[Soren’s POV]
I recognise him before my brain supplies the name.
It's the hands—broad, scarred across the knuckles, grease permanently embedded in the whorls despite decades of scrubbing.
The same hands I watched disassemble a gearbox over a video call when I was thirteen, Nico holding the phone while his father explained torque settings with the patience of a man who believed engines were a language anyone could learn.
Tomás Almeida is crossing the Monza paddock toward me, and the guilt arrives before he does—cold, surgical, sliding between my ribs.
"Sorenzinho!"
The nickname detonates something I didn't know I was still carrying. Soren with the -zinho—the Brazilian diminutive suffix that turns names into endearments. His attempt to make me sound like I belonged in his family, in his language.
Nico used to laugh every time, and I'd pretend to be annoyed while something warm settled behind my ribs. I'd forgotten it existed. My body hasn't, and something behind my sternum cracks open like a fault line.
Then his arms are around me—crushing, unashamed, the kind of hug my own father would sooner amputate a limb than give—and he smells like machine oil and lavender detergent. The combination is so specifically Nico's family that my throat closes.
"Look at you." He pulls back, gripping my shoulders. "The skinny Swedish boy who couldn't eat spicy food is now a famous Formula 1 driver. Meu Deus, time is a thief!"
"Tomás." The correction comes automatically when I start with Senhor Almeida and he raises a finger. Muscle memory from a life I dismantled. "It's really good to see you." The worst part is that I mean it.
He steers me toward hospitality, talking the entire way—about his wife Camila's moqueca obsession, about the Ferreira twins getting into university, about the fishmonger at Pinheiros market who holds his Saturday mornings hostage.
Every detail delivered with theatrical warmth, and I find myself laughing despite the knife twisting between my ribs.
This man showed me more warmth in sporadic video calls than my own father managed in years of daily proximity, and I repaid him by destroying his son in a locker room and spending eleven years pretending the wreckage wasn't my fault.
"The Brazilian Grand Prix is in a few weeks," Tomás says, his tone shifting to deliberate casualness—the kind that means the important part is coming. "Mid-season break after. Camila wants you to come stay with us. See São Paulo properly."
Every rational instinct assembles into a unified no. Decline politely. Cite scheduling conflicts. Do not walk into that man's home carrying what you did to his son.
"Tomás, that's incredibly generous, but my schedule is—"
"Her feijoada, Soren." He leans in conspiratorially, as though sharing state secrets. "She will ruin you for all other food. A full day she spends on it. The beans alone take twelve hours."
He straightens, reading the hesitation on my face "You work too hard, all of you. Young men eating hotel food, sleeping in airports. Come eat real food. Sleep in a real bed. Let Camila fuss over you—she has been asking about the sweet Swedish boy since the team announcement."
"I'd love that," I hear myself say, and the sincerity catches me so off guard I nearly flinch. The words aren't performed or calculated. They're true—I want it with an urgency that terrifies me, want to see Nico's home, want to sit in the kitchen where his mother sings, want something I can't name and won't examine.
"Maravilhoso!" He claps my shoulder hard enough to rock me sideways, beaming. "I will tell Camila—oh, she’ll be delighted!" One more hug, briefer but no less devastating. "It is good to have you back, Sorenzinho."
He walks away, and I stand in the paddock like someone's removed my skeleton.
I'm still replaying the conversation when Maren appears at the motorhome entrance, arms crossed, press credentials around her neck. That particular expression—somewhere between investigative journalist and sister who's found your embarrassing browser history.
"Inside," she says. Not a request.
I follow her because arguing with Maren requires energy I don't possess. She shuts the door, leans against the counter, and studies me with an intensity that makes me want to confess to crimes I haven't committed.
"I watched you and Nico during the morning briefing," she says, tilting her head. "You don't look at each other anymore. Which is interesting, because you used to aggressively look at each other—the hostility was practically a spectator sport.”
A deliberate pause that makes my stomach turn with anxiety.
“And now there's this careful avoidance that reads completely differently, and I've been trying to figure out what changed. Care to share?"
"Nothing changed. We're professionals."
"Right." She pulls out her phone, scrolls. "I've been researching your junior academy days. There's footage, Soren. Old karting videos—two boys who are clearly inseparable. And then forums referencing an 'incident' that no one specifies but everyone alludes to. After which you two never spoke again."
She looks up and holds my gaze, giving me a clear understanding that there’s nothing I could do to shut her up.
"What actually happened?"
The question lands on skin already raw—Tomás's kindness stripped my armour and Maren is hitting exposed nerve.
The deflection engages automatically. "Teenage drama. People grow apart."
"People who grow apart don't spend eleven years racing like they're settling a blood debt." She steps closer. "What happened with Nico?"
"For fuck’s sake, drop it, Maren!"
The force shocks us both—too loud, too desperate, cracking in a way that answers her question more thoroughly than any confession. My hands are shaking until I shove them into my pockets.
She goes quiet. The journalist recedes and my little sister surfaces—softer, reading the fracture lines with the precision of someone who knows where my architecture is weakest.
"Okay," she says gently. "I'm dropping it." A pause. "But whatever you're carrying—you don't have to carry it alone. You know that, right?"
She touches my arm once before leaving and the click of the motorhome door sounds like an absolution I haven't earned. And I’m left to prepare to the family’s warmth that doesn’t belong to me just in two weeks time.
* * *
Two weeks pass like a held breath, and then the Almeida home swallows me whole.
It smells like garlic and dendê oil and something sweet baking in an oven older than Formula 1 itself. Every surface is cluttered—racing trophies wedged between family photos, cookbooks sagging under collective weight.
My family home in Stockholm could be photographed for an architecture magazine at any moment. White walls, clean angles, love expressed through expectation. I didn't realise it was strange until Camila crushes me against her chest, calls me Sorenzinho, and puts a wooden spoon in my hand before I've set down my bag.
"You stir," she commands, pointing at a pot that could feed a village. "Slowly. With feeling. The feijoada knows when you don't care."
"Mamãe, he's a racing driver, not a chef," Nico says from the counter, arms crossed, something playing at the corners of his mouth.
“Do the racing drivers not eat?” she counters back, and the logic is bulletproof. So I stir.
"The beans need less salt," Nico mutters anyway, and Camila whips the spoon from my hand to brandish at her son like a weapon, unleashing a torrent of Portuguese that makes Tomás duck through the kitchen, steal a taste from the pot, and vanish before she turns the spoon on him too.
Nico doubles over laughing—fluid, unguarded, his whole body shifting into someone I have never met. Not the cold rival, not the controlled competitor. Just Nico. Whole and unhurt, his father ruffling his hair like he's still twelve.
The guilt is staggering. This warmth, this capacity for joy—I tried to destroy this at seventeen. The horror sits in my chest like a stone while I stir feijoada with shaking hands.
The text thread with Nico sits buried in my phone—nothing but room numbers and times. No evidence of anything human. And here I am at his mother's table, stirring his family's food, hiding the fact that I am sleeping with their son.
The son I abandoned to a locker room full of wolves. The son I spent eleven years treating like an enemy because facing what I did required a courage I have never possessed.
Camila presses a second bowl into my hands and tells me I'm too thin, and the kindness is so undeserved it nearly breaks me open right there at the counter.