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I have a contract .

I keep saying it over and over in my head, but it still doesn’t feel real.

A messenger biked it over the day after I met with Tom (because Crosswire is too fancy for e-mail, I guess), and Kelsie and

I just stared at the dark blue envelope for a while. She hooked me up with some high-powered lawyer she knows who spent a

few days poring over it and making recommendations. A week later, after a few back-and-forths and minor adjustments, I signed

it.

I’m officially a test driver for Crosswire Racing.

I’m so happy, it’s honestly hard to sleep. I just grin up at the ceiling of my new room (Kelsie’s roommate finally moved the

last of her stuff out) and whisper it out loud. I’m a test driver for Crosswire Racing .

I call Amanda’s office to tell her. She sounds like she’s crying when she calls me back, which nearly makes me cry, too.

And when Crosswire releases a press piece online about signing me, I get a flood of messages from people congratulating me.

Carl from Porteo even sends me a sort of passive-aggressive congratulations, saying something like, I must be glad he released me from my contract.

I spend a full day responding to e-mails and Instagram messages. I owe some big apologies to my close friends for disappearing

for so long. It makes me feel awful, seeing how many times some of them tried to reach out and check in. None of them call

me on it, though, and I set a plan to meet up with Nate in a couple of weeks. The girlfriend he told me about all those months

ago is now his fiancée, and they’re in and out of London quite a bit.

There’s radio silence from my parents and Paul and Lily, which shouldn’t surprise me, but somehow still does. Sometimes I’ll

be walking along and suddenly remember some happy childhood memory, and I’ll feel sort of sick inside.

But then I remember my dad saying I’d be a laughingstock, and my mother looking away from me, and I move past it.

The only other downside, which I’m trying not to think about, is how this could affect things with Travis. Not that there’s

anything to affect.

“He’s probably still with that guy from the parking lot,” I tell Kelsie for the fiftieth time. “So, it’s probably just as

well.”

She gives me a skeptical look over the rim of her coffee mug. It’s midmorning on a Saturday, and I’ve been rambling at her

for about ten minutes now.

“Even if he’s not,” I continue, “he probably doesn’t want to get back together. I was such an asshole to him. Plus he’s, like,

a world champion now. He could date anyone he wants.”

Kelsie opens her laptop. “Mm-hm.”

“Plus, I still think it’d be kind of rude to just show up out of nowhere at his door. If he wanted to see me, he could. So,

I should just... respect that. Right?”

Kelsie doesn’t look up from her typing.

“Right?” I say again. “Kels?”

“Huh? Oh—sorry, babe. I was just Googling synonyms for ‘coward.’?”

I give her a flat look. “Ha, ha.”

“‘Chicken,’” she reads. “‘Scaredy-cat.’ ‘Wimp.’ ‘Milksop.’ Ooh, I like that one. Stop being a fucking milksop, Nichols.”

“Hilarious.”

She grins. “I thought so. For real, though. You want to be with him, so just stop making stupid excuses and go talk to him.”

I fiddle with my coffee mug. “They’re not stupid excuses. Okay, they’re not all stupid excuses,” I clarify, reading her expression. “It could ruin things with Crosswire if I got back together with Travis.”

“They can’t fire you for dating him, that’s discrimination.”

“If they fired me for dating guys in general, yes. Not for dating their main competition.”

She shrugs. “So don’t tell them.”

I shift uneasily, remembering Tom’s penetrating stare. “I don’t think I could do that.”

“Okay, so then don’t try to date Travis again. Give up on him completely. Forget him and move on.”

I look down at my hands. “I don’t think I can do that, either.”

She gives me a fond, exasperated look. “Duh. Look, babe, not that I don’t enjoy our heart-to-hearts, but you’ve been saying

the same things for, like, days now.” She kicks me under the table. “You know what you need to do, so just stop whining and

go do it.”

I fall silent for a while, chewing the inside of my lip.

She’s right. Obviously, she’s right. I’m just latching on to the Crosswire thing as an excuse.

I don’t really think that Crosswire would fire me for dating Travis, but if they did.

.. if they did, I would survive it. It would mean going back to the drawing board, maybe waiting another year or two to claw my way back into F3 or F2.

.. but I would do it. If Crosswire couldn’t trust me to date Travis and still be loyal to their team, then I would suck it up and find another way back into racing.

But I can’t see any way forward without at least trying to get back together with Travis. If he doesn’t want me anymore, that’s

one thing. But as long as there’s hope, even if it’s a one-in-a-million chance...

“I’ll go and see him,” I say.

Kelsie grins. “Finally.”

I convince myself it’s better to wait to talk to Travis during F1 testing in Barcelona. If he’s still dating someone (and

he probably is, even though he did come to see me after I saw him and that guy together), there’s no way he’ll bring them to testing. Or if he does, they won’t

be following him around all the time. Surely I’ll be able to talk to him alone.

Testing is a bit later than usual this year, the very last weekend in March. I’m flying over with the Crosswire team, although

I won’t be doing any driving. They’re really putting me through the ringer with fitness and psychological testing, and I’ve

been sitting in on tons of engineering meetings.

Yesterday, though, I got to drive an F1 car for the first time.

It was Crosswire’s car from two seasons ago, before the regulations changed, and Tom arranged to let me drive it as a sort of welcome to the team.

It was crazy, really. This entire team of people bringing a monstrously expensive car out on track just so I could drive around in it awhile.

When I first got there, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, like I was floating off the ground, watching someone who looked like me walking around the car in a race suit and answering the team’s questions.

When I got in the car, though, everything changed. I felt inexplicably calm, and present. Like all the colors around me had

gotten brighter, and the smells of hot tarmac and race fuel had gotten stronger. I had the strongest sense of déjà vu, too.

A girl I dated briefly a few years ago said that if you have déjà vu, it’s a sign that you’re following the right path in

life, the path that fate set out for you. Total bullshit, obviously, but in that moment, pulling an F1 car out on track for

the first time, I really hoped it was true.

Then I reached the end of the pit lane, and I stopped thinking at all and just drove .

And fuck, I’d forgotten how fun it was. People used to ask me all the time what it felt like to drive my F2 car, but I’d never

found a good way to describe it. I could say something about the g-forces and the noise and the acceleration, but really,

it was just a lot of fucking fun . And driving an F1 car was even better. Like my F2 car on steroids.

The team let me drive all morning, pushing the limits of the car until my neck muscles were absolutely aching. When I finally

pulled back into the garage, the muscles in my cheeks were sore, too, from grinning inside my helmet. In all my desperation

to get back to racing, I hadn’t let myself remember how it felt, and how much I loved it. The team probably thought I was

a bit weird with how hard I was grinning, but I couldn’t have stopped smiling if I tried.

I didn’t think about my crash at all, not even when I almost lost the car running a bit too fast into a corner.

If my mother were there, she would have cried and fussed and asked me how racing a car didn’t trigger bad memories.

I would have told her she was looking at it the wrong way.

If you almost drown, you don’t give up breathing afterward because it’s too triggering.

It’ll probably be a while before I’m allowed to drive Crosswire’s current car—though the team principal, Sofia, promised me

a free practice drive later on in the season—but I don’t feel impatient anymore. Things will happen when they’re meant to

happen. All I can do is work hard and stay positive.

It helps that the team is so cool. Everyone is so friendly and helpful. They all work hard, and they all take their jobs seriously,

but no one takes themselves too seriously, like the people at Porteo used to. I cheered against Crosswire last year, because I wanted Travis to win,

but now that I work for them, I can see why they’re always so good. They work for it. And they don’t take their own success

for granted.

“Can you shut up about Crosswire, please?” Kelsie asks. We’ve been on the phone for a while now, and okay, maybe I have been

going on a bit. “Have you seen Travis yet?”

I glance at the hotel room window, which looks out over the city of Barcelona. “I’ve been here, like, two hours. Testing doesn’t

start until tomorrow. We’re all just hanging out in our rooms tonight.”

“Hm,” Kelsie hums doubtfully. “You’d better not chicken out.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

We hang up shortly after, and I lie back on my hotel bed and stare up at the ceiling, stretching my arms out as far as I can

reach. I’m not going to chicken out. I miss Travis too much. And knowing that he went to my house, that he confronted my mother...

I can’t help but feel like there’s hope.

I just have to get him alone, and get the words out.