could see the bubble appearing in their chat.

Because what if she didn’t feel the same? What if he scared her off again?

By the end of the second week, even the phone calls were strained.

Lando tried once more, late, in the summer quiet, joking, asking about her day, her research. She smiled on the other end, but it wasn’t enough. Her voice was careful, her laughter measured.

He could hear the distance in her breathing. He hung up, heart heavier than before, and realized he couldn’t do this anymore.

The almost, the misread texts, the hesitation. It was killing him.

He needed to fix it. He needed her to see him, not the careful, scared version of himself he’d been showing over messages.

He drove to her flat that night from the McLaren HQ in Woking, the heat clinging to the car as he parked, pulse hammering.

He didn’t call first. He didn’t text. He just rang her doorbell. Because weeks of almosts had gone on long enough.

He had to explain.

He had to know.

He walked up the stairs quickly. He knocked once on her door. She opened it, expecting anyone except him.

“Lando?!” She exhaled in surprise. “What…” She wrapped her arms around her. He just then noticed she was in short and a t-shirt. His eyes wandered on her figure and his pulse jumped.

She was wearing a t-shirt with his name on it. It was from the 2021 merch stock and a bit worn out.

“Can we talk?” He asked out of breath “I need to tell you a big thing.”

She inhaled abruptly. She nodded and stepped beside to let him in. The door clicked shut behind him.

“What is going on?” Lando asked, “What are we doing?” 

“What?” she asked softly.

“What do those texts mean? Do you want me to stop texting you?”

“Lando, what?” She took a step closer, “What are you talking about?” 

“You sound like… someone is holding you at gunpoint each time we talk.” 

Margaret stared at him like he had just told her the Earth was flat.

“You sound like you'd rather eat glass than talk to me!” She said.

“That's …” He wanted to say it wasn't true but he knew how wrong his texts had sounded. “I'm scared.” He said, “You… I'm scared I pushed too far the other night. That I have… pressured you.”

“Pushed too far?”

Lando ranked a hand through his curls. “Yeah, I… I… God, Maggie.” He sighed, “I don't know what to do. It's so fucking confusing.” 

“Tell me about it.” She exhaled. “You replied to me the next day like you had regretted everything. What was I supposed to think?”

Lando turned to her “That I was scared shitless of pushing you away, of making it worse than it already is!” 

“You sounded cold as ice!” 

Lando ran a hand over his face, exhaling sharply, the tension in his shoulders cracking under the weight of weeks of miscommunication.

“I know,” he admitted, voice low, raw. “I sound like a complete idiot. I didn’t mean to. I just… I couldn’t figure out how to say what I actually felt without… without making it all wrong.”

Margaret took a step closer, her arms folding across her chest. “Every message… every call… it felt like you didn’t want me. Like I was bothering you, like… like I was imagining it all,” she said softly, the sting of hurt still lingering.

“You weren't imagining it,” he said immediately, stepping forward, closing the distance between them. “I wasn’t avoiding you because I didn’t care. I was avoiding you because I care too much. And I was scared of saying the wrong thing and losing you.”

Her eyes widened slightly, and her chest tightened. “Lando…”

He shook his head, running his hand down his face again, frustration cracking through him. “No, I’m not done. You have to understand… every word you sent, every tiny thing you said… I’ve been rereading them in my head for days, wondering if I ruined it, wondering if I scared you off. I can’t stop thinking about you, Maggie. Not a single second. And seeing you the other night… God, I didn’t know how to act. I wanted you, so badly, I didn’t know if I could breathe around you without messing it all up.”

Her lips parted slightly, and she shook her head in disbelief, stepping closer until only inches separated them. “You made it worse by pretending not to care!” she said, voice trembling, “By saying things that sounded like you didn’t want me at all!”

“I know!” he snapped, a flash of desperation in his eyes. “I know, I know, I know! And I hate myself for it. I just… I didn’t want to lose you before I even had a chance to try. I was trying not to break us before we even had anything real!”

Margaret’s heart pounded. She could feel the heat radiating off him, the rawness in his voice, the ache in his eyes. Slowly, cautiously, she reached out, her hand brushing his arm.

He caught it immediately, holding her fingers like he was afraid to let go. His eyes locked on hers, desperate, pleading.

“Do you… do you even want this?” she whispered, her voice small, but steady enough to cut through the tension.

“Want this?” he repeated, voice dropping, thick with emotion. “Maggie… I’ve wanted this since the second I saw you standing in that hallway. I’ve wanted you since forever. I’m terrified of screwing it up, but I’ve never, ever not wanted this. Not for a second.”

Her chest tightened. She swallowed hard, seeing the truth in his eyes, feeling the weight of all the almosts, the misread texts, the silence stretching between them. “I was scared,” he admitted, voice low. “Scared I’d say too much, scared I’d push you away, scared I’d ruin it. I thought if I acted… neutral, careful… maybe I wouldn’t break us. But all I did was make you feel alone. And I hate myself for that.”

Margaret’s hand tightened on his arm. “Lando…” she breathed. “You’ve been scaring me too. I thought you didn’t care anymore. I didn’t know you were… scared of losing me.”

He cupped her cheek gently, thumb brushing along her jaw, his eyes dark with emotion. “I’m never letting you go again, Maggie. I swear to you. Not after this. Not after everything. I don’t care if I have to beg or fight or… whatever it takes. I just… I need you. I need us.”

Her chest tightened, tears pricking her eyes, heart hammering in her chest. She could feel the truth, raw and undeniable, radiating from him.

And slowly, tentatively, she leaned in.

Lando’s hands moved to her waist, steadying her as she closed the last fraction of the distance. Their foreheads touched first, breaths mingling, hearts racing in sync.

“I… I don’t want to fight this anymore,” she whispered, voice trembling but sure.

“Then don’t,” he murmured, lips brushing hers just barely, teasing, testing. “Just… stay. Don’t run.”

She shook her head, a small smile breaking through her worry. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And finally, finally, he kissed her, slow, gentle at first, then deeper, hungrier.

Lando's hands tightened on her waist, pulling her closer. Margaret wrapped her arms around his neck, hands gripping the strands of hair at the back of his neck.

She pulled away to breathe. He didn't let her go more than an inch away from him.

He breathed heavy, trying to rein in whatever overwhelming feeling was rushing through him.

“Maggie,” he murmured on her lips. 

His hands moved up her sides to cup her cheeks. His thumbs brushed her face. Margaret closed her eyes, leaning into his touch. 

“I think I'm in love with you,” he whispered, “No, I don't think… I am. I - I can't breathe properly when you're not near.” 

Margaret shivered, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes.

“I love the way your voice sounds when you tell me to piss off. How your hand fits in mine like they're made to hold each other. I love the stupid way you try to pretend you don't watch every damn race of mine but you remember my lap times better than my engineer.” 

Margaret chuckled softly.

“I love your eyes, the light in them each time you laugh. I love the way you bite your lip when you read.” 

Margaret leaned closer to him, the tip of her nose brushing his. His breath hitched. 

“God…I…I think about school, how you made it bearable. No one else would have done what you did for me.” 

“That's not true. I didn't do anything special.” She whispered.

He ignored her. “Not just at school. After that too.” Lando sighed on her lips 

Margaret shook her head softly.  

“You kept me going for years.”

His hand slipped into her hair, the soft blonde strands between his fingers. He leaned closer, his lips brushing hers.

Lando waited for her to close the distance. And she did.

She pressed her lips against his. He snapped at the touch. He groaned against her lips. 

“Sorry,” his voice was low and rough. 

“For what?” She whispered, smiling. “You do the same to me.” 

“Uh?” He whispered, “Good to know, love.”

Her eyes snapped open. Lando smirked.

“Oh, you liked that, didn't you?”

“Stop,” she pulled away, making it two steps before he reached for her hand and pulled her against him again. His hands landed on her hips. 

“Not a chance, love. Not now that I have you.” 

He kissed her again like his life depended on it. She melted against him, her knees going weak under her.

His hand moved to the hem of her shirt, his thumb brushing her naked strip of skin just above the waistband of her shorts. She shivered so hard he had to smile against her lips.

“You're too cocky,” she whispered out of breath 

He just laughed low and throaty, the sound vibrating against her ear.

“Maybe,” he murmured, brushing a stray curl from her forehead, “but I don’t care. Not when I’ve finally got you.”

Margaret pressed herself closer, letting herself melt into him, the tension of the past weeks washing away in the heat of his touch. She could feel his pulse against her chest, strong and steady, grounding her in a way nothing else had managed in months.

Lando’s hands roamed slowly, deliberately, tracing her sides, memorizing every curve as if he could make up for all the moments he’d let slip by. He pressed his forehead against hers again, lips hovering just shy of brushing hers.

His lips found hers again, softer this time, slower, tasting, exploring. Every kiss was an apology, a promise, a confession. She let herself finally feel it, all the longing, all the fear, all the want that had been building like a storm inside them.

“I'm sorry for… not saying it sooner.” Margaret whispered.

“Don’t be. It's on the both of us.” 

“... I feel it too…” She added softly, “You know, right?” 

“Feels good to hear it.” Lando smiled. She pushed his shoulder, rolling her eyes playfully. He leaned to kiss her cheek, then the corner of her mouth and her lips again.

Lando laughed softly against her mouth, the sound warm and breathless, and Margaret felt it everywhere—like electricity threading under her skin. His hands slid up her back, palms warm, steady, grounding her as if he was still half-convinced she might disappear if he stopped touching her.

She didn’t. She only pressed closer, fingers curling in the hair at the nape of his neck, tugging just enough to make him inhale sharply.

“Jesus, Maggie…” he whispered, voice breaking, head falling forward until his forehead rested on her shoulder. “You’re gonna kill me.”

She smiled, brushing her nose against his temple. “You were the one who showed up at my door.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist and hugged her tight, really tight, his body trembling just slightly with everything he’d been holding back. She melted into it, into him, arms sliding around his shoulders as she buried her face against his neck.

They stayed like that for a long moment, breathing each other in, letting the world recalibrate around the simple, impossible fact that they were finally here, finally honest, finally not running.

When Lando eventually pulled back, his hands stayed on her waist, thumbs stroking small circles into the fabric of her shirt like he couldn’t stop even if he tried.

His eyes scanned her face, slow and reverent, as if memorizing her all over again.

“I’ve imagined this so many times,” he murmured, voice barely above a whisper.

Margaret’s breath hitched. “What… being in my flat?”

He huffed a quiet laugh, shaking his head. “No.” His hand came up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “Being this close. Touching you. Kissing you. Hearing you say you feel it too.”

Her cheeks warmed. She bit her lip, but he caught her chin gently with two fingers, guiding her gaze back to him.

“Don’t hide from me,” he whispered.

“I’m not hiding,” she said softly. “I’m… overwhelmed.”

“Good.” His thumb brushed her cheek. “Me too.”

She laughed, soft and shaky, and he kissed her again—slow, lingering, like he wanted to make up for every hour they’d spent doubting each other. She kissed him back just as hungrily, her hands slipping under the hem of his hoodie, fingers brushing the warm skin along his waist.

He sucked in a breath, his hands tightening on her hips. “Careful,” he warned with a dizzy smile, “you have no idea what you’re doing to me.”

“Oh, I think I do,” she teased, her own pulse racing.

He groaned, actually groaned, and pressed her back a step until her knees brushed the edge of her sofa. She sank down onto it, pulling him with her until he braced one hand beside her head, his curls falling forward, framing his face.

He kissed her jaw, the corner of her mouth, the hollow beneath her ear. “Missed you,” he murmured between kisses. “Missed you for years.”

Margaret’s breath hitched, her hand sliding up his chest to cup his jaw. “You have me now,” she whispered. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He froze—just one second—then looked at her like she had said something sacred.

“Say it again.”

She smiled, fingers brushing along the line of his throat. “I’m not going anywhere.”

A slow, reverent grin tugged at his lips. “Good,” he whispered. “Because I’m planning on staying right here.”

He dipped down to kiss her again, deeper this time, sure, certain, full of every word neither of them had dared to say.

And for the first time in weeks, neither of them felt scared. Not even a little.

Because they finally understood something simple, and terrifying, and beautiful:

Winning Imola felt good.

It always did — the track, the flow, the way a lap could come together there like a sentence that finally made sense. The car had still been difficult, still on the edge of uncooperative, but he’d dragged it where it needed to go and stood on the top step anyway.

Applause. Champagne. Noise.

By the time Max made it back to the factory a few days later, the win had already settled into something quieter — pride instead of adrenaline. He expected congratulations. Handshakes. Smiles.

What he hadn’t expected was how clearly, immediately, he knew where he was going.

Charlotte’s desk sat where it always did: half-buried in screens, notes taped at precise angles, a mug that had definitely gone cold hours ago. She was leaning forward slightly, chin tucked, eyes fixed on a replay loop from the simulator, fingers tapping lightly against the desk as she thought.

Max stopped a few steps away, watching her for a moment.

Still pretty. Still focused. Still not looking at him.

He cleared his throat.

She glanced up. Recognition flickered — quick, contained.

“Hey,” she said.

Just that.

No excitement. No smile. No Imola! hanging in the air between them.

He waited.

Nothing happened.

“Well,” Max said finally, tilting his head, “we won.”

Charlotte nodded once. “Yes. Congratulations.”

That was it.

No follow-up questions. No gushing. No visible awe. She turned back to the screen, already rewinding a segment of the run.

Max frowned slightly. “…You saw the race?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And the mid-corner balance looked improved,” she said, still watching the data. “The correlation update helped.”

He blinked. “That’s—” He stopped himself, then tried again. “That’s all?”

Charlotte looked back at him properly this time, dark eyes assessing, not unkind — just curious. “Did you want something else?”

Max stared at her.

People usually did something when he won. Even people who tried very hard not to care still leaked enthusiasm at the edges. Pride. Excitement. Relief.

Charlotte just… processed it.

He shifted his weight, suddenly aware that this wasn’t going the way he’d pictured.

“I thought,” he said slowly, “you might be… impressed.”

She considered that. “I’m glad the work helped,” she said eventually. “But you’ve won races before.”

It wasn’t dismissive. It wasn’t rude. It was factual.

Max felt something unfamiliar flicker in his chest — not annoyance, not quite — more like disorientation. “…Right,” he said.

She tilted her head slightly, studying him now. “Is everything okay?”

He huffed out a small laugh despite himself. “Yeah. Just—”

He stopped. Tried to find the words.

Normally, this part was easy.

Normally, the women he was interested in reacted. There was a rhythm to it — admiration first, curiosity second, the unspoken understanding that this was impressive and he was part of it.

Charlotte wasn’t playing that game.

She wasn’t unimpressed.

She just wasn’t impressed by that.

“I just wanted to say hi,” he said finally.

She nodded. “Hi.”

Then, as if remembering something, she added, “Good drive.”

Two words. Earned. Clean.

Max felt more validated by that than he wanted to admit.

She turned back to her work, conversation clearly concluded.

Max stood there for a second longer than necessary, then walked away, hands in his pockets, brain spinning.

That had not gone according to plan.

At all.

He’d come expecting to dazzle her.

Instead, he’d been treated like a variable that performed as expected.

And for the first time in a long while, Max Verstappen found himself genuinely, deeply dumbfounded.

Which was… annoying.

And, inconveniently—

Kind of thrilling.

***

GP did not look surprised.

Which, frankly, offended Max a little.

They were walking down the corridor toward the sim wing, Max still buzzing with post-win energy that had nowhere to go, irritation prickling under his skin like static. He’d tried to ignore it. Failed. Badly.

“So,” Max said finally, unable to help himself, “I went to see Charlotte.”

GP hummed. Noncommittal. Dangerous. “And?” he asked.

Max stopped walking and turned on him. “She didn’t care.”

GP blinked. “About what.”

“About Imola,” Max said, exasperated. “About the win. About—” He gestured vaguely at himself. “Any of it.”

GP sipped his coffee. Took his time.

“She said congratulations,” Max added quickly. “But like. Professionally.”

GP stared at him for a long moment. Then: “Mate.”

Max folded his arms. “Don’t.”

“You have it bad.”

Max scoffed. “I do not.”

“You came to find me specifically to complain about a woman not being impressed by you winning a Grand Prix,” GP said evenly. “That’s not subtle.”

Max opened his mouth to argue. Closed it. “…She just went straight back to her screen,” he muttered. “Like I was a meeting reminder.”

GP nodded. “Sounds like Charlotte.”

Max frowned. “You know her?”

GP shrugged. “Some. Hannah does more. They’re friends through one of the other sim engineers.”

Max perked up despite himself. “They’re friends?”

“Yes,” GP said. “They talk. Coffee. Normal human things.”

Max exhaled. “Of course they do.”

GP gave him a sideways look. “You’re spiralling.”

“I am not spiralling.”

“You are,” GP said calmly, “standing in a hallway, emotionally compromised by a woman who complimented your driving efficiency instead of your ego.”

Max grimaced. “When you say it like that, it sounds —”

“It sounds accurate,” GP finished.

They resumed walking.

GP took another sip of coffee, then added casually, “Also, you need to recalibrate your expectations.”

Max shot him a look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

GP didn’t hesitate. “Charlotte has a Cambridge degree,” he said. “She’s been buried in sim models since she was about twenty-two. She’s not a wannabe model, influencer, or someone impressed by trophies.”

Max bristled. “I don’t only go for—”

GP raised an eyebrow.

Max sighed. “…Usually.”

“Exactly,” GP said. “She doesn’t orbit your world. She has her own. And she’s not going to perform admiration on command.”

Max stared ahead, jaw tight.

“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t care,” GP added. “It means you’re going to have to try something you’re not very good at.”

Max groaned. “What.”

“Being interesting without winning something,” GP said.

“That’s harsh.”

They walked in silence for a moment.

“…She said the car looked better,” Max muttered. “Said the correlation update helped. That it was a ‘Good Drive’.”

GP smiled faintly. “High praise. From her.”

Max glanced at him. “You think?”

“I know,” GP said. “If Charlotte Fischer tells you ‘good drive’ and means it, that’s about as close as you’ll get to a standing ovation.”

Max absorbed that slowly. Then, quieter: “I didn’t know what to do.”

GP looked at him then — really looked.

“Good,” he said. “Maybe this time, you’ll learn.”

Max huffed a reluctant laugh, shaking his head.

“I hate this,” he said.

GP smiled into his coffee.

“No,” he said. “You really, really don’t.”

***

Slack Channel:  #general-racing-not-business-definitely-not-gossip

Members: far too many Red Bull Racing employees

Aero_Matt:rumour check did max actually go to charlotte after imola expecting her to be impressed

Sim_Ruby:yes

Aero_Matt:oh my god

Garage_Pete:how bad was it

Sim_Ruby:she said congratulations and then went back to the model

Strategy_Leah:iconic

Composite_Tom:brutal

Powertrains_Nina:efficient

Garage_Pete:did she at least smile

Sim_Ruby:no

Aero_Matt:MAX VERSTAPPEN WON IMOLA AND GOT A CALENDAR NOTIFICATION RESPONSE

Comms_Jess:wait is charlotte even single

Aero_Matt:do we know literally anything about charlotte

Sim_Ruby:she has a cat

Garage_Pete:called tilly

Powertrains_Nina:tilly wears hats

Composite_Tom:crochet hats

Strategy_Leah:seasonal crochet hats

Comms_Jess:okay so we know cat lore do we know boyfriend lore

Sim_Ruby:no boyfriend has ever been mentioned

Aero_Matt:has ANY personal human ever been mentioned

Powertrains_Nina:hannah?

Garage_Pete:hannah is not charlotte’s boyfriend

Strategy_Hannah:Thank you for clarifying.

Comms_Jess:no but seriously she’s pretty, terrifyingly smart, has an expensive accent, went to cambridge, and max is acting like a teenage boy someone should know if she’s single

Composite_Tom:“expensive accent” is so real

Aero_Matt:she says “can’t” like there’s inheritance involved

Sim_Ruby:she was born in austria though

Comms_Jess:SHE WAS WHAT

Garage_Pete:welcome to charlotte lore part 2

Strategy_Leah:austrian but sounds like she was educated by the bbc

Powertrains_Nina:because she was

Aero_Matt:boarding school apparently

Comms_Jess:how do we know all this and still not know if she has a boyfriend

Sim_Ruby:to be fair charlotte doesn’t talk about herself

Composite_Tom:she once answered “did you have a good weekend?” with “it was operationally sufficient”

Garage_Pete:that’s romantic actually

Comms_Jess:max would probably propose if she said that to him

Engineering_GP:Do not give him ideas.

Aero_Matt:GP CONFIRMED MAX HAS IDEAS

Engineering_GP:I confirmed nothing.

Strategy_Hannah:You confirmed it by appearing.

Engineering_GP:I regret teaching any of you how to use Slack.

Comms_Jess:okay facts we know about Charlotte Fischer:

Austrian

Cambridge

sim engineer wizard

posh accent

cat named Tilly

crochets cat hats

immune to Max Verstappen Grand Prix victory flirting

possibly single

mysterious family situation??

Aero_Matt:what family situation

Sim_Ruby:her mother died, I think

Comms_Jess:oh

Powertrains_Nina:yeah. she doesn’t talk about it much.

Garage_Pete:does she have family here?

Sim_Ruby:not really, I don’t think

Composite_Tom:I’ve never heard her mention anyone

Strategy_Leah:she has Tilly

Strategy_Hannah:And before anyone gets weird: that is enough information.

Comms_Jess:understood

Aero_Matt:respecting boundaries in the gossip channel growth

Garage_Pete:wait wasn’t there also the cancer thing

Comms_Jess:the what

Sim_Ruby:Pete.

Garage_Pete:sorry

Strategy_Hannah:Careful.

Garage_Pete:no I mean not gossip way just like That why everyone is protective of her, right?

Powertrains_Nina:yes. partly.

Composite_Tom:she had a brain tumour a few years ago. she’s okay now.

Comms_Jess:oh my god

Strategy_Leah:she gets migraines sometimes. we cover when she’s out.

Comms_Jess:okay suddenly max having a crush is less funny and more like oh no he is going to be extremely sincere about this

Engineering_GP:Unfortunately, yes.

Aero_Matt:does max know about the cancer?

Strategy_Hannah:Not from this channel.

Sim_Ruby:good point

Garage_Pete:if max finds out he’s going to hover

Strategy_Leah:he already hovers

Composite_Tom:he does emotional hovering

Comms_Jess:what does emotional hovering look like

Sim_Ruby:asking whether the low-speed model has been updated when what he means is “is Charlotte here today”

Aero_Matt:walking past the sim wing three times

Powertrains_Nina:bringing coffee and pretending it was extra

Garage_Pete:liking Tilly’s strawberry bonnet at 01:13

Comms_Jess:HE DID WHAT

Strategy_Hannah:Please stop monitoring the man’s likes.

Aero_Matt:he followed a 39-follower cat account that’s public behaviour

Comms_Jess:back to the important bit how did max take charlotte not being impressed by imola

Engineering_GP:Badly.

Aero_Matt:details

Engineering_GP:No.

Strategy_Hannah:He complained that she “didn’t care.”

Composite_Tom:HAHAHAHA

Garage_Pete:world champion defeated by woman saying “expected performance”

Strategy_Leah:to be fair she did say good drive

Sim_Ruby:that is basically a standing ovation from Charlotte

Powertrains_Nina:that is Charlotte throwing underwear on stage

Strategy_Hannah:Nina.

Powertrains_Nina:sorry

Aero_Matt:did GP give him advice

Engineering_GP:I told him to be interesting without winning something.

Comms_Jess:that is the meanest and most useful advice I’ve ever heard

Garage_Pete:did he survive it

Engineering_GP:Barely.

Sim_Ruby:max has never had to flirt uphill before

Composite_Tom:flirt uphill 😭

Strategy_Leah:Charlotte is basically Eau Rouge emotionally

Strategy_Hannah:Difficult, fast, and punishes arrogance?

Engineering_GP:Accurate.

Sim_Ruby:I am gonna go and find out if Charlotte has a boyfriend. 

***

It happened over coffee.

It always did.

There was something about the Red Bull sim wing before ten in the morning that made people forget themselves. Maybe it was the bad coffee. Maybe it was the hours. Maybe it was the false intimacy of standing around half-awake with mugs in hand, pretending they were not all about to spend the day arguing with data that had the emotional temperament of a spoilt racehorse.

Charlotte had been halfway through explaining a small but irritating inconsistency in a tyre degradation model when one of the younger engineers, Ruby, — bright, well-meaning, and entirely too invested in the romantic prospects of everyone around them — looked at her over the rim of her mug.

“You know,” Ruby said, far too casually, “my friend is single.”

Charlotte paused. Only for a second. “No,” she said.

Ruby blinked. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to tell me he works in aero,” Charlotte replied, turning back toward the screen. “Possibly that he is tall. Probably that he is normal, which is never as reassuring as people think it is.”

A beat.

Ruby’s mouth fell open. “How did you—”

“You have tried this twice before.”

“I have not.”

“You have. Once with the gearbox analyst. Once with the composite materials guy who owned a bearded dragon.”

“He was lovely.”

“He brought the bearded dragon to a first date.”

“That shows commitment.”

“That shows poor judgment.”

Someone at the next desk laughed into their coffee.

Ruby, undeterred, leaned against the edge of Charlotte’s workstation. “Okay, but this one is different.”

“They never are.”

“He’s nice.”

“I’m sure.”

“Tall.”

“As predicted.”

“Works in aero.”

“Tragic.”

“And he’s normal.”

Charlotte looked at her then.

Ruby winced. “Okay, I hear it now.”

“Good.”

“Oh, come on,” Ruby said, laughing. “It’s just coffee. No pressure. You might like him.”

Charlotte’s face settled automatically into something pleasant and final.

“No, thank you.”

The words came easily.

Too easily.

They always had.

Ruby held her gaze for a moment, looking for a crack in the answer, some hidden hesitation she could widen into a yes. Charlotte gave her nothing.

Eventually, Ruby shrugged. “Fine. Your loss.”

“Statistically unlikely.”

That earned another laugh, and the conversation drifted back toward the model, toward tyre behaviour and track evolution and the clean relief of problems that did not ask to be loved.

Charlotte appreciated that.

She appreciated people who knew when to stop.

Still, the thought followed her after Ruby left.

It sat beside her through the next simulation review, quiet and unwelcome. It lingered when she corrected an input error, when she sent an update to Hannah, when she stood by the coffee machine later and realised she had forgotten to drink the first cup entirely.

Dating required openness.

Not the fashionable kind of vulnerability people discussed in seminars, all neat language and tidy conclusions. Not the sort of thing that could be packaged into a sentence about communication styles.

Real openness.

The kind that meant letting someone close enough to see the places where you had learned not to expect much.

Charlotte did not have that in her anymore.

Or maybe she had once, and it had been worn away so gradually she had not noticed until it was gone. Either way, she had lost the ability to trust gently a very, very long time ago.

She had never had a boyfriend.

Not in school, where safety had felt temporary and affection like something that could be revoked without warning. She had been too busy learning which version of herself took up the least space.

Not at Cambridge, where she had worked until her eyes burned and her hands cramped, pouring herself into problem sets, libraries, lectures, late-night calculations, anything that could be solved by discipline. People had flirted. Some had even been kind about it. She had deflected them all with essays and deadlines and the cold, efficient belief that competence was a better investment than connection.

There had always been something more important.

Then there had been the cancer.

That had settled the matter in a very definitive way.

Charlotte still remembered the room where the doctor told her.

Sterile walls. Too-bright lights. 

A poster about neurological symptoms curling slightly at one corner. The careful, gentle cadence of a specialist explaining timelines and treatment options and probabilities as if kindness could soften the shape of the words.

Tumour.

Surgery.

Radiation.

Chemotherapy.

Monitoring.

Support.

They had said that word several times.

Support.

As if it were a thing a person could simply decide to have.

Charlotte had sat with her hands folded in her lap, listening carefully, asking precise questions, nodding in the appropriate places. And somewhere beneath the clinical calm, a thought had arrived with perfect clarity.

This is not something you ask someone to share.

Nobody should be burdened with that.

The fear. The uncertainty. The possibility that she might disappear halfway through someone loving her.

She had survived, yes.

But survival had come with a cost.

It had taught her to carry her own weight and then some. To plan for the worst and apologise for nothing. To assume that if life dropped something unbearable into her hands, it was still her responsibility to hold it.

Opening herself up enough to let someone in would mean explaining too much.

Her mother.

Her father.

The house where she had learned to be silent.

The years no one had come for her.

The scars, visible and otherwise.

Charlotte no longer knew how to do that without flinching.

So she didn’t.

It was easier that way.

Cleaner.

By the time Charlotte got home that evening, the migraine had settled in properly.

Not the sharp kind. Not the kind that made her vision blur at the edges and forced her immediately into darkness.

This was duller. Heavier. A pressure wrapped around her skull like a hand tightening very slowly, making the world feel faintly misaligned, as though everything was half a second behind where it ought to be.

She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind her.

For a moment, she stayed there.

Bag dropped at her feet.

Forehead pressed against the cool wood.

Breathing.

In.

Out.

Again.

It was not panic.

It never was anymore.

But migraines still carried echoes.

Pressure behind the eye. Light sensitivity. The low, traitorous whisper at the back of her mind: you have felt this before.

Charlotte closed her eyes.

“I know,” she murmured, to no one in particular. “I know.”

A soft, questioning noise answered from the hallway.

Charlotte opened her eyes and looked down.

Tilly sat on the floor, tail curled neatly around her paws, a round orange face tilted up in stern disapproval. She looked profoundly unimpressed by human frailty.

“You’re right,” Charlotte said quietly. “I’m late.”

Tilly blinked.

Judgment, but with affection.

Probably.

Charlotte kicked off her shoes and padded into the living room, switching off the overhead light before it could worsen the pressure behind her eyes. She left only the small lamp on near the sofa, its glow low and amber.

Muscle memory.

Survival habits never quite left. They only softened around the edges until they looked like preferences.

Tilly followed at her heels.

Charlotte sank onto the couch carefully, one hand pressed against her temple. The migraine pulsed, insistent but contained.

Unpleasant.

Not alarming.

She repeated that to herself automatically.

Unpleasant. Not alarming.

Still, every migraine carried the echo of hospital lights. Of MRI machines humming too close to her skull. Of doctors speaking gently in that terrible voice people used when they were about to change your life.

It’s probably nothing, they had said at first.

It had not been nothing.

Tilly jumped up beside her without waiting for an invitation, circled once, then climbed into Charlotte’s lap with the deliberate gravity of a creature who considered herself medically essential.

Charlotte exhaled.

“There you are,” she whispered.

Tilly tucked herself against Charlotte’s stomach, purring almost immediately.

Charlotte let her head fall back against the couch.

“Cancer cat,” she murmured, resting one hand on Tilly’s warm back.

Tilly flicked an ear.

Charlotte had gotten Tilly on a Tuesday.

Charlotte remembered that with unreasonable clarity.

The shelter had smelled of disinfectant, old blankets, and damp fur. Charlotte had still been wearing the blouse she wore to the appointment. She remembered that too. White. Stupid choice. Too formal for a diagnosis, too ordinary for the fact that her life had just split neatly into before and after.

The doctor’s voice had still been in her head.

We caught it early.

The prognosis is good.

You’ll need support.

She had not called her father.

She had not called anyone.

Instead, she had gone to the shelter on the way home, because some part of her had known before the rest of her caught up that she could not return to an empty flat with a brain tumour and nothing alive waiting for her.

Tilly had been in the last cage.

Quiet. Watchful. Recently surrendered.

Not performing charm. Not pawing at the bars. Not begging to be chosen.

Just sitting there, looking at Charlotte with an expression that seemed to say, Well?

Charlotte had crouched in front of the cage.

Tilly had stared back.

And Charlotte had thought, with startling, absurd clarity: If I die, this cat will not understand why I left.

So she had stayed.

Through surgery.

Through radiation.

Through the long, ugly recovery no one put in pamphlets properly — the fatigue, the dizziness, the fear disguised as medical vigilance, the slow crawl back into a body that no longer felt entirely trustworthy.

She had stayed because every evening there was a cat waiting to be fed.

A cat waiting to complain.

A cat waiting to climb onto her chest as if she could hold Charlotte’s soul in place by sheer stubbornness.

Charlotte stroked Tilly’s fur now, slow and steady, feeling the vibration of her purr seep through her hand and into her bones.

“I stayed,” she whispered. “See?”

Tilly pressed closer.

The migraine dulled, fractionally.

Outside, the world went on. Rumours, races, strategy calls, factory gossip, the noise of a season slowly trying to eat itself alive.

Inside, there was low light, warm fur, and the steady proof of something Charlotte still struggled to name.

Not happiness, exactly.

Not peace.

But life.

Chosen once.

Chosen again.

Chosen every day since.

Charlotte closed her eyes and let herself rest beneath the weight of the cat who had once made survival feel less like an obligation and more like a promise.

Just for a moment.

Just long enough to remember why she was still here.

***

The simulator room was wrong.

Not silent — the simulator room was never silent. There was always the low electrical hum of machinery, the faint murmur of engineers speaking in half-sentences, the click of keys, the shuffle of someone moving between consoles with a coffee in one hand and three problems in the other.

But it was missing something.

Max noticed before he meant to.

A rhythm.

A presence.

The far console, usually lit before the rest of the room had properly settled, was dark.

Charlotte’s chair was empty.

Max pulled off his gloves slowly, gaze lingering on the workstation as if she might appear if he looked long enough. Which was stupid. He knew it was stupid. He had known her properly for only a handful of weeks, and yet somehow his brain had already started cataloguing the room by whether or not Charlotte Fischer was in it.

He looked away.

“Where’s Charlotte?” he asked.

Casual.

Perfectly casual.

Like he had simply noticed a missing engineer and not the absence of a particular woman with short dark hair, dark eyes, and the ability to make him feel like an idiot by raising one eyebrow.

One of the sim engineers looked up from their laptop. “She called in sick.”

Max nodded. “Oh.”

The word landed badly.

Too heavy.

Too obvious.

He made himself set his gloves down.

Another engineer, older and more familiar, grimaced slightly. “Yeah. Migraines.”

Max paused. “Migraines?”

“Yeah.”

“She gets those a lot?”

The engineer hesitated.

It was small. Barely anything. But Max noticed it the way he noticed hesitation in a car before it snapped.

The first engineer glanced at the second.

The second shrugged. “After the brain tumour,” they said. “Yeah. Sometimes they’re brutal.”

Max went still.

For a second, the hum of the room seemed to flatten into one long, dull note.

“…The what?”

Both engineers looked at him.

The older one’s expression shifted first.

Realisation. Then regret.

“Oh,” they said slowly. “You didn’t know.”

Max shook his head once.

“No.”

The answer came out too quiet.

There was another pause, and this one was heavier. A silent exchange moved between the two engineers — not gossip, not panic, just the quick calculation of people who had learned there were things you handled carefully because Charlotte mattered.

That, somehow, made it worse.

The younger engineer spoke first, voice gentler now.

“She had cancer. A few years ago. Brain tumour.” He said it plainly, without drama, which only made the words more brutal. “She survived. Obviously. But the migraines stuck around.”

Max stared at them.

Brain tumour.

Cancer.

The words did not fit.

They refused to attach themselves to the woman he knew — precise, contained Charlotte, who rewound sim runs with a frown of intense concentration and spoke about flawed modelling assumptions like the data had personally betrayed her.

Charlotte, who crocheted tiny hats for her cat.

Charlotte, who had looked at him after Imola like winning a Grand Prix was a perfectly normal thing for a Grand Prix driver to have done.

Charlotte, who had made the car honest again.

“She’s fine now,” the engineer added quickly, as if Max had asked. As if the room could feel the sudden, sharp drop in him. “It’s not… I mean, they monitor everything. She’s okay. It’s just that sometimes her body reminds her.”

Max nodded.

He did not trust himself to speak.

Sometimes her body reminds her.

He looked toward the empty console again.

Her screens were off.

Her chair pushed in.

A neat absence.

The older engineer followed his gaze and sighed softly. “We basically force her to stay home when it hits.”

Max’s eyes moved back to them.

“Force her?”

“She’d work through it otherwise.”

“Of course she would,” the younger engineer muttered, fond and exasperated. “Last time she tried to remote into the model review from her sofa with one eye open.”

“She lasted eleven minutes,” the older one said. “Then Hannah threatened to change her passwords.”

Despite himself, Max almost smiled.

Almost.

“She’s stubborn,” the younger engineer said.

“Brilliant,” the other added. “But stubborn.”

Then their tone shifted, just slightly. Firmer. Protective.

“And we don’t mess around with it. If Charlotte says she’s not okay, she’s not okay. End of.”

Max looked between them.

That was when he saw it properly.

Not pity.

Not curiosity.

Not the strange, hungry interest people sometimes had in someone else’s tragedy.

This was different.

Quiet. Unshowy. Absolute.

They protected her.

Not because she had asked them to. 

Max suspected Charlotte Fischer rarely asked anyone for anything.

They protected her because they had decided she was theirs.

The sim department’s. Red Bull’s, in that strange, territorial way the team had with people it loved.

The same way half the building treated Max like he was both weapon and child.

Except Charlotte had earned it without ever inviting it.

Something tightened in Max’s chest.

“How long has she been here?” he asked.

“Since she graduated,” the younger engineer said. “Cambridge. Straight in.”

“Barely took time off even then,” the older one added. “Had to be bullied into it, obviously.”

Max let out a slow breath.

Cambridge.

Austria.

Boarding school.

The cat account.

Cancer.

Migraines.

The pieces rearranged themselves, but they still did not make a full picture. If anything, they made less sense now. Or maybe they made too much.

Charlotte’s composure. Her distance. The way she did not waste energy trying to be liked. The way she treated praise like a weather report. The way she had made herself necessary and still somehow almost invisible.

“She never talks about it,” Max said.

It was not really a question.

“No,” the older engineer replied. “And we don’t push.”

The younger one glanced toward Charlotte’s empty console, expression softening. “She earned that.”

Max nodded once.

He understood that.

More than he expected to.

There were things people did not get to know simply because they were curious.

There were parts of a person that had to be offered, not taken.

Still, the knowledge sat badly in him.

He had gone to her desk after Imola wanting her to be impressed.

The memory turned sour now.

He had stood there with a trophy somewhere in the building and a win still fresh in everyone’s mouth, waiting for Charlotte Fischer to look at him like he was extraordinary.

And she had survived a brain tumour.

Of course she had not cared about Imola the way he wanted her to.

Of course she had looked at him like winning was simply what he was supposed to do.

Her scale for important had been rewritten by things he had not even imagined.

Max swallowed.

“Right,” he said finally. “Okay.”

It was neither right nor okay, but there was nothing else to say.

He turned back toward the simulator, movements automatic. Helmet. Seat. Straps. Wheel. Systems coming online around him, the familiar ritual settling over his body even as his mind stayed fixed on the empty workstation beyond the glass.

The run began.

The car loaded.

The model waited.

Max stared at the screen for a moment longer than necessary.

He was supposed to be thinking about balance. Entry instability. Rear load. The thousand problems of a car that wanted to punish him for believing in it too much.

Instead, he thought about Charlotte sitting alone somewhere with a migraine bad enough to keep her away from the one place she seemed to prefer over people.

He thought about her colleagues closing ranks without needing to discuss it.

He thought about a woman who had survived something enormous and then returned to work as if that were the logical next step.

A few days ago, he had been curious about her.

Annoyingly curious.

Embarrassingly curious.

He had wanted to know why she sounded British when she was Austrian. Why she crocheted hats for her cat. Why she looked at him like he was a variable instead of a world champion.

Now the curiosity had changed shape.

It had become concern.

Not abstract. Not polite.

Personal.

Max tightened his hands on the wheel.

That was inconvenient.

That was dangerous.

That was very, very bad.

Through the glass, Charlotte’s console remained dark.

Max looked at it once more.

Then he drove.

***

Max found Hannah exactly where he expected to find her.

In her office. Half-hidden behind two monitors, shoulders rounded toward a screen full of data, a mug beside her hand that had probably been hot once in a previous lifetime.

She looked up when he knocked.

Then immediately narrowed her eyes.

“You have a face,” she said.

Max paused in the doorway. “I always have a face.”

“No,” Hannah said. “You have that face. The one where you are about to ask a question you have already decided is casual, even though it absolutely is not.”

Max exhaled through his nose and leaned one shoulder against the doorframe.

“I found out about Charlotte.”

Hannah’s expression changed.

Not dramatically. Not with alarm.

Just softer.

“Oh,” she said.

That confirmed it before she said anything else.

Max’s jaw tightened.

“They said she called in sick. Migraine.”

Hannah nodded once. “Yeah. That happens sometimes.”

“Because of the tumour.”

She watched him for a moment, measuring how much he knew and how much he was trying very hard not to show he cared.

“Yes,” she said eventually. “Brain tumour. Cancer. A few years ago.”

The words were not new anymore. He had already heard them in the sim room.

They still landed badly.

Max looked down at the floor, then back at her. “She’s okay?”

“If it’s one of the migraines, she’ll be fine in a day or two,” Hannah said. “She knows her limits.”

Max gave her a look.

Hannah sighed. “Mostly.”

That sounded more like Charlotte.

“She tries to work through them?”

“Of course she does,” Hannah said, as if this was a deeply irritating fact of nature. “Because apparently surviving cancer did not teach her that rest is not a moral failure.”

Max’s mouth pressed into a line.

Hannah leaned back in her chair.

“She doesn’t like people making a thing out of it,” she added. “She doesn’t hide it exactly, but she doesn’t volunteer it either. It’s not how she wants people to see her.”

“No,” Max said quietly. “I can understand that.”

Hannah studied him.

There was too much understanding in her face.

Max hated that.

He shifted, folding his arms. “So she’s alone?”

Hannah blinked.

“Alone?”

“At home,” Max clarified too quickly. “I mean, if she has a migraine. Is someone there? A boyfriend or something?”

Silence.

It lasted half a second too long.

Then Hannah’s eyebrows rose.

Max immediately regretted everything.

“Oh,” she said.

“No.”

“Oh, Max.”

“I am just asking.”

“No, you are absolutely not just asking.”

He straightened. “It’s a normal question.”

“It became abnormal the second you said boyfriend or something like the word boyfriend was trying to murder you.”

Max looked away. “Forget I asked.”

“I will do no such thing.”

“Hannah.”

“She’s single,” Hannah said, far too calmly.

Max’s eyes flicked back to her before he could stop them.

Hannah saw it.

Of course she saw it.

Her smile sharpened.

“She lives alone,” she continued. “A few minutes from campus. Quiet flat. One cat. No boyfriend. No secret husband. No dramatic situationship with an aero engineer, despite several people’s attempts.”

Max absorbed that with a level of interest he did not want to examine.

“Oh,” he said.

Hannah’s smile became unbearable.

“Right,” he added, because apparently he was determined to make it worse.

She rested her chin in her hand.

“You want to check on her.”

“No,” Max said automatically.

Hannah waited.

He made it three seconds.

“…Maybe.”

“There it is.”

“I can’t just show up at her apartment,” he said. “That’s weird.”

“It can be weird,” Hannah allowed.

Max stared at her. “That is not helpful.”

“It depends how you do it.”

“How is there a non-weird way to show up at someone’s home when they’re sick?”

“By not making it about yourself,” Hannah said simply. “By bringing something useful. By leaving if she wants you to leave. By not expecting gratitude, vulnerability, or a scene from a romantic comedy.”

Max frowned. “I don’t want a romantic comedy.”

“No,” Hannah said. “You want a woman who doesn’t care that you won Imola to let you care about her without biting your head off.”

Max opened his mouth. Closed it. “That is very specific.”

“And yet accurate.”

He rubbed a hand over his face.

“I don’t even know her that well.”

“No,” Hannah agreed. “You don’t.”

That should have helped.

It did not.

“But you know enough to be worried,” she added.

Max looked at her.

Hannah’s voice softened. “And for Charlotte, someone being worried without trying to take over is not the worst thing in the world.”

“She doesn’t need me checking on her.”

“No,” Hannah said. “She doesn’t need anyone.”

That hit him harder than expected.

Because Hannah did not say it admiringly.

She said it like it was a fact and a wound at the same time.

Max looked toward the corridor, though Charlotte was not there. Her empty console flashed in his mind again. Dark screens. Chair pushed in. The whole room subtly wrong without her.

“She would hate people fussing,” he said.

“She would despise it.”

“So I should not fuss.”

“Correct.”

“But checking is different?”

“It can be.”

Max huffed. “You are being very unhelpful for someone who knows her.”

“I know her well enough to know she won’t want pity,” Hannah said. “And I know you well enough to know pity is not what this is.”

Max went still.

Hannah let that sit for a moment.

Then she stood, picking up her tablet.

“Don’t overthink it.”

“That is impossible.”

“For you, apparently.” She moved around the desk, then paused beside him. “Bring normal things. Migraine-safe things. Crackers. Electrolytes. Nothing scented. Nothing loud. Don’t knock like the police. If she opens the door and tells you to go away, go away.”

Max nodded slowly, committing the list to memory with the same seriousness he gave race strategy.

Hannah looked at him and sighed.

“Oh, you are completely doomed.”

“I am not.”

“Max,” she said, almost fond now. “You came into my office to ask whether Charlotte Fischer has a boyfriend because you heard she has a migraine.”

He said nothing.

There was really nothing useful to say.

Hannah patted his arm once as she passed.

“She lives on Hawthorn Close,” she said. “Number twelve. I did not tell you that.”

Max stared after her.

“That seems very much like you told me.”

“No,” Hannah called over her shoulder. “I merely released information into the room. What you do with it is between you, your conscience, and whatever terrible romantic instincts you apparently have.”

“Hannah.”

She glanced back, smiling now.

“You really do have it bad.”

Then she was gone, leaving Max alone in her office doorway with Charlotte’s address in his head, concern sitting uncomfortably behind his ribs, and the deeply inconvenient realisation that, for once, winning something would not help him at all.

Charlotte Fischer had been at Red Bull since the week after she graduated.

She’d sent in her CV like anyone else. Interviewed in a windowless room with bad coffee and too many questions. Signed her contract quietly and moved her life to Milton Keynes with the vague sense that she’d chosen something irreversible.

Sometimes — usually when she was three coffees deep and the sim refused to behave — it amused her, in a dry, private way, that she’d ended up here of all places.

Red Bull Racing.

The irony wasn’t lost on her.

No one here knew who she was related to. 

No one softened their tone around her. No one watched her for signs of brilliance or disappointment. No one projected legacy onto her shoulders.

She wasn’t anyone’s daughter.

She could just be Charlotte.

Just another engineer with too many tabs open and a stubborn relationship with data.

Charlotte liked it that way.

The simulator lived deep inside the building, far from daylight and distraction.

Charlotte liked to joke — only to herself — that you could lose entire days down there and no one would notice.

She’d learned the rhythms of the place: the hum of machines, the faint smell of warmed electronics, the way the air never quite changed. It was insulated from the outside world, from weather and seasons and expectations.

The sim didn’t care who her father was. It didn’t care who her mother had been.

It didn’t care that she’d once lain in a hospital bed counting ceiling tiles and wondering if this would be the last room she would ever see.  

The sim only cared whether the model was wrong.

If the numbers were wrong, it told her.

If the assumptions were flawed, it punished her.

If she fixed it, it responded honestly.

There was no pity in it.

Only cause and effect.

She spent most of her time down there — long hours, irregular meals, headphones on, mind locked into the language of physics and probability. People sometimes forgot she existed until something broke or improved unexpectedly.

She didn’t mind.

Being invisible had its advantages.

There were days — quieter ones, harder ones — when she recognised the truth without flinching:

When it wasn’t Tilly the cat keeping her alive, it had been this.

The focus. The problems.

The sense that something complex could be understood if she stayed with it long enough.

She had survived because she’d had reasons to keep thinking forward.

Sometimes, late at night, she’d sit alone in the sim control room, lights low, replaying runs not because she needed to — but because the repetition was grounding. 

The steady hum reminded her that she was still here, that time was still moving.

She didn’t think about her father much while she worked.

That part of her life felt distant, sealed off behind professional neutrality and old decisions. Here, she was judged on output, not origin.

Here, she was competent.

Here, she mattered.

Charlotte adjusted a parameter, watched the model settle, and made a note to herself for the next session.

Just Charlotte.

And that was more than enough.

***

The car was lying to him.

Max had known it for weeks, in that low, irritating way that lived between shoulder blades and instincts — the way a thing felt wrong even when the numbers insisted otherwise. 

The simulator said one thing. The track said another. 

And every time he brought it up, it got smoothed over with words like correlation and tolerance and development window.

None of which helped when the rear snapped like it hated him personally.

So when GP told him there was someone in the sim department who wanted ten minutes of his time, Max expected another polite meeting. 

Another explanation. 

Another we’re working on it.

He did not expect her.

She was standing half-turned toward the screen when he walked in, arms crossed loosely, posture straight but not stiff. 

Tall. Longer legs than most people in the room. 

Short dark hair that brushed her jaw, slightly mussed like she’d run a hand through it too many times. 

Dark eyes — sharp, focused— flicked to him, assessed him, and then went straight back to the data.

No awe. No hesitation.

Interesting.

“Max, this is Charlotte Fischer.” GP said. “Sim engineer. Charlotte, Max.”

Charlotte Fischer nodded once. No smile. No fuss.

“Hi, nice to meet you.”

Her voice was calm. Neutral in a way that suggested it had been trained that way.

Max nodded back, suddenly very aware of the fact that he was still in his race suit and probably smelled faintly like heat and frustration.

“So,” he said, because silence felt loaded already. “You found something.”

“Yes,” she said immediately, uncrossing her arms and stepping closer to the screen. “The sim wasn’t wrong because of bad inputs. It was wrong because it was assuming the car behaved honestly.”

Max blinked.

“…Okay.”

She glanced at him then, just briefly, and there was something dry in her expression. Not amused. Not impressed. Just… certain.

“The aero load model is overcorrecting for yaw instability,” she continued. “Which means the sim compensates in ways the real car can’t. It’s smoothing behavior that doesn’t exist. So when you drive it, you subconsciously trust a balance you’ll never actually have on track.”

GP inhaled slowly, like someone bracing.

Max stepped closer, eyes narrowing at the replay she pulled up.

“That’s why it snaps,” he said quietly. “Mid-corner. Feels fine until it doesn’t.”

Charlotte nodded. “Yes.”

Not maybe. Not we think. Yes.

She pulled up a comparison run — sim versus real telemetry — and the discrepancy was suddenly obvious, glaring in hindsight. The sim was lying, and it had been doing it for months.

“I adjusted the assumptions,” she said. “Removed the artificial stabilisation. It’s… less pleasant to drive now.”

Max snorted.

“Good.”

That earned him a real look. One eyebrow lifted slightly. “I thought you might say that.”

He liked her already.

They ran the updated sim together. 

The car was ugly, nervous, difficult — and suddenly, it made sense. The feedback matched his hands. The fear points lined up with reality.

When Max climbed out, adrenaline buzzing in his veins, he realised something else had changed.

He was smiling. “That’s it,” he said, turning toward her. “That’s the car.”

Charlotte inclined her head, like she’d expected nothing else.

“You’ll still hate it,” she said. “Just for the correct reasons now.”

He laughed before he could stop himself.

GP cleared his throat, looking between them with interest. “Good work,” he said to Charlotte.

She nodded again, already gathering her tablet, mentally moving on.

Max watched her for half a second too long.

Pretty was the wrong word. She wasn’t decorative. She was… arresting. 

Tall, composed, dark hair sharp against pale skin, dark eyes that didn’t seek approval. Someone who fixed things quietly and didn’t need applause for it.

And something else — something he couldn’t quite name — tugged at him.

Familiarity, maybe. Or recognition.

As she turned to leave, Max found himself speaking without planning it. “You’ll be around for the next sessions?”

Charlotte paused, glanced back at him. “Yes.”

Just that.

Then she walked out, steps measured, already gone from the moment.

Max stood there, helmet under his arm, heart doing something annoying and unexpected.

GP watched him, unimpressed. “…Don’t,” he said flatly.

Max didn’t even look away from the door. “I haven’t done anything.”

GP huffed. “You’re thinking too loudly.”

Max smiled to himself, slow and crooked. Yeah. He definitely was.

***

Lunch was a brief ceasefire between debriefs and damage limitation.

They were halfway through eating when Charlotte appeared at the edge of the table, tablet tucked under her arm, tote bag slung over one shoulder.

She paused, polite. “Sorry to interrupt.”

Max looked up immediately. Tried not to look like he had.

Hannah smiled. “You’re not interrupting.”

Charlotte reached into her bag and pulled out something… knitted. Crocheted, actually. Thick yarn, carefully shaped.

It was a tiny hat.

A ridiculous, adorable, painstakingly made tiny hat.

“This is for Nimbus,” Charlotte said, handing it to Hannah. “Your daughters asked if the ears could be… exaggerated.”

Hannah gasped softly. “Oh my god. They’re going to lose their minds.”

Max stared at the hat.

Then at Charlotte.

Then back at the hat.

“…Is that,” he said slowly, “a cat-sized hat?”

“Yes.”

No hesitation. No embarrassment.

GP choked on his drink.

Hannah turned the little thing over in her hands, inspecting the stitches. “You’re a miracle worker. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Charlotte hesitated, then added, “If Nimbus hates it, tell them it’s my fault.”

“He won’t,” Hannah said confidently. “He tolerates nonsense remarkably well.”

Charlotte nodded once, satisfied, and glanced briefly at Max — just a flicker — before stepping back.

“Enjoy lunch,” she said.

Then she was gone again, leaving behind a crochet hat and a table full of stunned engineers.

There was a beat of silence.

Max broke it immediately.

“I need to see pictures,” he said, pointing at the hat. “Immediately. When your cat wears that.”

Hannah laughed. “Of course you do.”

“I’m serious,” Max said. “This is important.”

GP sighed into his coffee. “Please explain to me how this is now important.”

Max ignored him, eyes still on the hat.

Hannah smiled knowingly. “Charlotte has an Instagram.”

Max’s head snapped up. “She does?”

“Yes,” Hannah said casually. “She only posts her cat. Modeling the hats.”

Max froze. “…Only that?”

“Yes.”

“How many hats are we talking about?”

Hannah shrugged. “Seasonal. Themes. There was a little witch one at Halloween.”

Max was already pulling out his phone.

“What’s the handle?”

Hannah told him.

Max followed the account without a second’s hesitation.

The feed loaded.

Cat. Hat. Another hat. A different angle of the same cat. A caption that was aggressively understated.

Max stared.

Then smiled.

Then liked three photos in a row before realising he probably shouldn’t like all of them.

GP watched him with the weary expression of a man who had seen this before and knew how it ended.

“You are,” GP said, “deeply predictable.”

Max didn’t look up.

“She crochets hats,” he said faintly. “For cats.”

“Yes,” Hannah said. “And?”

“And she fixes our sim,” Max added. “And she’s tall.”

Hannah snorted.

GP stood, collecting his tray. “I’m leaving before this gets worse.”

Max finally glanced up, phone still in his hand, eyes bright.

“It’s already worse,” he said cheerfully.

And he liked another photo anyway.

Max was still scrolling when GP came back with his coffee.

Another cat. Another hat.

Max liked it.

Hannah watched him do it.

She didn’t say anything at first. Just leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, eyes flicking between Max, the phone, and GP with the quiet confidence of someone about to ruin a man’s day.

“Ah,” she said eventually. “There it is.”

Max frowned. “What.”

GP glanced over. Took in the scene in half a second. “Oh,” GP said flatly. “No.”

Max finally looked up. “What do you mean no.”

“You have a crush,” Hannah said, far too cheerfully.

Max scoffed. “I do not.”

GP sat down slowly, the way one does when bracing for disappointment.

“You followed an engineer’s cat Instagram within thirty seconds,” GP said. “And you’re smiling at your phone.”

“It’s a cat,” Max argued. “In a hat!”

Hannah raised an eyebrow. “You don’t follow my cat.”

“That’s because your cat doesn’t wear costumes,” Max shot back.

GP pinched the bridge of his nose.

“This,” he said, gesturing vaguely at Max, “is exactly how it starts.”

Max rolled his eyes. “You’re both being dramatic.”

Hannah leaned forward. “Max. You asked me to send you photos of Nimbus wearing the hat. You said it was ‘important.’”

“It is important.”

GP stared at him. “Why.”

Max opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

“Well,” he said, stalling, “because—”

Hannah smiled sweetly. “Because you like her.”

“I like that she fixed the sim,” Max said quickly.

“And crocheted a hat for my cat,” Hannah added.

“And has an Instagram for it,” GP said.

“And you followed it immediately,” Hannah finished.

They both looked at him.

Max exhaled through his nose, defeated.

“…Fine,” he muttered. “Maybe a little.”

Hannah clapped once. “Oh god. You have a crush.”

GP groaned. “We are not doing this in the middle of a season from hell.”

Max looked back at his phone. The orange cat stared out from the screen, tiny hat slightly askew.

“She’s just… interesting,” he said, quieter now. “And she’s good. At her job.”

GP gave him a long look. “So were many people before who you did not stalk via crochet content.”

Max shrugged.

Hannah laughed outright. “This is adorable. I give it three weeks before you ask her about yarn.”

“I am not asking her about yarn,” Max protested.

GP didn’t even look convinced.

Max liked another photo.

Just one more.

For science.

***

Meanwhile on Twitter: 

@/gridwatcher:  🚨 extremely important max verstappen following update 🚨 he just followed… a cat account???

@/tyredegpls:  a WHAT account

@/gridwatcher:  no because look it’s just a cat wearing crocheted hats

@/papayapanic:  pls tell me you’re joking

@/gridwatcher:  I WISH I WAS handle is literally tillyshats 

@/softsector:  hold on scrolling oh my god WHY IS IT SO CUTE

@/dutchdelight33:  max: fighting a cursed car every weekend also max: yes. tiny hat.

@/downforcegirlie:  this is the most unhinged thing he’s done all season and that is SAYING something

@/gridwatcher:  the captions are killing me “she hated this.” bestie SAME

@/tyredegpls:  do we think max knows the person irl or is this just him discovering joy again

@/softsector:  either way i support his healing journey through crochet cat hats

@/downforcegirlie:  he’s gonna like every post isn’t he

@/softsector:  he already liked three in a row. source: me, refreshing.

@/gridwatcher:  someone please tell him twitter has eyes

@/papayapanic:  no don’t this is the only joy we have this season

@/gridwatcher:  max verstappen following a cat crochet account is the most emotionally stable thing he’s done in months and honestly? relatable.

@/papayaemergency:  the captions are like “she did not consent” “winter collection complete” I’m crying

@/F1Detective:  give us 24 hours

@/F1Detective (later):  ok so: – account has existed for years – never posted anything F1 related – follows exactly 12 people – max followed it today this is either chaos or romance

@/OrangeSector33:  max verstappen silently liking crochet cat content during a catastrophic season is my new coping mechanism

@/MaxAppreciation:  I just know GP saw this and sighed

@/SlowPitStop:  this is how it starts first the cat then the yarn then suddenly he’s knitting in the garage

@/RedBullChaos:  max hasn’t liked anything else today just the cat priorities king 👑

@/DutchF1Watcher:  I don’t care who runs the account I just want them to know they made the fandom happy today 🧶🐱

´***

Slack Channel:  #general-racing-not-business-definitely-not-gossip

Members: far too many Red Bull Racing employees

Aero_Matt: why is max in the sim wing again

Sim_Ruby: because he is a dedicated professional athlete committed to improving performance

Aero_Matt: ruby

Sim_Ruby: because charlotte is here

Strategy_Leah: ah

Composite_Tom: there it is

Garage_Pete: wait are we allowed to say that now

Strategy_Hannah: No.

Garage_Pete: so yes

Strategy_Hannah: Also no.

Sim_Ruby: Max asked whether the updated low-speed model was ready

Aero_Matt: is it

Sim_Ruby: it was ready yesterday

Aero_Matt: and did he know that

Sim_Ruby: yes

Aero_Matt: Beautiful 

Powertrains_Nina: I saw him walk past the sim wing three times this morning

Garage_Pete: maybe he was lost

Powertrains_Nina: max verstappen has been in this building since he was seventeen

Garage_Pete: emotionally lost

Composite_Tom: that checks out

PR_Sophie: Can someone confirm whether Max has actually followed the cat account or is this another rumour?

Strategy_Leah: confirmed 

PR_Sophie: oh my god

Aero_Matt: what cat account

Sim_Ruby: Charlotte’s cat. Tilly. The crochet hats.

Aero_Matt: the WHAT

Garage_Pete: welcome to the lore

Powertrains_Nina: Tilly has worn, to my knowledge:

pumpkin hat

dinosaur hat

mushroom hat

flower hat

PR_Sophie: and max followed within approximately thirty seconds of learning it existed

Aero_Matt: that is not a crush that is a telemetry trace

Engineering_GP: All of you have work to do.

Aero_Matt: so do you

Engineering_GP: Correct. Mine is apparently preventing a world champion from flirting like a concussed golden retriever.

Sim_Ruby: GP

Garage_Pete: A CONCUSSED GOLDEN RETRIEVER

Powertrains_Nina: accurate though

Strategy_Hannah: Unfortunately.

PR_Sophie: For legal purposes, no one is to discuss this outside internal channels.

Aero_Matt: we have legal purposes now?

PR_Sophie: Max liking five consecutive photos of a cat wearing hats is market-sensitive information.

Strategy_Leah: true

Composite_Tom:  the FIA should investigate 

Garage_Pete: penalty for excessive adorableness

Sim_Ruby: UPDATE: Charlotte just told Max the simulator was “less wrong than yesterday” and he smiled like she handed him a trophy

Aero_Matt: oh he is GONE gone

Powertrains_Nina: did she mean it as praise?

Sim_Ruby: for Charlotte? yes

Strategy_Hannah: That is basically a sonnet from her.

Engineering_GP: Do not encourage him.

Strategy_Hannah: I am not encouraging him. I am observing.

Engineering_GP: You gave him her cat Instagram.

Strategy_Hannah: That was cultural enrichment!

Garage_Pete: max just asked whether charlotte was having lunch

Aero_Matt: normal

Garage_Pete: then immediately said “not like that”

Strategy_Leah: less normal

Garage_Pete: then left without eating

Composite_Tom: catastrophic

Powertrains_Nina: has anyone told charlotte

Sim_Ruby: told charlotte what

Powertrains_Nina: that the entire building thinks max has a crush on her

Sim_Ruby: she knows

Aero_Matt: SHE KNOWS?

Sim_Ruby: she has eyes

Strategy_Hannah: And a Cambridge degree.

Garage_Pete: so what is she doing about it

Sim_Ruby: mostly pretending not to know

Strategy_Leah: valid

Composite_Tom: romance, but make it deeply repressed and data-driven

Sim_Ruby: MAX JUST BROUGHT CHARLOTTE A COFFEE

Aero_Matt: did she accept it

Sim_Ruby: yes

Composite_Tom: oh my god

Garage_Pete: wedding when

Strategy_Hannah: Do not be weird.

Garage_Pete: sorry

Powertrains_Nina: what kind of coffee

Sim_Ruby: black. no sugar. exactly how she drinks it.

Strategy_Leah: oh

Aero_Matt: OH

Composite_Tom: he knows her coffee order

Garage_Pete: we are so back

***

Charlotte arrived early enough that the building had not fully woken yet.

The corridor lights were still dimmed to half-strength, the air cool and quiet in the way she liked best, before the factory filled with voices and footsteps and the restless machinery of a race weekend being prepared in a thousand invisible ways. 

She had a coffee in one hand, her tablet tucked beneath her arm, and half her mind already turning over the work she had left unfinished the night before.

There was still a discrepancy in the latest sim run that annoyed her.

Not enough to be alarming.

Enough to be personal.

She slowed when she reached the entrance to the sim wing.

Voices drifted from the coffee machine.

Two engineers stood near the counter, jackets still on, mugs in hand, bodies loose with the kind of ease people only had before the day had properly claimed them. They were talking the way people talked when work had not yet narrowed them down to data and deadlines.

“My mum keeps asking if I’m coming home for Easter,” one of them said, amused. “As if I can just teleport.”

The other laughed. “Mine’s already planning Christmas. It’s March.”

“Better than my dad,” the first replied. “He sends spreadsheets. Travel options. Budget comparisons. Last year there were colour-coded tabs.”

Charlotte stopped just out of sight.

Family talk had a way of slipping under her skin before she had time to brace for it. It was always the harmless conversations that did the most damage. 

The little complaints. The fond exasperation. The casual certainty that someone was waiting somewhere, planning too much, caring clumsily but consistently.

She waited until the moment passed, then stepped forward.

The engineers glanced over, nodded in greeting, and moved aside to let her reach the coffee machine. Their conversation faded naturally as work reasserted itself.

Normal.

Unremarkable.

Charlotte returned the nod, polite and distant, then continued down the corridor with her coffee warming her hand.

She did not think about her family often.

Not actively.

It was not something she pushed away so much as something that had ceased to belong to her daily life. Like a room in a house she had stopped entering until, eventually, she no longer remembered the exact placement of the furniture.

She had a mother once.

That part was easy to remember.

Warmth. Beauty that had nothing to do with mirrors. A laugh that lived in the body more than the mouth. Hands that tucked hair behind Charlotte’s ear with absentminded tenderness. A voice that spoke to her as if she were already someone worth listening to.

Then she had a father.

Had.

The word still landed strangely.

She had not spoken to him in nearly four years now. Not properly. Not since the last argument — if it could even be called that. Arguments implied heat on both sides. Noise. Back-and-forth. Something alive enough to resist.

What they had…that was a rupture.

A single moment where everything unspoken finally surfaced, where Charlotte stopped absorbing it quietly and said, in every way she knew how, this hurts.

And he had answered with calm-downs.

With compromises.

With that familiar, polished instinct to keep the peace, as if peace had ever been neutral. As if it had not always been purchased with her silence.

She had walked out that night without slamming the door.

She had never gone back.

Cutting contact had not been dramatic.

It had been administrative.

She changed her number. Updated emergency contacts. Removed his name from forms and replaced it with her own. Changed what needed changing, signed what needed signing, and built a life that no longer required anyone else’s permission to continue.

It had not felt like loss.

That had surprised her, at first.

It had felt like relief.

She reached the simulator control room and set her things down. The machines hummed around her, steady and familiar, wrapping the room in a sound she understood better than most people’s voices.

This, she could trust.

Data did not ask where you were from.

It did not ask who raised you.

It did not assume connection where there was none.

She powered up her workstation, eyes scanning the screen as systems came online. The familiar glow caught against her coffee cup, her notes, the edge of her hand.

Families, she thought, were something you either got lucky with or learned to live without.

She had learned. And she had survived.

Still, sometimes, she could not help thinking about it.

It happened more often than she liked to admit.

Not deliberately. Not masochistically.

Just… in passing.

A screen left on in the background. A photograph in a paddock recap. A video clip that autoplayed before she could stop it.

Her father laughing with Jack on his shoulders.

Her father leaning down to listen to Rosa, one hand warm and familiar at her back.

Her father with Benedict, proud and attentive and present in a way that looked effortless from the outside.

A father.

Charlotte never sought those moments out, but they found her anyway, slipping into her periphery like static she could never quite tune out.

Every time, she wondered the same thing.

How can you do it for them?

How could he know how to kneel to a child’s height, how to listen, how to protect, how to make himself soft enough to be trusted — and still never have managed it for her?

She did not think it with anger anymore.

That part had burned out years ago.

What remained was quieter. Sharper.

Confusion, edged with grief.

She had been there first.

The thought arrived uninvited every time. Not as an accusation. Not even as a plea.

Just as fact.

She had been there first.

Stephanie’s face surfaced next, as it often did when Charlotte let herself follow the thread.

Stephanie, cool and immaculate. Stephanie, whose displeasure had never needed to become a raised voice to be felt. Stephanie, who had looked at Charlotte as if she were a problem that should have resolved itself through gratitude and silence.

Charlotte had spent years trying to be smaller around her.

Quieter.

Easier.

Less inconveniently alive.

It had never worked.

Nothing would have worked.

That had been one of the cruellest things to learn. That sometimes there was no correct version of yourself that would make someone love you. Sometimes the offence was not your behaviour, or your tone, or your awkwardness, or your grief.

Sometimes the offence was simply that you existed.

Susie belonged in a different category altogether.

Susie had never been cruel.

That mattered.

It also had not been enough.

Charlotte had learned early that kindness without intervention still left bruises. That sympathy did not stop harm if it stayed quiet. That a soft look across a dinner table was not the same thing as someone saying, enough.

She did not resent Susie.

Not exactly.

She simply had not trusted her.

And that, too, had felt inevitable.

Her mother was the only one untouched by complication.

Charlotte missed her with a dull, persistent ache that had nothing to do with time. No amount of years had softened it. No amount of success had replaced the absence. It lived in her quietly, beneath the skin, like an old injury that ached before rain.

She missed the way her mother had spoken to her like Charlotte’s thoughts mattered.

The way she had touched her hair when she was thinking.

The way she had laughed — full-bodied, unselfconscious, generous — as if joy was not something to ration.

She missed the safety of her.

The certainty.

Sometimes Charlotte tried to imagine what her life would have been if her mother had lived.

She suspected the answer was: simpler.

Not easier.

Just less lonely.

She rarely allowed herself to dwell on the question that haunted her most.

If she were still alive, would any of this have happened?

Charlotte knew the answer.

No.

Because her mother would never have let anyone make her feel optional.

She sat down at her desk, set her coffee beside the keyboard, and pulled up the latest sim data.

The discrepancy was still there, waiting for her.

Good.

That, at least, was something she knew how to fix.

***

Max hadn’t meant to listen.

That was the thing.

He was not sneaking around the sim wing like some sort of stalker who lingered near doorways because Charlotte Fischer happened to be on the other side of them.

He was simply walking.

And then he heard her laugh.

Not the small, contained sound she sometimes made when someone said something mildly funny and she decided, apparently by committee, that it deserved acknowledgement.

This was different.

Quick. Unpolished. Surprised out of her.

Max slowed before he could stop himself.

The office door was half-open. Voices drifted out into the corridor — easy, bright, the kind of conversation people had when the day had not fully sharpened around them yet.

Charlotte’s voice cut through the others.

Distinct.

Calm.

Impeccably British in that way that made Max think of expensive schools and people who used forks correctly even when angry.

“You know,” one of her colleagues said, audibly grinning, “every time you say can’t, I expect you to start announcing tea.”

Charlotte made an offended sound. “That’s not even fair.”

“It is,” another voice chimed in. “You sound like you went to the kind of school that has its own crest.”

“I did,” Charlotte said dryly.

Max stopped walking.

He pulled out his phone, because apparently he was now that person and if anyone asked, he could pretend he had received a message.

“Called it,” the first colleague said triumphantly. “I knew it. Boarding school.”

“Very pricey boarding school,” Charlotte corrected. “With uniforms that cost more than my rent.”

Someone laughed. “You’re joking.”

“I wish I were. There was a blazer. It had piping.”

“Oh, posh-posh.”

“Traumatised-posh,” Charlotte corrected. “There is a difference.”

Max’s mouth twitched despite himself.

He could picture it too easily.

Charlotte in some severe school uniform, dark hair shorter even then maybe, dark eyes already watchful, standing too straight because someone somewhere had taught her posture could be armour. 

Charlotte learning early how to sound composed. How to make every sentence smooth enough that no one could grab hold of it.

He filed it away.

Boarding school.

Expensive.

Old money, maybe.

Or at least money somewhere.

That part did not quite fit with the rest of her, though. Not with the way she never talked like someone expecting anything to be handed to her. Not with the way she moved through Red Bull like she had carved out every inch of space herself.

Then one of her colleagues said, “Okay, but wait — you’re not even British, are you?”

There was a pause.

Small. Almost nothing.

Max noticed anyway.

“No,” Charlotte said. “I was born in Austria.”

That stopped him properly.

Austria.

The word clicked into place somewhere in the back of his mind, sharp and unexpected.

“In Austria?” the colleague echoed. “Then why do you sound like you were raised by the BBC?”

Charlotte huffed softly. “Because I moved young and learned quickly that sounding neutral was useful.”

The colleague laughed. “Neutral? Charlotte, you sound like you should be disappointed in my table manners.”

“I often am.”

More laughter.

Max did not laugh this time.

Sounding neutral was useful.

He turned the words over once.

Twice.

He had learned, in the few weeks since Charlotte had appeared properly in his orbit, that she rarely wasted words. She could make a joke, yes. She could be dry enough to make GP look up from his coffee. But she did not say things by accident.

Useful.

Not natural.

Not inherited.

Useful.

He stored that away too.

Austrian.

Moved young.

Accent chosen. Or trained. Or both.

He should have kept walking.

He really should have.

Instead, he stood there in the corridor with his phone in his hand, pretending to scroll through nothing, collecting pieces of Charlotte Fischer like small, mismatched parts of a car he did not yet understand.

Cat Instagram.

That had been the first piece, really.

The account with the orange cat in crocheted hats. 

Tilly’s hats. sixty-seven posts. No selfies. No friends. No food pictures. No glamorous life tucked between work and travel.

Just a cat staring into the camera with offended dignity while wearing whatever newest crocheted creation her owner had made. 

Max had followed the account within thirty seconds of finding it.

Hannah and GP had mocked him for that.

Fairly, maybe.

He had liked only three photos at first, because he had enough self-control not to like all of them immediately. Then he had gone back later and liked two more, because the cat had been wearing a tiny mushroom hat and he was not made of stone.

That had told him something about Charlotte too.

Not the obvious thing — that she liked cats, though that was important and frankly made her more interesting.

But the other thing.

That she made things with her hands.

Tiny, impractical, ridiculous things.

For a cat.

The same woman who spoke in clean, precise lines about sim correlation and flawed modelling assumptions spent her free time crocheting hats for an animal that looked furious about it.

Max liked that more than he knew what to do with.

Now Austria. Boarding school. The accent.

The little pause before she answered.

He put those beside the cat hats in his head.

None of it made a full picture.

All of it made him want to look again.

“So what,” the first colleague said, still teasing, “secret posh childhood?”

Charlotte made a sound Max could not quite read. “Something like that.”

That was not an answer.

Max knew that because he gave those kinds of answers all the time.

The ones that sounded enough like truth that people stopped asking.

“Come on,” the colleague pressed. “Austria, British boarding school, Cambridge, Red Bull. That’s a lot.”

“It looks more coherent on paper than it was in practice,” Charlotte said.

There it was again.

A sentence with a door behind it.

Max stared at his phone without seeing it.

“Did your parents just decide England would build character?” someone asked.

Another pause.

Longer this time.

Then Charlotte said, lightly, “Something like that.”

The same phrase.

Different weight.

Max’s fingers tightened around his phone.

Parents.

So there were parents. Or had been. Rich enough for boarding school. Connected enough for Cambridge. Absent enough, maybe, that Charlotte had learned to make her voice sound like something that could not be questioned.

He did not know.

That was the problem.

He did not know anything, really.

He knew she was tall. That he had noticed immediately.

Tall, short dark hair, dark eyes that looked at data like it had personally offended her. Pretty in a way that did not ask to be looked at and therefore made him want to look more, which was annoying and inconvenient and absolutely GP’s fault somehow.

He knew she was good.

Not normal good. Not useful member of the department good.

Very good.

The kind of good that made people in the sim wing listen when she spoke. The kind of good that had made the car, for the first time in weeks, feel honestly bad instead of dishonestly manageable. The kind of good that mattered, because Max hated being lied to by machines almost as much as he hated being lied to by people.

He knew she was not impressed by him.

That might have been the worst part.

Or the best.

He had not decided.

She did not look at him like most people looked at him. Not fans. Not sponsors. Not women who already knew his reputation before he opened his mouth.

Charlotte looked at him like a data point.

A very fast data point, maybe.

Occasionally useful.

Occasionally irritating.

But not miraculous.

Max should have found that insulting.

Instead, he found himself walking slightly slower past corridors where he knew she worked, checking whether she was in the sim bay before he asked a question he could probably have asked someone else, and thinking about an orange cat in a frog hat more often than was dignified.

“Anyway,” Charlotte said inside the office, her voice shifting back toward professional even as the others still sounded amused. “If we are finished psychoanalysing my vowels, the model is still wrong.”

Someone groaned. “You’re no fun.”

“I am enormous fun,” Charlotte replied. “In controlled conditions.”

Max nearly smiled.

There she was.

The door closed on the conversation a moment later, the voices muffling into work.

Max stood there for half a second longer.

Then he put his phone away and continued toward the sim bay.

By the time he arrived, Charlotte was already there, because of course she was. She sat at her desk with her posture perfect and her eyes on the screen, short dark hair tucked behind one ear, speaking to another engineer in that polished British register that now sounded different to him.

Not fake.

Never fake.

Constructed.

There was a difference.

Max watched her while pretending not to.

Austria, he thought.

Boarding school.

Cambridge.

Cat.

Parents with money, maybe. Or money around her. Or something complicated enough that she had learned to answer around it.

He added each fact to the quiet little folder in his mind labelled Charlotte Fischer.

It was becoming embarrassingly full.

She looked up suddenly, as if she had felt him watching.

Max, who was excellent under pressure and had won world championships, immediately forgot what he had come in for.

Charlotte raised an eyebrow.

“Did you need something?”

“Yes,” Max said.

A pause.

Her eyebrow rose a fraction higher.

He recovered badly.

“The sim,” he said. “I wanted to ask about the updated model.”

That was at least true.

Charlotte turned back to her screen. “Sit down, then.”

Max sat.

Too quickly.

Behind him, GP made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a cough and even more suspiciously like amusement.

Max ignored him.

Charlotte pulled up the model, all focus again, all precision. The polished accent. The steady hands. The brain that saw flaws in systems and fixed them before anyone else had found the right question.

Max listened.

Mostly.

But some part of him stayed in the corridor, holding the pieces he had collected.

He wondered how many versions of herself Charlotte Fischer had built to get here.

And, more dangerously, whether she ever let anyone see the one underneath.

***

The apartment was quiet in the particular way Monaco became quiet at night.

Not silent.

Never silent.

There was always the low hush of the city beyond the glass, the distant drag of tyres over tarmac, the occasional voice rising from the street below and dissolving into the dark. But up here, above most of it, the noise arrived softened. Cushioned. Expensive.

Toto Wolff sat alone at the dining table, laptop open in front of him, the glow of the screen cutting pale lines across the polished stone.

The paperwork was orderly.

Of course it was.

Trust statements. Account summaries. Investment reports. Tax documents. Things that made sense because numbers had the decency to declare what they were. They could be checked, balanced, corrected.

He had reviewed these accounts often enough to know most of them by heart.

Often enough to pretend this part would not still hurt.

He scrolled.

Benedict’s trust was active. University fees. Living expenses. Transfers made with the faint carelessness of someone who had always known the safety net was there.

Rosa’s was the same. Regular withdrawals. Sensible ones, mostly. A larger payment for an apartment deposit. A few indulgences Toto had noticed and chosen not to comment on.

They were using what he had built for them.

That was the point of it, he told himself. That had always been the point.

Then the next file opened. Charlotte Wolff.

Her name sat there in the same clean font as the others, understated and formal, as if it were simply another account to review. As if it did not reach through the screen and close around his throat.

Toto went still.

The balance was untouched.

No withdrawals.

No requests.

No transfers.

No activity beyond interest accrual and the neat, automatic work of money compounding around an absence.

For years.

He stared at the numbers for a long time.

Four years since she had blocked his number.

Four years since his calls had stopped ringing through and gone instead into that cold, immediate silence. Four years since messages had remained delivered but unanswered, until eventually even that stopped because he no longer knew whether she had the same number at all.

Four years since he had told himself the same cowardly thing over and over.

She will call if she needs something.

It had sounded reasonable at the time.

Respectful, even.

A way of giving her space. A way of not forcing himself into a life she had clearly decided to keep without him.

Now, looking at the untouched trust, he saw it for what it had been.

An excuse.

She had never called.

Not for money.

Not for help.

Not because she was frightened.

Not because she was ill.

Not because there was no one else.

She had taken his absence and made it permanent.

Cleanly.

Efficiently.

Like Charlotte did most things.

And the worst part — the part that sat heavy and sickening beneath his ribs — was that he had always known she would be capable of it.

Even as a child, she had been too self-contained.

Too careful.

Too ready to take responsibility for the temperature of a room before any adult had asked why a child was reading it so closely.

He could still see her sometimes, if he let himself.

Small at the edge of a dining table. Hands folded. Back straight. Eyes lowered, then lifted, then lowered again. Watching. Measuring. Learning what not to say.

He remembered the way her shoulders tightened when Stephanie spoke her name.

He remembered the way she grew quieter over the years.

He remembered noticing.

That was the unforgivable thing.

Not ignorance.

Not blindness.

Not some convenient failure of perception.

He had noticed.

He had seen enough to know.

The tension in her jaw. The way she left rooms before she could be dismissed from them. The way she stopped asking for things. The way she learned, year by year, to make needing him unnecessary.

And he had done nothing.

Not because he had not loved her.

That was the excuse he had reached for in darker moments, but even he had never managed to make himself believe it.

He had loved her.

He had simply loved his own peace more.

He had loved the fragile balance of the household more.

He had loved avoiding confrontation more.

He had loved the version of himself who could provide everything measurable and pretend protection was included somewhere in the cost.

Toto pressed his fingers to his eyes.

“I didn’t protect her,” he said.

The words fell into the empty apartment and stayed there.

They did not shock him.

They were too old for that.

Too worn down by repetition.

Too true.

Behind him, the door opened softly.

Toto did not turn around.

He heard Susie come in, the quiet click of keys set down, the pause that followed when she saw him sitting there in the dark with the laptop open and every line of his body pulled tight.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

It was not really a question.

Susie had always been better than most people at reading the shape of disaster before anyone named it.

Toto kept his eyes on the screen.

“I really fucked up with her,” he said.

The apartment seemed to hold its breath.

Susie did not ask who.

That was its own kind of mercy.

After a moment, she came closer. Her hand settled lightly on the back of his chair, not quite touching him yet.

“Charlotte,” she said.

Toto nodded once.

The name hurt more when Susie said it.

“She hasn’t touched the trust,” he said. “Not once.”

Susie’s gaze moved to the laptop.

Toto heard her inhale.

“Years,” he continued, and his voice sounded strange even to himself. Too flat. Too controlled. “No withdrawals. No calls. No requests. Nothing.”

Susie was quiet.

“I told myself she would call if she needed money,” he said.

The shame of it rose hot in his throat.

“God,” he muttered. “Money.”

Susie’s hand moved from the chair to his shoulder.

“That was never how Charlotte asked for help,” she said gently.

Toto laughed once.

Short.

Humourless.

“She didn’t ask,” he said. “That was the point.”

“I know.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think I did. Not properly.”

He looked back at the screen.

At the pristine account.

At the money he had set aside like proof of fatherhood. As if a trust fund could stand in for all the rooms where he had remained silent. As if Cambridge and doctors and security and a name on paperwork could add up to safety.

“I gave her everything except what she needed,” he said.

Susie said nothing.

There was kindness in her silence, but not absolution. He was grateful for that.

“She was a child,” Toto said, and this time his voice cracked around it. “She was a child, Susie. And I left her alone in that house.”

“You were there,” Susie said softly.

“That’s worse.”

Her hand tightened on his shoulder.

He closed his eyes.

“She looked at me that night,” he said. “Before she left. After I told her to calm down.”

The memory came back with brutal clarity.

Charlotte standing at the table, pale with fury, eyes too bright and too dry. Stephanie offended. Rosa defensive. Benedict silent.

And Charlotte looking at him.

Not waiting for him to fix it anymore.

Just watching him fail one final time.

“I thought I was de-escalating,” he said.

The word tasted obscene.

Susie did not soften it for him.

“You were choosing the room,” she said. “Not her.”

Toto nodded.

The truth of it settled between them like dust.

“I know.”

He had known then too, perhaps. Somewhere beneath the practiced instinct. Beneath the diplomacy, the management, the relentless need to make every conflict survivable by making it smaller.

Charlotte had not needed the conflict made smaller.

She had needed him to make himself larger.

He had not.

Susie drew out the chair beside him and sat.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

The laptop screen dimmed slightly, the numbers fading toward grey.

After a long moment, Susie said, “You could try reaching out again.”

Toto stared at Charlotte’s name.

“I don’t know how.”

“Start with the truth.”

He let out another brittle laugh. “Which part?”

“All of it.”

“That would take years.”

“Then start with one sentence.”

He looked at her then.

Susie’s face was calm, but her eyes were not easy. She was not offering comfort. Not exactly. She was offering something harder.

A way forward that did not pretend forward meant forgiveness.

“She blocked me,” he said. “I don’t even know if anything would reach her.”

“You could write.”

“She might not read it.”

“She might not,” Susie agreed.

“She might hate me.”

Susie held his gaze.

“Toto.”

He looked away first.

Of course.

“I don’t even know what she’s doing,” he admitted. The words came quietly, and somehow that made them worse. “Where she lives. Who she knows. Whether she is happy. Whether she is safe.”

His mouth tightened.

“I don’t know who she is anymore.”

Susie’s expression flickered.

Pain.

Regret.

Something she did not ask him to name.

“She made a life without me,” Toto said.

The laptop went darker again, Charlotte’s untouched account now barely visible on the screen.

He looked at it anyway.

“And I taught her how.”

Susie reached for his hand then.

He let her take it.

For once, there was nothing to fix. No strategy to find. No call to make. No negotiation, no restructuring, no transfer of money large enough to alter the shape of what had happened.

There was only the untouched trust fund.

The daughter who had not needed it.

The father who had mistaken provision for protection until the evidence became impossible to ignore.

And in the expensive quiet of the Monaco apartment, Toto Wolff finally understood that Charlotte had not left because he had given her too little.

A dramatic moan rips out of his throat. You slap your palm over his mouth and his blue eyes twinkle on yours.

He peels it off his lips, amusement flickering across his face. “You can be rough with me, bun. I can take it.”

“Bun?” You echo with a raised eyebrow as you unclasp your bra.

“Bunny,” he grins, his eyes zeroing on your tits as the lace material falls as well. “Fuck me,” he mutters under his breath, his rough fingers reaching out, looping around the band of your panties at your hips, tugging them lower. A deep groan rumbles out of him, vibrating against your lips.

He dips in kissing his way up your stomach, over your chest, up your neck, his hands resting against your back, pulling you into him.

“I was minding my business, Di Laurentis. You are the one that begged me to come here—”

“I did,” he answers honestly. “And aren’t you glad you did?” The look he gives you makes your heart flutter, dimples popping into his cheeks. “You love me.”

“I like you,” you say, fighting a grin.

“Give it another week. You’ll be at the bar next weekend fighting for my attention. I know it. I’m perfect.” His mouth curves. “Boyfriend material.”

“Boyfriend material? Says the man that’s never asked me on a date,” you whisper as your lips press against his neck. You feel his pulse race and, as cool as he’s playing it, you can tell he’s nervous.

“Lies. Didn’t know that was still an option,” he says as your mouth traces a path over his chest and stomach as you sink to your knees. “You gonna say ‘yes’ this time?”

“You’re keeping score?”

“I always keep score,” he huffs out a breath.

Your fingertips skim along the sharp lines of his hips, making the muscles in his stomach tighten. “You’re growing on me, Dean. What can I say,” you whisper.

“Oh?” His eyebrows lift as a stupid-excited laugh slips out of him. Steam curls through the room as the water grows warmer. “You know what?”

“What?” You murmur as your hand wraps around the base of his cock. His breath catches in his chest when you press a kiss on his tip.

“I…” He mumbles, watching you lay out your tongue and glide up the side of him. The thought dies behind his eyes in real time. “S’unimportant,” he murmurs as your lips wrap around him.

You take him in your mouth inch by inch, his lips parting, brows softening. The wet sounds of your mouth on him leave him reaching out and squeezing the edge of the sink for support, his other hand resting on your head.

“There is no way you’re gonna stand there and pretend you don’t know what you’ve been doing all night,” he grits out.

You pop off his cock and the breath punches out of him, spitting on his dick before you smile, stroking him lazily with your fist. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Liar,” he grins. “You spent three hours winding me up.”

“I did not.”

“You absolutely did,” he snorts. “You love that shit.”

“Maybe a bit,” you whisper, your breath ghosting across him and making goosebumps fan across his tanned skin.

“Knew it.” Dean smirks, that smug little look he had when he walked out with his arm around your shoulders at Malone’s tugging at his lips again.

“I was just having fun,” you look up at him through your lashes, far too innocently for how you’re working him in your hand.

“Trust me, I noticed. Love when you tease me—love when I get anything from you.”

You roll your eyes, warmth pooling in your cheeks, running your nails up his thighs.

“I’d sit through another three hours of it.”

“That so?” You ask.

“Mhmm,” he hums as his hold on your head gets tighter, guiding you back toward him. You wrap your lips around him and his jaw clicks, eyes rolling back in his head when you let him use you a little. The head of his cock kisses the back of your throat, spit seeping from the corners of your lips.

“So fuckin’ good at suckin’ cock, baby. Jesus Christ,” he rambles breathily, thrusting deeply a few more times before giving you back the reins.

You moan around him and his eyes screw shut, the thick muscles in his thigh shaking as his dick swells on your tongue.

“Not gonna last if you let me use you like this. I’m gonna—Fuck,” he gasps when you release him from your lips, stroking him with your tongue flat and your breasts pressed together.

“Shit, baby,” he groans, white ropes of cum landing on your tongue and chest as steam hangs heavy in the air.

Dean catches your wrists, pulling you up off your feet and into his arms. You wrap your legs around his trim waist, melting into him as he breathes laboriously, coming down from his high.

“Goddamn, baby. You’re so fuckin’ good at that,” he mumbles breathlessly. “Do you know how good you make me feel?”

You hum into the kiss, catching his bottom lip between your teeth as he steps into the shower with you.

The water is warm, remnants of his release rise off your body, swirling down the drain. He tilts in, tongue slipping in your mouth before your lips even touch.

Your gasp breaks the kiss as your back presses against the cool tile wall, so cold it sends shivers straight through you.

Dean reaches for the shower head, taking it off the base and turning it to a steady stream. He sets you down on your feet and your brows furrow in confusion because no matter how many times you've found yourself in Dean Di Laurentis's shower, he's never done this.

He kicks your foot out gently. The corner of his mouth curls as he sees you start to put the pieces together.

“Dean?” You breathe out a laugh.

“You ever done this before?” His voice drops as he grips the detachable shower head in one hand, the other pinned just over your shoulder as he looks down at you.

“I mean maybe,” you admit.

“Well,” he laughs, clearly excited by the idea. “We’re gonna have to talk about that later. No one’s ever done it for you?” His eyes flick down as the warm water sprays against your thigh, working upward.

You bite your lip and shake your head ‘no’.

“How romantic,” he whispers. “I’m your first and only. Love that for me.”

“Shut up,” you chuckle, your focus falling to the narrow space between you.

You gasp when the water hits your pussy, surging over your clit and making your knees buckle. Your arms quickly wrap around his neck for support, a moan echoing through the bathroom.

“Baby… Fuck, baby. Too much?”

You shake your head rapidly, feeling your heartbeat climb, nails clawing into his skin. “So good,” you pant. “Don’t stop.”

Dean moves his arm from the wall to your waist, drawing you closer, rocking slowly, increasing and decreasing the intensity, making you throw your head back in pleasure. Dean’s lips quickly lock onto your skin, kissing you harshly before biting down, making you cry out.

He watches your face as you drift closer and closer to your breaking point.

You feel your pleasure building fast, the pressure mounting stronger than anything you’ve felt in a while.

“You like that, huh?” He grunts.

”Mhmm,“ you whimper as your vision starts to cloud.

“I can’t wait to fuck you, baby. This is just a warm-up—”

“Dean!” You cut him off, crying out in pleasure as you wrap your arms tighter, nails digging into his shoulder blades. He lets out a devilish laugh, forcing the stream a little closer. “D-Dean,” you stutter.

“What, angel?” Your body jolts as you fight him slightly in overstimulation, continuing to ride the waves of your orgasm, pussy clenching around nothing. ”Does it feel good, baby?“

“Yes, fuck!”

“Then just take it,” he soothes, your heart pounding in your chest as you reach for air. Dean returns the water head to the base, cranking up the heat, pressing you into the wall once more as you continue to kiss, ears ringing, body tingling head to toe.

“Fuck me?” You whimper, desperation laced in your tone, but he’s already reaching above the shower, patting around the windowsill until he finds a condom.

He brings the package to his teeth and tears it open, watching as you roll it on, the thick weight of his cock squeezed in rubber.

Dean reaches down, taking a grip on your thigh, looping it in his bicep, muscles flexing as he lifts you slightly.

“Shit,” you whine as he circles your sensitive clit with the ribbed rubber on his tip, making him smirk. Dean traces the tip through your folds, teasing your entrance.

“Dean. Please.“

“Please what?” He teases you again.

“Fuck. Me.”

“Baby…” He lets out a gravelly laugh. “Beg harder.” Dean swipes his head across your clit again, making you gasp.

”Dean, can you please fuck me? Ple—” He thrusts his cock into you, rutting up, breasts pressing flush to his broad chest as he steals your breath.

Dean grabs your ass and picks you up swiftly, causing you to sink deeper on his cock and moan onto his lips.

He pins you to the wall, tilting in, drilling you into the tile quickly. His strokes are merciless, incredibly deep as you cling to his shoulders again. The hot water cascades down your body, flowing between the two of you, the sensation on your clit alone almost enough to send you over the edge. But it’s not enough. You want to feel him.

“Baby,” you murmur and he melts at the sound of your voice, pushing himself even closer. “Can we… I—” Your voice stutters with each snap of his hips.

“What is it, sweetheart?” He murmurs against your mouth.

“I wanna feel you—”

His hips lose their rhythm and his reaction speaks for itself, but he’d never leave it like that. “You serious?” He pants, and you can hear the smirk in his voice.

“Please,” you whisper, and he growls out a breath. “Is that okay?”

“Begging too? Fuck me. You even gotta ask?”

“Take it off,” you whisper, and the look on his face is so pleased it nearly makes you laugh.

“Hands against the wall,” he mumbles, chuckling under his breath when he sees your legs trembling after he pulls out.

He grabs the condom by the tip, tugging it off, letting it slip down the drain without a second thought.

Dean grabs your hips impatiently, bullying you toward the wall before pressing himself deep. Your eyes slam shut as you tip your face toward the ceiling. Your mouth falls open as his big hand comes up, curving around your shoulder, the other drifting to your waist, using his hold to fuck into you harder.

“Holy fucking shit,” he pants, every muscle at work, water flying with each rough clap of his hips against your ass, his blonde fringe, wet and messy when you look over your shoulder, his parted lips curling into a smirk.

“Dean…” You sigh, feeling yourself about to cum again, your head throbbing with your heartbeat.

“Yeah? That’s the spot, huh?”

“Yeah,” you whine, cock-drunk, thighs quivering uncontrollably, making you lose your rhythm.

“Let me, baby. Let me,” he groans.

Dean fucks into you, striking the perfect angle, making your muscles tense up. “Shit… Right there, Dean. You’re gonna make me cum.“

“Pussy was made for me. Cum on my cock.”

You let out a cry far louder than intended in a house full of hockey boys. You cover your mouth with the back of your hand.

Dean quickly grabs your wrist, pulling it away from your mouth, shaking his head ‘no’ as he tacks it and the other to the small of your back.

“Never do that again,” he pants through parted lips, punctuating each word with a rough snap of his hips.

The knot in your stomach tightens—threatening to snap. “Dean,” you gasp.

“Me too, baby. Fuck. Me too,” he moans, as his hand shifts from your shoulder to your neck, squeezing just enough to have your eyes rolling back.

Your orgasm spills over, your hand coming back to wrap around his wrist, pussy squeezing him so tight he’s hissing out a breath.

“That’s it… Good fuckin’ girl.”

His hips snap into you one last time, filling you with his warmth, his blunt nails digging into your skin as his rhythm stutters out.

You can feel everything at this moment—the spasm of your sex and the throb of his cock. Your head falls between your shoulders in exhaustion, but he uses his hold on your neck to guide you back to his lips instead.

A soft laugh escapes him against your mouth, your post-sex giggles bouncing off the walls of the shower as you soften into his arms.

“Aren’t you glad you came home with me?”

You go to say something smart, but he kisses you instead, stealing the words before they leave your mouth. He turns you back toward him, not letting you get far at all. His big arms wrap around you, holding you close as he presses a kiss to your forehead.

“What I tell you, huh?” He grins, still trying to catch his breath. “Shower sex is hot.”

“Mhmm,” you hum into yet another kiss and he can’t stop grinning.

“Tomorrow. Seven PM. You and me. What do you say?”

Your lips brush over the top of his, the tension between you thick and charged as you make him sweat it out a little more. His fingers flex against your waist.

“Okay, Di Laurentis,” you say, unable to hide your smile.

“That a yes?” He asks.

“That’s a yes,” you answer, and he sighs in relief.

“I mean did you wanna hear the speech I had in case you said ‘no’ again?”

“Was it good?” You taunt.

“Amazing—pathetic as hell,” he answers simply, his hand following the rush of water down your skin.

Your fingers drift into his hair, tugging at the root and he smiles, the stupid-pretty dimples popping yet again, making you absolutely weak.

“See? You love me.”

“I like like you at best,” you smile, matching his hushed tone.

And for the first time all night, Dean goes quiet. A smile pulls at his lips as he tilts in, cupping your cheeks in his hands.

“No shit? Like like, huh?” He teases against your mouth, chuckling when he says it back. “That’s pretty goddamn close if you ask me—”

“Don’t start,” you whisper, fighting a smile before he kisses you.

“Give it a week.”

SOUNDTRACK:

Margaret's Playlist

Love You For A Long Time - Maggie Rogers

You Are In Love - Taylor Swift

Every Breath You Take - The Police

Kiss Me - Ed Sheeran

She Will Be Loved - Maroon 5

Lando's Playlist

Heal - Tom Odell

Dial Drunk - Noah Khan

back to friends - sombr

Scream&Shout - will.iam

Troublemaker - Olly Murs&Flo Rida

Lando And Margaret's Playlist

Everywhere, Everything - Noah Khan&Gracie Adams

Love Will Get You There - Inhaler

About You - The 1975

Pink + White - Frank Ocean

Rude - MAGIC!

PROLOGUE - 2010

CHAPTER ONE - 2012

CHAPTER TWO- 2013

CHAPTER THREE - 2014

CHAPTER FOUR - 2015

CHAPTER FIVE - 2016

CHAPTER SIX - 2017/2018

CHAPTER SEVEN - 2019

CHAPTER EIGHT -2020

CHAPTER NINE - 2021

CHAPTER TEN - 2022

CHAPTER ELEVEN - 2023

CHAPTER TWELVE - 2023

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - 2023

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - 2023

CHAPTER FIFTHTEEN - 2024

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - 2024

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - 2024

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - 2024

CHAPTER NINETEEN - 2025

CHAPTER TWENTY - 2025

CHAPTER TWENTYONE - 2025

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO - 2025

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE - 2025

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR - 2025

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE - 2025

2024, August, Oxford.

Her phone buzzed just as she was slipping on her shoes.

Lando

I’m downstairs.

Margaret froze in her tiny hallway, breath caught halfway up her throat. For a second she just stared at the message, the simple words swelling in her chest until she felt too full to breathe.

Downstairs.

He was here.

For real.

He wasn’t anymore a figment of her imagination after reading too many books.

He was there for real.

The weight of it pressed into her ribs. Her vision went a little blurry around the edges, not with tears, but with the sudden, overwhelming rush of adrenaline. Her fingertips tingled. Her stomach flipped over itself.

She didn’t allow herself to think because thinking would send her right back to the couch, hiding behind fear and logic and the long list of reasons why seeing him was a bad idea.

So she grabbed her jacket and keys, and walked out before she could change her mind.

The stairwell felt too narrow, like the air tightened around her with each step. She could hear her pulse in her ears, feel it in her wrists, her throat. Her hands were cold around the banister, knuckles pale.

By the time she reached the last flight of stairs, her pulse was a frantic drum in her neck.

She saw him through the glass door before she pushed it open.

Lando stood under the soft yellow streetlamp, hands tucked into the pockets of his hoodie, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet like he couldn’t stand still. He looked like he’d been waiting longer than he admitted, too much energy in his posture, too much hope tucked into the line of his shoulders.

His hair curled from the humidity; a few strands fell across his forehead in that way that always made him look younger, softer. He kept looking down at his shoes, then up at the door, then back down — like he was afraid to look too hopeful and even more afraid not to.

And when he spotted her, he froze. 

God.

He stilled. Completely. Like someone had pressed pause on him.

Then he straightened, chest rising, eyes widening in a way that hit her like a physical touch. His breath visibly caught, a subtle shift in his ribs she felt in her own lungs.

She stepped out onto the pavement.

And for a moment, neither of them moved.

It felt like something hung between them in the cold London air, months of distance, more than ten years of knowing each other, a winter full of unsent messages and unsaid apologies and memories that refused to fade.

The quiet hummed in her bones.

He was the first to speak.

“Hi,” he said softly, almost breathless.

His voice. Warm as a hand sliding over her sternum. Too familiar. Too missed.

Margaret swallowed and trusted her feet to keep her standing.

“Hi, Lan.”

Her voice shook. She hoped he wouldn’t notice. He did. Of course he did. His eyes softened instantly, the kind of softness he only ever aimed at her, the version of him she believed no one else ever really got.

He took a tiny step forward, tiny, like he was terrified she’d run. She took one too without realizing it, her body betraying her before her mind could catch up.

Suddenly they were close enough that she could feel the faint heat radiating from him, smell his cologne, something clean, woodsy, warm, familiar enough to make her chest ache. God, she’d forgotten how much she loved that scent, how it had once clung to her scarves, her jumpers, her pillow when he’d had come by.

He exhaled a quiet laugh, like he couldn’t believe she was real.

“You look—” He stopped, mouth curving. His eyes dropped briefly, shyly, to the ground. “You look good.”

“You too,” she whispered.

They lingered like that, suspended, neither of them daring to bridge the last few centimeters. The air between them buzzed, not with tension exactly, but with recognition. With everything they hadn’t said. With everything they still felt and didn’t know what to do with.

Then he cleared his throat, glancing to the side with a shy smile.

“There’s this little bar near your campus,” he said, voice warm, gentle. “I thought maybe… we could go there? I didn’t want you to feel… stuck. I just wanted somewhere you could leave if you needed to.”

He didn’t meet her eyes when he said it. His jaw flexed, that little nervous tic she knew too well. The one that always meant he cared too much and didn’t want to screw it up.

It tugged something deep inside her.

“Lando,” she murmured, her voice soft. “If I didn’t want to be with you, I wouldn’t have come downstairs.”

His head snapped toward her, eyes sharp and bright, like the world had just tilted under him.

For the first time in months, he let himself really look at her, openly, like the guard he’d carried all winter finally cracked in half. His gaze traced her face slowly, reverently, lingering on her mouth, her eyes, the curve of her cheek, like memorizing what he’d lost.

Her skin prickled under it, every nerve ending waking up at once.

“Okay,” he whispered, something loosening — breaking — in his expression. “Okay. Then come with me.”

He reached for the door first. He didn’t touch her  but his arm brushed her shoulder as they walked side by side, and the tiny contact sent a ripple through her so sharp she nearly stumbled.

He noticed. His breath caught. She heard it.

They walked the short distance to the bar in silence, close enough their sleeves brushed occasionally, each tiny touch sparking like static. Her palm warmed where it hung beside his, like her body remembered the shape of his hand even after all these months.

At the door of the bar, he turned to her again.

The streetlight caught his eyelashes, his cheekbones, the soft uncertainty in the lines of his mouth. He was nervous. Really, genuinely nervous. It made her chest squeeze.

“I’ve missed you,” he said quietly.

The words hit her lower than her lungs. Warm. True. Unsteady.

She let herself step closer, one breath closer, one heartbeat closer, until she could feel the warmth radiating from his chest.

“I’ve missed you too,” she whispered.

And for a moment, for the length of one shared breath, they stood there, close enough their foreheads could have touched if one of them leaned the slightest bit.

Lando swallowed hard, eyes dropping to her lips for a single, trembling second before he tore his gaze away and pushed the bar door open for her.

He didn’t touch her as she walked past him.

But his fingers brushed the small of her back, light, cautious, reverent, and her whole body lit up like it remembered him.

They stepped inside.

And everything between them shifted.

Quietly.

Irrevocably.

The bar was small, warm, dimly lit. It was the kind of place where everyone either whispered or leaned in close to hear each other. Wooden tables, low music, glasses clinking softly. Margaret felt the warmth hit her cheeks the second they stepped inside.

Lando hovered just behind her, close enough that she felt his presence like a hand pressed lightly against her back. Not touching, but there. Always there.

“This okay?” he murmured.

His breath brushed the shell of her ear.

She swallowed. “Yeah. It’s perfect.”

He exhaled like he’d been holding that breath since he texted her. Then he touched her elbow — the gentlest, most cautious touch, barely there — guiding her toward a small table in the corner.

She felt it everywhere.

They sat across from each other, a small round table separating them. It felt far too small to hide anything.

He shrugged off his hoodie, leaving just a fitted black tee that clung to his shoulders and arms in a way that made her pulse trip. For a second, she had to look away, staring at the tiny candle flickering between them.

A waitress approached. Lando looked at Margaret.

“What are you having?”

“Um… gin and tonic?”

“Two g&t, then” he said, already smiling like the order meant something. Maybe it did.

When the drinks came, she wrapped her fingers around the glass just so she had something to hold onto.

Lando leaned back in his chair, one arm draped loosely over the back of it — casual, except for the way his fingers tapped nervously against the wood. His eyes were steady on her, warm, a little shy.

“I thought about this a hundred times,” he said quietly. “About what I’d say. What you’d say.”

“And now?” she whispered.

He huffed a soft laugh. “Now I’m just trying not to stare.”

Her breath hitched. She looked down at her drink.

“You look beautiful. Good doesn't cover half of it.” Words slipped out before he could pull them back.

Silence dropped between them like soft velvet.

Lando sat up a little straighter, eyes darkening at the edges. “Maggie…”

The nickname hit her low in her stomach. She forced herself to look up — and the second their eyes met, the air seemed to tighten.

He wasn’t smiling anymore.