Page 122 of Downforce

“Thank you.”

Her forehead wrinkles.

“For being my motivation to win this weekend.”

She waves me off as if I’ve just told a lie.

“You don’t believe me?”

“My ‘yes’ to staying with you after the race mattered that much?” she asks, as if it’s out of the realm of possibilities.

“You,” I take her hand into mine, kissing her knuckles, “are the reason my season is going the way it is.”

“You and your car are the reasons your season is going so well.”

My chest fills with pride from her comment, but I shake my head.

“Amato built a hell of a car this year, as they do almost every year,” I reply. “But not everyone can drive a rocket like Amato puts out. And the driver I was last season, or any of my previous seasons in Formula 1, can’t hold a candle to who I am today as a racer.”

It’s been a constant since the Monaco Grand Prix.

Max, what’s gotten into you this season?

Max, can you tell us what influence Drake has had over your driving?

Max, do you think your success this season is your father’s ghost smiling down on you?

That was the question that’d ticked me off the most. I instantly walked away from the sports journalist who’d asked it.

“My father used to tell me I was always outwardly motivated. I used to think it was a bad thing until this season.” I meet her searching gaze. “You’re the reason I’m going to win the Driver’s Championship, Annalise.”

Her eyelids lower.

When I cup her chin, making her look at me again, her eyes are unreadable. I ignore the stabbing sensation in my heart.

“Does that upset you?”

She leans up, cups my face, and brushes her lips against mine. “No. It fills my heart with a pride and happiness I never thought I could feel for someone I’m not related to.”

She pulls back, staring me in the eyes as if imploring me to understand what she’s not saying just as much as what she is saying.

I kiss the inside of her palm.

Annalise lays her head against my chest again, and the stabbing pain decreases, almost completely disappearing. But not quite.

“I wasn’t diagnosed until I was almost twenty-one. With OCD,” she clarifies, although I already guessed what she meant. A pained laugh pierces the air. “I thought it was normal to wake up every night and go from room to room, checking to make sure each of my siblings were still breathing.”

I adjust our bodies so that we’re better able to look at one another, but I still hold her to my body, refusing to lose the closeness of skin-to-skin contact.

“Why would you do that?” I ask even though I understood it was likely derived from an obsession she hadn’t understood at that age. From the book I’ve been reading on OCD, it often presents in early childhood but isn’t diagnosed until years later.

“I convinced myself,” she hesitates. “My brain convinced me that they would die in their sleep. I’d overheard a conversation between my mom and dad when Chloe was barely one. They were talking about sudden infant death syndrome. Someone they knew had a baby that died recently from it. After that, my mind contorted it into an inevitable reality.

“For years, off and on, I thought ‘she could stop breathing in her sleep.’ It didn’t matter that she was well past the SIDs stage. All I could think was ‘what if she stops breathing and no one knows until it’s too late because I was too busy sleeping?’ It started with me getting up to check on her in her bedroom right before my parents put us to bed.

“They thought it was just me taking my big sister role seriously, which it was, but even I didn’t realize it was something more than that. Within the year, I was sneaking out of bed multiple times a night to go to her room to stick my hand under her nose to make sure she was still breathing.

“Then one night I passed Tristan’s room and I wondered, ‘what if he stopped breathing and then Travis?’ That’s when I started checking on all three of my siblings throughout the night. First Chloe, then Travis, then Tristan. Always in that order.”