The Dalton Motorsports garage hums with the familiar pre-race symphony: air guns whining in sharp metallic bursts, telemetry screens flickering with data, mechanics speaking in low murmurs. The first race of the season is only hours away, and everything carries that particular edge—anticipation mixed with nerves.

You’re at the front of the car, double-checking the final setup numbers scrolling across your tablet. Suspension tolerances. Fuel calibration. Brake temperatures. The details that decide whether a driver fights for points or spends the race staring at the back of a William’s gearbox.

As Mattheo’s race engineer, the voice he will hear for every lap today, you know this ritual well. You know the rhythm of race mornings, the tension beneath the routine.

You also know him.

So when you glance up and see him slip quietly from the garage, something about it feels… wrong. He's too fast. Too abrupt. Moving like someone escaping a room rather than leaving it.

The door swings shut behind him, and for a moment the garage noise swallows the absence he leaves behind. But you’ve spent enough weekends beside that cockpit to read the tiniest shifts in his body language—the tightness in his posture, the way his hands curl when something is eating at him.

So you follow him.

The hallway outside the garage is quiet in comparison, the distant roar of the paddock reduced to a dull echo through concrete corridors. Fluorescent lights buzz faintly overhead, casting pale reflections along the polished floor.

You don’t have to look far.

Halfway down the corridor, Mattheo stands alone. He’s leaning back against the wall as though it's what's holding him upright. His head is tilted upwards, eyes closed, his chest rising and falling a little too quickly for someone who should be calm.

His helmet is clutched tightly in both hands. Gripped so tight, his knuckles are white against the monochrome carbon fibre.

You know why. Everyone in the paddock knows, even if they pretend not to.

Last season’s accident wasn’t the kind that fades into nothing. It wasn’t a harmless spin or a damaged wing. It was the kind of crash that stops a race dead, that sends silence rolling through grandstands packed with thousands of people.

Metal twisting. Marshals running. And afterward, the unbearable truth that followed.

Mattheo walked away from the wreckage.

Another driver did not.

Even now, months later, the memory still hangs over him like smoke after a fire. The investigation cleared him. The stewards said it wasn’t his fault.

But guilt doesn’t care about verdicts.

You step closer, your footsteps quiet against the floor. The sound must reach him eventually, because Mattheo’s eyes open. They’re darker than usual, tired in a way that has nothing to do with lack of sleep.

For a moment he simply looks.

Not as a driver looks at an engineer, but as a man looks at the only person who will be inside his head when the lights go out.

You’re the voice he trusts when the track disappears into spray and chaos. The one who talks him through tire life, strategy calls, pit windows. The calm presence in his ear when the car is shaking beneath him at 200mph.

Your driver.

And right now, he looks like he’s standing at the edge of something far more terrifying than finishing in the points.

Mattheo exhales slowly, lowering his gaze from the ceiling.

“I can’t do it.”

The words come out rough, barely louder than the buzz of the hallway lights. Honest in a way that helps you understand.

His jaw tightens as though the admission costs him something.

“I thought I could,” he adds quietly, eyes flicking down to the visor reflecting his own distorted expression. “I told everyone I was ready. The team, the media… you.”

A bitter breath escapes him.

“But when I think about getting back in the car… when I imagine the…”

His voice falters.

The memory is there again. The crash. The impact. The moment the world went silent and someone else never climbed out of their cockpit.