Flat out, p.22
Flat Out, page 22
I’m still obligated to do post-race interviews, speak with my team, and most of all figure out what the hell happened out there.
It has me question what the hell I’m doing all of this for. Is the price of a championship worth it, if it terrifies the woman I lo—
“Travis, we have to get you checked out more thoroughly. That was a nasty accident and then there’re some interviews you need to finish,” Drake calls from behind me, as if I’m unaware of the drill.
I hug Alyssia to me again and kiss her. It’s too brief for my liking, but I know if I don’t pull away now I never will.
And where will that leave me?
I release Alyssia and turn to my sister who’s never far. “Take care of her,” I tell Annalise in her ear.
Each step away from Alyssia feels like a blade slicing through my heart.
Tingles run through my body as Alyssia runs her finger along my belly, tracing the largest bruise there.
She’s been quiet for the past ten minutes we’ve been lying in bed, staring at one another. Well, I’ve been watching her while she’s examining the bruises that’ve formed along my abdomen and chest as a result of today’s accident.
While I could’ve hidden them from her by wearing my shirt to bed, I wanted her to see that I really am fine after what happened today.
After all of my post-race interviews and going over with my team about what happened, we assessed that something went wrong with one of the tires. Once I got caught in another driver’s downforce, things got messy, and in Monaco it doesn’t take much to end up in the wall.
This is the last place I would’ve wanted a crash to end my race. Not over pride solely, but because this is one of the few races where my entire family is here.
And, most importantly, Alyssia.
“Does it hurt?” she finally asks while still tracing her finger along my skin.
“No.”
She frowns as she lifts her eyes to meet mine.
“Much,” I add.
Her mouth quirks into a small smile.
“There was a moment …” She pauses, swallowing. “Annalise was with me. She told me the moment she heard your voice when you told your team principal that you were okay.”
I lean in, kissing her forehead. I’m grateful for my sister. My family is used to this type of thing, though I know it’s not easy for them to see me crash either.
Guilt burns through my chest at the reminder that I’ve put everyone I love through the difficulty of watching me crash at some point.
My hand finds its way to Alyssia’s belly.
“My mom hated my racing,” I say as I look at my hand resting on top of her swollen belly.
“She seems like your biggest fan,” Alyssia says, surprise in her voice.
“She is … always has been. Doesn’t mean she always liked it.”
I adjust my head on my elbow and raise my other hand to run my thumb over her jawline.
“How did that change happen?” she asks.
“My first go-kart racing championship. My entire family came out: grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and of course Mom, Dad, and the sibs.”
She snorts, grinning.
“But I got overconfident. I tanked in qualifying. Came in second to last. After that, I knew it would be nothing more than a humiliation ritual to go out and compete. So, I decided I was going to walk away.”
“Let me guess. It was your dad who talked you up and told you there was no way you were going to quit.”
I shake my head.
“It didn’t even get that far. I knew my dad would’ve been disappointed, so I went to my mom instead. I figured it would be easy to get her on my side since I knew she wasn’t a fan of my racing. Then Dad would have to be okay with it.”
Alyssia cocks her head to the side. “She refused to let you quit.”
I nod. “Told me not only was I entering that race, but I was going to give it my all, no matter what. And if I didn’t, I would be grounded for three months.”
Alyssia chuckles. “No way.”
“I kid you not. I knew she was serious and I knew even if I gave it my all, I’d still lose because I was starting so far behind.”
“But?”
“I did what she said. I gave it everything I had.”
“And you won,” she says, eyes looking expectant.
“Not quite. I came in third, still an accomplishment given where I started. It wasn’t until the next year that I won the championship.”
Alyssia’s eyes sparkle as she caresses my cheek.
I turn and kiss the inside of her palm, remembering all of the new reasons I have to win now. This time it’s to make the woman I’m falling in love with proud.
CHAPTER 36
Travis
I double check my rental car’s GPS to make sure I’m going in the right direction. I’ve been traveling on this isolated road for nearly thirty minutes.
The navigation system tells me that I have another ten minutes before arriving at my destination. My hands squeeze the steering wheel.
Only a handful of people know why I’m in Italy instead of on my flight to Austria for my next Grand Prix. Hours after winning in Barcelona, I received another fucked-up note. This one was a picture of my wrecked car in Monaco with the words:
Did you think this was an accident?
Since the note was left among my belongings in the paddock, it had to have come from someone with easy access. With over a thousand people on the Amato racing team alone, not to mention the extraneous reporters, track staff, agents, and publicists who pass through the paddock on race day, it could’ve been anyone.
Since then, my Uncle Brutus has made contact with Luciano Farina.
He’s said he wants to meet with me. Which is why I’m in Italy.
“Dad,” I answer the call through the car’s Bluetooth system.
“Are you there yet?”
I drop my gaze to the GPS again. “Seven minutes.”
“I don’t like you going by yourself,” Dad says, his voice sounding grim.
“I’m not alone,” I remind him. My family’s security team can pick out my location right down to within a few feet.
“You know what I mean. What if it’s a set up and no one can get to you in time?”
It’s taken me until now to recognize the tone of fear in my father’s voice. Now that I’m close to becoming a father myself, I understand it a hell of a lot more.
“This isn’t a set up,” I tell my dad. “Farina wants to tell me something in person.”
“Are you sure he’s not the one making these threats?”
“Uncle Brutus checked that when he found Farina.”
“I don’t like it.”
The nervousness in my dad’s voice is the only reason I don’t tell him I know what I’m doing.
“It’ll be over soon.”
A second later the GPS beeps, telling me I’m less than a minute out.
“I’m here,” I respond. “I’ll text when I’m done.”
“Call,” he insists. “Love you. Be safe.”
I make a right turn off of the main gravel road, which is surrounded by forest, onto a long driveway. The asphalt delivers me to a large, two-toned brick and stone house.
The house sits at around six thousand square feet, a huge wraparound front porch and four massive windows in which the main door sits in between.
Out of my car, I glance around at the spread of nature and quiet that surrounds the home. In the distance, I can hear flowing water and the songs of birds in the trees.
The sound of the wooden door opening catches my attention. A woman dressed in white scrubs with a light blue badge clipped to her shirt pocket stands there, awaiting my approach.
My stomach tightens in anticipation. I’ve never seen this woman before but the badge on her shirt says that she’s some sort of nurse.
“Mr. Townsend?” she asks in accented English.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Farina has been waiting for you,” she confirms. “Please come inside.”
A medicinal odor mixed with a heaviness in the air pummels my senses as soon as I close the door behind me. While the outside looks serene, slightly majestic, the inside is a different story.
The entryway leads down the hall to a kitchen where I observe two people, dressed in scrubs talking, while another healthcare worker sits at a dining table, assisting a person in a wheelchair as they eat.
To my right is a small study or TV room. Two more people sit in it watching television, a man, in scrubs as well, sits in between them commenting on what’s happening on the screen and asking for their input.
Their replies are murmured words or simple nods of their heads. Looking away, I notice that the wall to my right there’s a whiteboard. On it is a schedule of times, names, and lists of medications.
What stands out is the third name on the schedule. Farina, L.
“Excuse me?” I ask the woman who welcomed me at the door. “What is this place?”
Her brows knit together. “You weren’t told?”
I shake my head. “I was given an address and told that Luciano Farina wanted to speak with me. But that can’t be ri—”
“Yes, that is correct,” she says. “This is a private facility.”
I glance around again, seeing everything anew.
“Facility,” I repeat. “As in a nursing home?”
She gives me a tight smile. “Perhaps, I should allow Mr. Farina to explain. He has been prepared for your arrival. Allow me to show you to him.”
My mind can’t conceive of what I’m about to walk into. All around me, as I follow the nurse to the second floor, are signs and sights of illness.
I can’t conceive of Luciano Farina needing to be in a place like this. Not unless something severe happened to him after he retired.
The nurse knocks on an opened door. She holds out a hand for me to wait.
“Luciano, your guest is here to see you,” she says, her voice pitching higher. “Can he come in? Are you prepared to see him?”
“Y-Y-es,” comes a reply. It sounds nothing like the Farina I know.
She waves me in, and I enter the large bedroom. “They’ll both see you now.”
“They?”
At the center is a made-up bed on which a man I don’t recognize sits. The left side of the room is a half-empty bookshelf, while the right side houses a large window that looks out onto a stream among the trees.
It must be the same stream of water I heard before entering the house.
Luciano sits in a cushioned chair in front of the window, staring out of it.
“Will you be all right?” the nurse asks him.
He nods.
It’s not until she closes the door behind me that he finally turns to look at me. He’s dressed in an oversized grey sweatsuit, a blanket covering his lap.
My mind fills with the last time I saw Luciano. It was the day he won the championship. The way he looked larger than life as he stood on top of the podium, spraying champagne and cheering for his win is a complete contrast from the man before me now.
“Sit,” he says, his voice low.
I glance at the other man who doesn’t move before striding to the chair opposite him and taking a seat.
“I’m Ciro Russo, Luciano’s health advocate and legal counsel. I’m here just in case he needs help explaining.”
I nod and look at Luciano. “You wanted to speak with me.”
He frowns as he looks around this small space. “This is my room.”
A far cry from the star-studded life he lived in Monte-Carlo.
“Huntington’s disease,” he says.
The confusion must show on my face, because without me asking he elaborates, “Diagnosed more than two years ago.”
“Wait …” Two years ago, Farina was still on the grid, racing.
He nods.
“Explain.”
His eyes drift toward the window again. I don’t know much about Huntington’s disease, but I wonder if he’s having difficulty putting his thoughts into words.
“I started having symptoms a while ago. Shaking hands.” He holds up his trembling hands for me to see. “When I couldn’t ignore it anymore, I went to a private doctor. He diagnosed me.”
He pauses for a long time, looking back out of the window.
“He has difficulty speaking,” Russo says. “I’ll take it from here.” He squeezes Farina’s shoulder.
“He never told anyone,” he explains. “If he would’ve told anyone at Maxim …”
“He would’ve been out.”
Farina drops his head when I look back at him.
“Luciano hid it for as long as he could, telling only his doctors who gave him medications to help deal with the symptoms. It worked for a while, but as the stress of the season continued, the disease worsened.”
“You put your life on the line,” I say to Luciano. “You put our lives on the line. It wasn’t just you on that damn track.”
He flinches as he faces me.
There’s a hollowness in his eyes. The stars of that championship win are long gone. The thrill of racing looks to have never even passed his way.
I should feel some sympathy for him given his current state, but I think about Alyssia and what she suffered. The selfishness of others cost her parents their lives, almost hers, and a lifetime of trauma and grief. Luciano’s self-centered behavior could’ve cost any of the other drivers the same type of pain.
“It was my last season,” he suddenly says. “Ten years in the sport, I wanted a championship.” His voice wobbles, and I think the cause is part emotion and part illness.
“How did you win?” I ask, my voice coming out harsh.
His cloudy eyes drop away.
“The officiant,” Russo picks up for him. “Luciano told me that the officiant that made the call in the last race of the season owed a few debts. In exchange for money, throughout the season he was able to …” he clears his throat, “overlook a few of the regulations.”
“Which is why he was able to stay tied with me throughout the season,” I say, not ask. Luciano had always been a top contender, but he’d performed better than ever in his final season, which is unusual in this sport.
He also didn’t have a better car than mine.
Cheating his how he made his victory possible. My stomach rumbles in disgust.
“After he retired, he fell into a deep depression which made his illness worse,” Russo continues. “None of his exes or his kids want anything to do with him. He has no other family.”
I snort.
Couldn’t have happened to a better guy.
“Why are you telling all of this? Why did you want me to come here?” I rise to my feet.
Luciano looks back at me. “I wasn’t the only one cheating last season,” he says.
I narrow my eyes.
“Throughout the season, I would receive notes out of nowhere telling me updates made to your car before a race.”
“My car?” I point to my chest, my voice filled with incredulity.
Car updates are never revealed to the public until race day. That information is kept top secret. Hell, sometimes even from the drivers.
“Someone wanted you to lose,” Luciano says.
“No shit,” I scoff. “What about your officiant friend?”
Shaking his head, he opens and closes his mouth a few times.
“They weren’t exactly friends,” Russo cuts in. “Luciano’s told me that the officiant had nothing to do with the notes. He never found out who it was.”
“Because he didn’t do much digging,” I guess.
Luciano silently answers my question when he looks down, ashamed.
“He wanted you to know this because he thinks whoever had it out for you last season might still be hanging around.”
I don’t tell him about all of the calls and notes I’ve received in the past few months, threatening me to throw races.
“W-Watch your back,” Luciano says, shakily.
I start to ask him why he wanted me to come all of the way out here to tell me this, but I already know the answer. As I watch him look from me back out of the window, I sense his loneliness.
Luciano spent a decade in Formula 1, had two marriages and the same number of divorces. Remembering the way he partied and discarded friendship like they weren’t anything to him, makes it easy to figure out how he ended up alone in this facility with no one but a legal representative to speak for him.
The only thing he showed real passion for was racing. He was a hardline competitor outside of the partying life. And look where it got him. His one championship will forever remain shrouded in controversy. And that’s if I don’t tell what was revealed to me today. If I do, it’ll likely be taken away.
That won’t be me.
The voice wells up in me so firmly that I almost think I say it out loud.
I will not become the next Luciano Farina.
My mind goes to Alyssia. Months ago, I thought my sole reason for existing was to win championships. For most of my life winning has come easily once I put my efforts into it. I lived with tunnel vision, appreciating all my parents and family did for me, but if I’m honest, I’d come to expect it.
Life came easy for me. Except for when I lost last season when I was certain the title was in my grasp. After losing, I sulked and became even more focused on getting what was mine.
Then I met Alyssia and she’s changed everything for me.
Never will I become so focused on winning a championship or this high-profile lifestyle that I’ll forget what’s most important.
“You take care of yourself.”
Luciano nods at me.
As I depart his room and descend the stairs, I leave what happened last season with him. I wasn’t the failure of that race.
Days later, I compete in Austria and take second place in that race. Though my brother, Annalise, and my father accompany me for my European races while Chloe and mom stay in Monaco with Alyssia, I ache with missing her face.
