No Regrets, Only Memories

I Was Wrong

Daniel

Azerbaijan started like any other race week. Michael had split his time between my training and moving to help Maeve during her down time from the garage. She wasn't doing so hot on something based on how much work he was having to put in with her, which was shocking. She had always been naturally fit in all the right ways. If something was wrong, it had to be serious. Part of me wanted to worry that my friend would accidentally sit herself next to Max on the disabled list for working too hard. It was impossible to miss the near 20 hour days she sometimes put in when it came to her work. The team noticed it when she was the one that closed the roller doors at the end of the night because she was the last to leave. I had noticed because I knew what her training regime looked like, mostly the run she went on every morning before the sun was usually up in whatever exotic location we were. I couldn't imagine what would happen if she had to add an injury to her growing list of work obligations that had to be nursed daily.

Thursday morning I was surprised to see that Maeve had press commitments on the daily briefing. Something I hadn't foreseen her adding to her work list. She had been so adamantly against it, if anything for fear of replacing Max, but mostly for the already small amount of personal time she had.

"Maeve is doing the Facebook interview with me and Will?" I asked Charlotte as I looked over the time table in our shared room. It didn't happen often, but when we shared a room I could see whatever the other members of the team were doing through the team schedule.

"Yep. Angela will be leading her over. We are going to be late though if we don't head over now." Charlotte left the suite, expecting me to follow. I was just confused by the entrance of this new player in our game. It took a moment for me to step away from the printed, colored-coded papers on the walls to follow after Charlotte.

"Who is Angela?" Charlotte looked up from her phone at me as we were walking along the edge of the paddock towards the interview area. I had rushed to catch up to her and finally match her stride as we walked.

"Oh, Christian brought in a new team for Maeve finally. Angela is her new Press Officer, she has a new performance coach too that starts in Spain. We're working on getting her a PA too." I tried to keep my face neutral despite the shock of what Charlotte was telling me.

"Oh? Does that mean she's gonna be here for a while?" Charlotte nodded, looking back down at her phone. I heard the clicking of her tongue suddenly as she looked over whatever had been on her phone pertaining to our day.

"Yes...Which means you should probably fix whatever happened between the two of you." I went to protest, but I wouldn't lie to Charlotte. She saw right through it after all these years. Clearly, Maeve and I hadn't been our usual selves, anyone that knew us would've seen that simply by the fact that we hadn't taken every opportunity to be next to each other over the last two weeks. The fact that there had been raised voices and the young girl crying in the hospitality in China? They knew something had happened and they all had me pinned for the crime.

"I'm trying. She's making it pretty difficult by suddenly deciding not to share teams now." There was no point in hiding that something happened or even trying to push the blame from myself.

"It wasn't her call, Christian did it and if you had come back to the factory when asked, you would've known that." She said pointedly. I couldn't help the disbelief that read on my face then. No one had asked me officially to come back to the factory in our one week break from the race. The only commitments I had were for media and they could all be done safely from my own apartment during training.

"What does that have to do with anything? I always come back the week before the race." She sighed as we turned to take the bridge over the track where F2 were currently getting ready to do their qualifying race.