Chapter 5 Redo It

I was still staring at the words ‘reduced, not eliminated’ when Ronan crouched in front of my crate and brought his eyes level with mine. He had zipped his race suit back up to the collar, but sweat still glistened at his temples.

“Up.”

“I need to find—”

“A chair that isn’t a crate.” He pried the empty paper cup out of my fingers and set it aside. “Hospitality suite. Now.”

“I’m fine.”

He raised one eyebrow and glanced down. My hands were still shaking. I tucked them under my arms, which only made him smile.

“You tackled a Formula 1 car with your bare hands, Mrs. Stanton. Fine is not the word.”

“I didn’t tackle it. I stood near it.”

“In front of it. With your arms out.” He stood and offered me a hand. “Mr. Valcourt is currently being lectured by my team principal, and I’d guess he’s composing a speech for you. I’d avoid him for twenty minutes. Come on.”

I looked across the garage. Mr. Valcourt stood rigid beside a tool cart with his arms folded, listening to the team principal with an expression I could only describe as expensive. He caught my eye for half a second. Then he looked away, which was somehow worse than a glare.

I took Ronan’s hand.

The walk through the paddock was an education. Heads turned. Phones rose. Someone muttered ‘That’s her’ in the tone usually reserved for celebrity scandals and car crashes. Ronan strolled through it all with his hands in his pockets, nodding at fans and ignoring cameras, and somehow I ended up walking in the gap he made.

The hospitality suite sat above the garage like a very expensive aquarium: glass walls looking down over the pit lane, leather sofas, white tablecloths, a buffet that could have fed a small village. A woman in a team blazer hurried over the moment she saw him. Ronan steered me into an armchair as if I were a package marked fragile.

“Tea,” he told her. “Something sweet. And please don’t let her leave.”

“I’m not a prisoner.” I crossed my arms, though the armchair swallowed most of the gesture.

“Of course not.” His grin flashed. “Prisoners get fewer biscuits.”

He winked and left. The door clicked shut behind him, and for the first time since I’d woken up in this life, nobody was shouting at me.

I waited until the woman in the blazer had gone to fetch the tea. Then I whispered at the empty air, “Okay. Explain ‘reduced.’”

The blue text slid into view as if it had been waiting for me to ask.

[Primary hazard: removed.]

[Residual hazard: active.]

“That isn’t an explanation.” I glared at the words. “That’s two sentences.”

[Details unavailable.]

“Of course they are.” I dropped my head against the back of the chair. “You’re the least helpful customer service department I’ve ever dealt with, and I once spent three hours on hold with my phone company.”

The words didn’t answer. They never did.

So I did what I used to do when a spreadsheet wouldn’t balance. I went back over it line by line.

If that cracked upright had been the only problem, the hazard would be gone. The system would have said ‘saved’ and given me my ten percent. Instead it said residual. Something was left. Another part, maybe, or something the engineers hadn’t scanned. Or something that had nothing to do with metal at all.

Through the glass wall, I watched the garage below. A courier in a gray uniform walked in carrying a black case. Doyle met him halfway, signed for it, and carried it away like a man who had just been handed a winning lottery ticket.

“The spare’s here already?” one of the mechanics asked, loud enough that even I heard it through the glass. “It wasn’t due until after quali.”

“Don’t question a gift,” Doyle muttered.

I frowned.

Then I filed it under things that were probably nothing, right next to the way Abby had smiled at me in the doorway. It was a growing folder. I told myself I’d look at it later.

[Time remaining: 04:51:30.]

Qualifying was pushed back forty minutes while the team rebuilt the front of Ronan’s car. I know, because I watched every one of them on the monitors, my tea going cold in my hands. When the car finally rolled out of the garage, I stopped breathing.

It turns out that watching a man you’ve been ordered to keep alive drive three hundred kilometers an hour is not relaxing. Every corner felt personal. Every straight felt like a countdown. On the second flying lap, I was gripping the arm of my chair so hard my knuckles hurt, and when the car slid wide through the final corner and snapped back, I whispered a word that would have made Margaret faint.

Then the timing screen flashed. Second place, by two hundredths of a second.

The garage below erupted. Ronan climbed out of the cockpit, pulled off his helmet, and looked straight up at the suite window. He didn’t wave. He just lifted two fingers to his brow in a lazy salute, as though he’d known exactly where I was sitting the whole time.

I sagged into the chair, laughing helplessly into my cold tea.

[Time remaining: 03:21:07.]

An hour went by. Then another. The paddock emptied toward the evening sponsor events, and Ronan was caught in press conferences and debriefs, so I stayed where I was, eating tiny sandwiches and trying not to think. At some point I took out the diary, flipped it open, and shut it again without reading. I wasn’t ready for another entry.

At exactly 1:20 on the countdown, the door to the suite banged open.

“Juliet.”

Jeffery filled the doorway in his team polo, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, jaw set like concrete. Behind him came Margaret in her pearls, a man with a leather briefcase, and Abby, who looked pale and soft and lovely in a pale blue dress. They crossed the suite like a delegation coming to deliver a verdict.

“You have a lot of explaining to do.” Jeffery stopped in front of me.

I set down my teacup. “I really don’t.”

His eyes flashed. For a second I saw the version of him from the novel: arrogant, accustomed to being obeyed, certain he was the sun and everyone else was a planet. Then he blinked, and some of that certainty slid sideways, because I hadn’t flinched.

“The entire paddock is talking about you,” he snapped. “Stanton’s wife, throwing herself in front of Whitaker’s car. A scene in front of cameras, in front of my sponsors.”

“It wasn’t about you.”

“Everything’s about me.” He said it flatly, as a statement of fact. I nearly admired the honesty. “And now there’s a rumor that you told Whitaker’s engineers your name is Valcourt.”

“It is.”

“Don’t be absurd.” He barked a laugh. “You told me you had no family worth mentioning.”

“I told you what you were willing to hear.”

The words landed in the silence like a dropped plate. Jeffery’s mouth opened, then closed. Margaret’s nostrils flared.

“Look at her.” Margaret’s voice dripped with disdain as her gaze swept down my borrowed blouse. “Wearing someone else’s clothes and someone else’s name. How desperate do you have to be?”

I let my gaze drop to the blouse, then rise slowly to her pearls. “The blouse is borrowed,” I agreed. “The name was mine before I ever heard of yours. And I’ll be dropping Stanton the moment the papers are signed. Believe me, Mrs. Stanton, I’m counting the minutes.”

Margaret’s face went the color of her pearls.

“Juliet.” Abby rushed forward before anyone else could speak and wrapped both of my hands in hers. Her palms were warm, her eyes bright with worry. “Thank goodness you’re all right. We heard what happened and I was so frightened for you. You must be exhausted. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” The faintest itch pricked the back of my mind, small as a mosquito bite. Her kindness was perfect. It fit like a glove. That, I couldn’t explain, was the only thing that bothered me.

I slid my hands free as gently as I could. “Thank you.”

“Mrs. Stanton.” The man with the briefcase stepped forward, wearing the smooth smile of someone paid by the hour. “I’ve brought a revised agreement for your review. Mr. Stanton has been very generous. If you’ll just sign here—”

“I’ll read it first.”

He blinked. “There’s no need. It’s a standard—”

“I said I’ll read it.”

He handed it over with the expression of a man who had been told to expect a crying, trembling wreck, and had been handed a sharp object instead. I sat down, crossed my legs, and began to read.

It was a very long document. Thirty-one pages, dense with clauses and sub-clauses. Everyone in the room watched me as I turned the pages. Nobody spoke.

What they didn’t know was that my old life had not been all noodles and spreadsheets. For six years, I had read vendor contracts for a living. Four hundred of them, at least. I had caught missing zeros, hidden fees, and clauses that would have bankrupted my company if nobody had noticed. Nobody hides a bad clause from a woman who has read four hundred of them.

Page eight. Page twelve. Page nineteen.

I looked up.

“Clause seven says I waive any claim to marital property, including any assets acquired during the marriage.” I turned the page. “Clause twelve says my monthly allowance depends on, and I quote, ‘good conduct as determined by the Stanton family.’ Determined by you, Mrs. Stanton. Not a court.”

Margaret stiffened.

“And clause fifteen.” I tapped it with one finger. “I am forbidden from discussing any private family matter, past or present, with anyone, forever, on penalty of full repayment of the settlement.”

I looked at the lawyer. I looked at Jeffery.

“Private family matter,” I said slowly. “That’s an interesting phrase. What exactly are you afraid I’d say?”

Something flickered across Jeffery’s face, there and gone. I couldn’t read it. I put it in the same folder as the courier and the smile. The folder was getting crowded.

The lawyer’s smile twitched. “It’s boilerplate.”

“Then it won’t be missed.” I closed the folder, stood, and held it out to him. “Redo it. A proper agreement, a fair division, and nothing about conduct, silence, or family matters. Or I find my own lawyer, and I promise you, mine will be better than yours.”

The lawyer took the folder with the expression of a man holding a snake.

Jeffery stared at me. “Since when do you read contracts?”

“Since I stopped signing things I don’t understand.”

He looked, for just a moment, like a man who had put his foot on the stair that wasn’t there. All his usual weapons, the money, the family, the pressure, had stopped working at once. And he had no idea why.

That was when the door opened again.

A woman in a navy Valcourt Group blazer stepped inside, spotted me, and smiled warmly. “Miss Valcourt. There you are.”

The room froze.

“Mr. Valcourt would like you in the engineering box when you’re ready,” she went on, apparently oblivious. “The delegation wants to hear what you noticed in the garage. They’re very impressed.”

Margaret’s mouth fell open. The lawyer stopped breathing. Abby’s hand tightened on her purse. And Jeffery looked at me as if he were seeing a stranger for the first time.

I said nothing. I only nodded, polite and calm. “Thank you. Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

The woman smiled again and left.

The silence afterward was thick enough to cut.

“Miss Valcourt,” Jeffery repeated softly. His eyes searched mine. “Who are you?”

I picked up the diary and tucked it under my arm. “The woman you were never curious enough to ask about.”

He flinched. It was small, but I saw it.

Margaret herded the lawyer toward the door, spitting words under her breath. Jeffery followed, stiff-backed and silent, glancing back at me twice. Abby lingered last. She touched my arm, her eyes bright and wet.

“Take care of yourself, Juliet,” she whispered. “Please.”

Then she was gone too.

I stood alone in the middle of the suite with my heart hammering, replaying every word. I had just beaten four people with a pen and a bad memory for clauses. For the first time since I woke up in this body, I felt something that wasn’t fear.

It felt very good.

The door opened again, and Ronan leaned in, still in his race suit, his hair damp, a lanyard around his neck. He looked from the empty room to my face and his eyebrows climbed.

“I heard shouting from the corridor.” He propped a shoulder against the doorframe. “Your husband has a lovely speaking voice when he’s furious.”

“Ex-husband. Almost.”

“Is that so?” He stepped inside and let the door fall shut behind him. His gaze sharpened with something I couldn’t name. “I’ll ask the question the whole paddock is asking. Whose side are you on, Mrs. Stanton?”

“Mine.” I meant it, too.

He smiled slowly, as if I had given him a very good answer.

“I have a sponsor dinner.” He picked up his helmet bag. “Stay here, drink more tea. I’ll find you afterward.”

He turned and headed for the door.

Then the blue light bloomed so brightly it hurt.

[Time remaining: 01:00:00.]

[Residual hazard detected.]

[Target: Ronan Whitaker. Estimated window: 60 minutes.]

My heart stopped.

I had been so proud of myself. Four people, one contract, one very satisfying exit. And the whole time, the real danger had been waiting, patient and quiet, for the moment I stopped looking.

Ronan was already halfway down the corridor, whistling.