Chapter 4 Yet another day
Agnes' POV
I pulled my phone out of my ear and looked at the caller ID.
Manny who wanted me protected?
I ended the call and dropped the phone, heading to the window. I pulled the curtain aside, and there was no one there
Just a couple of people running past and I guess a driver training on the tracks again
I sighed in relief and leaned against the wall.
I didn't sleep.
I tried. I lay down, stared at the ceiling for a full hour, watched the shadows from passing headlights crawl across the wall, and then gave up on the whole project entirely.
I sat at my desk and opened a fresh document. Not the documentary file. A new one. I didn't title it anything. I just left the cursor there, blinking at me in the dark like a question I hadn't figured out how to answer yet.
I typed: Man at the garage. Day 1. He saw me and left.
Then I stared at it.
That was all I had.
I knew I'd seen him somewhere but each time I willed my brain to remember, it resulted in a headache.
I closed the laptop and went to make tea, but I didn't drink it.
Leo arrived the next morning with the rest of the crew, dragging three equipment cases off a trolley and looking like someone who had not slept on the flight and was personally offended by that fact.
"You look terrible", he said.
"Lovely to see you too."
“He couldn't get the number of a lovely woman he met on the plane, don't mind the look”, Margot said with a chuckle as she hugged me
We laughed with Leo shooting her a displeased look.
Having them here helped more than I expected. I hadn't noticed how much I'd been carrying alone until there were other people in the room and I could put some of it down. We spent the first hour doing a full gear check. Logging what we had and figuring out positions for the next session.
I threw myself into the day.
No filming yet — not in the way Leo expected. I moved through the garage and the paddock slowly, camera hanging at my side instead of being raised to my eye. I was still learning the grammar of this place. Who moved where? Who answered whom? Which silences meant something and which were just silence.
The paddock had shifted around me since day one. Crew members who'd gone stiff when I pointed a lens in their direction last week were nodding at me now. A mechanic held a door open without being asked to. Someone from the data team stepped aside to give me a better angle and didn't make a thing of it.
Documentary subjects always relaxed eventually.
I told myself that and kept walking.
Practice started at ten. I was on the pit wall with my headset on before Dae had finished his pre-session checks.
Ace's voice came through and my attention sharpened the way it does when I need to listen to something carefully. On the radio, he was always a completely different person.
"Balance is soft through the last corner."
"Copy," Dae said. "We'll look at it after this run."
"Don't wait. I'm finishing this race."
Dae's jaw tightened. I filmed Dae's jaw.
Ace drove around it. By the third lap, he was the fastest through that sector by three tenths, soft balance and all. The timing screen went purple and Dae exhaled through his nose like a man who had accepted something he couldn't argue with.
I pulled off my headset and wrote: In a sport run on data, he overrides it with instinct. The data catches up to him eventually.
I looked at the empty track.
Then I looked at what I'd written and wondered when exactly I'd started writing about him like that.
After the session wound down I stayed on the pit wall longer than I needed to. The crew was packing up around me, moving equipment back toward the garage in that efficient, wordless way they had. I had my notepad open on my knee, pen moving, not really writing anything coherent. Just thinking on paper.
"That's not footage."
I looked up and immediately closed my notepad.
Ace was standing beside me, still in his race suit, helmet under his arm. He was looking at the notepad with a puzzled expression on his face.
"No, it isn't", I said, staring straight ahead of me.
"What is it?"
"Thinking."
He looked at the notepad for another second, then looked out at the track. He didn't push. Didn't ask what I was thinking about or why I was still sitting here when everyone else had cleared out.
That surprised me. I wasn't sure why it did, but it did.
We stood there for a moment in the specific quiet of a track that had just been very loud. Then his engineer called his name from somewhere behind us and he left. No goodbye. Just gone.
I looked back down at my notepad.
I'd written the word access in the margin and circled it twice without noticing.
That evening I sat at my desk with my laptop open and went back to the Day 1 footage.
I'd already done this. I knew I'd already done this. But I've learned not to ignore the thing that keeps pulling me back to a clip because it's usually trying to tell me something my brain hasn't fully formed yet.
I paused at the garage entrance, backed it up three seconds. Played it again.
He stood in the doorway for maybe four seconds. One of the crew said something to him. He looked up, found my face across the garage, and left. Not fast enough to look panicked. Fast enough that I noticed.
I knew this face.
Newsrooms. Press events. Background faces in photographs I hadn't looked at in years.
I started cross-referencing. Publication websites. Byline archives. Pages going back five years, then eight. Leo knocked on the door frame at some point and said something about dinner.
“Give me twenty minutes Leo”, I called out.
He smiled and replied, “I'll send it up to your room”.
I sighed in relief. My team clearly understood me.
I found him an hour later.
A byline photograph on a motorsport publication. It was small and tucked into the contributor section at the bottom of the page. I held it next to the frozen frame from my footage and felt that very specific quiet satisfaction of a thing clicking into place.
Motorsport correspondent. Currently credentialled for the season.
I scrolled to the top of the page looking for the masthead.
There was a name there. Editor in Chief.
I read it.
Manny Plosfeid.
I narrowed my eyes remembering the call from that morning.
I quickly wrote it down. I needed to find out who Manny was and Reid's connection to her company.
