Chapter Text
Prologue
The Question
The press room had never been this quiet.
It wasn't unusual for Formula One press conferences to be crowded — cameras lined the back wall, journalists sat shoulder to shoulder behind open laptops, and photographers hovered by the exit, angling for one last shot before the room emptied out. What was unusual was the silence. No one was rushing to ask about tyre strategy. No one wanted to talk regulations, or qualifying, or the restart that had decided the race. Every eye in the room was on the woman seated at the center of the table, and nobody seemed in a hurry to break that.
Dr. Shuri Emiliana Notari-Valmont adjusted the microphone slightly, then folded her hands in her lap. The movement was small, almost absentminded — after everything, she still hadn't learned what to do with her hands during interviews. To her left sat the FIA President. To her right, the Chief Executive of Formula One. Behind her, projected across the screen, was a photograph from a few hours earlier: Shuri mid-laugh, confetti caught in the air around her, not looking at the camera at all. Someone in the crowd had taken it without her noticing. It was the kind of photo that made a room feel less like a press conference and more like the end of something.
A journalist in the second row stood, flipping back through his notes more out of habit than need.
"Dr. Notari-Valmont." He glanced up. "You've been a researcher. An engineer. A Formula One driver." A pause, and something almost fond crept into his voice. "A World Champion." A few soft claps rippled somewhere near the back. "You've reshaped how teams approach the technical side of this sport, and you've done it while inspiring a generation of young women to walk into a paddock and believe they belong there." He set the notes down. "So — after everything — what are you proudest of?"
For the first time all afternoon, Shuri didn't answer right away.
She looked past the cameras, past the rows of reporters, through the glass wall that overlooked the paddock below. Mechanics were still wheeling equipment into freight cases, unhurried, the way people move when the season is finally, actually over. A marshal was laughing at something with two photographers by the fence. Someone rolled a stack of tyres across the pit lane and let it clatter against a garage door. And near the Mercedes garage, a little girl in oversized ear defenders broke into a run, then stopped herself just short to wave — too enthusiastically, the way children do when they haven't yet learned to be embarrassed by their own excitement. A mechanic waved back.
It looked peaceful down there. It hadn't always.
Shuri felt something settle in her chest — not the scramble of trying to find the right words, but the quiet of already knowing them. She wasn't stalling. She was just, for a moment, back there.
It started with a bed-and-breakfast in the hills outside Monaco.
It started with twenty drivers who were only supposed to stay a few days.
It started on a Tuesday, seven years ago, the first time the bell above the door of Maison Céleste rang.