Read Chapter 18: Track Confession

The debrief room was empty when the door clicked shut behind Julien, the overhead fluorescents buzzing like a trapped fly. He leaned against the table, still in his fireproofs, sweat darkening the collar. The race had ended an hour ago—a fifth-place finish, salvaged from nothing after a late safety car had handed them a gift.

Elise had stayed to review the telemetry. Now she stood with her arms crossed, watching him watch the door.

"He's gone," Julien said. "Okafor left with the FIA stewards. You're clear for now."

"I know."

"Then why do you look like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop?"

She didn't answer. The silence stretched, thick with everything they'd said in the last forty-eight hours and everything they hadn't.

Julien ran a hand through his hair, messing the careful styling the PR team insisted on for camera days. He looked younger like that. Less like the champion the world saw, more like the boy who'd climbed karts in rural France while his father worked double shifts.

"When I first heard they were assigning you to my car," he said, "I asked for someone else."

Elise's jaw tightened. "I remember."

"Everyone does. I made sure of it." He laughed, but it came out hollow. "I stood in front of the entire engineering staff and said a female engineer from a mid-tier team didn't have the mettle for a championship fight. I said you'd break under pressure. I said you'd cost me the title."

"I have excellent recall, Julien."

"I know you do. That's the problem." He pushed off the table, took two steps toward her, stopped. Close enough to see the faint scar on her eyebrow from a childhood crash she'd never explained. "You're better than me, Elise. Not just as an engineer—you're smarter in a race strategy room than anyone I've ever worked with. You see three laps ahead while I'm still fighting the current one. And that terrified me."

She blinked. "You were threatened. By my skill. So you attacked me publicly to put me in my place."

"Yes."

"Admitting that doesn't make it better."

"No. It doesn't." He met her eyes. "But I'm not asking for better. I'm asking for forgiveness."

The word hung between them, raw and unexpected. Elise felt something crack in her chest—a calcified wall she'd built the day his press conference had aired, the day her phone had buzzed with twenty-three messages from sponsors asking if the rumors were true, the day she'd nearly walked away from the sport entirely.

"You cost me a year of credibility," she said, her voice quieter than she intended. "Every engineer who worked with me after that had to defend their choice. Every team principal looked at me first and saw your doubt before they saw my results."

"I know."

"I spent six months proving I wasn't a publicity stunt. Six months of my career, gone."

"I know." His voice cracked. "I watched you do it. And every time you succeeded, I felt worse, because it meant I'd been wrong. Not just about you—about everything. About what I thought a champion needed to be."

He reached out, not quite touching her arm, his hand hovering between them. "I was meant to be the best. The prodigy. The one who didn't need help. And then you arrived, and you were better than me at the one thing I thought I owned. So I tried to destroy you instead of learning from you."

Elise stared at his hand. At the calluses on his palm from years of steering wheel grip. At the slight tremor she'd never noticed before.

"Why are you telling me this now?" she asked.

"Because Danny almost killed me today. Because someone in my own team is feeding information to a man who wants us both dead. Because I might not get another chance to say it." He lowered his hand, let it fall to his side. "And because you deserve to know that when I said those things, it wasn't because I believed them. It was because I was afraid."

The anger she'd carried for two years—the sharp, familiar weight of it—shifted. Not gone. Not forgotten. But lighter, somehow. Like a stone rolling off her chest to reveal the bruise beneath.

"I don't know if I can forgive you," she said. "Not yet."

"I'm not asking for a timetable. I'm asking for a start."

She exhaled. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Somewhere above them, the team was packing up, preparing for the flight to Monaco, the next battle in a war that seemed to multiply enemies by the day.

"There's something I haven't told you," she said. "About my work before Ferretti. About why I know what a signed safety report looks like, and why Marco Tessaro's name on that document wasn't a coincidence."

Julien's eyes sharpened. "What do you mean?"

"I mean the project I worked on before I came here wasn't a standard engineering program. It was an investigation. And the people I was investigating—" She stopped, the words catching in her throat. The truth was a cliff she'd been circling for years, and every time she'd come close to the edge, she'd stepped back.

"When the race is over," she said. "In Monaco. When we're not one bad pit stop away from death. I'll tell you everything."

"That's a promise?"

"That's a threat." She almost smiled. "Because once you know it, you can't unknow it. And it might make you wish you'd never asked for my forgiveness in the first place."

Julien held her gaze. "I've spent my whole career racing at two hundred miles per hour in a carbon fiber coffin. I stopped being scared of the truth a long time ago."

"Then you're a better man than me."

"Maybe not better." He stepped closer, close enough to smell the burnt rubber and sweat still clinging to his suit. "But I'm trying."

Elise let herself look at him. At the vulnerability he was showing her, raw and unguarded—a side of Julien Moreau that no camera had ever captured. The champion who'd publicly doubted her was gone. In his place was a man asking for a chance.

"Then keep trying," she said. "And in Monaco, I'll decide if you're worth the truth."

She turned and walked out, leaving him alone in the buzzing light.