Lucas made the time count.
He took the family out of the country, one trip folding into the next, the kind of long stretch he'd been promising them for the better part of a year and never quite delivered. They moved when they felt like moving and stayed when they felt like staying, and for once nothing on a schedule could pull him out of the room.
For a while the internet ran on it. Photos of Lucas in one city, then another, surfaced and spread the way anything with his face on it did.
That was as far as it ever got. Not a single clear frame of Daciana, Daria, or Sera made it out into the world; Lucas and Jennifer held a hard line on the girls, strict to the point that no lens ever caught more than the back of a small head or a hand folded into his.
They enjoyed it as a family, and they let the noise stay noise.
There were critics, of course. There always were.
Some of them had picked up the Knights hopping border to border on the private jet, one country after the next, and decided it was worth a column; a few even asked, with a straight face, why a man with that kind of money didn't just take helicopters between the shorter stops.
Lucas didn't answer a word of it. He wasn't about to load his wife and three daughters into a helicopter to win a point with strangers who would never be satisfied either way. Their lives weren't a thing he gambled to look good online.
By the time the last trip wound down, the calendar had carried them all the way to Christmas.
They spent it together, the whole house full and warm with it. William came by to see his great-granddaughters, the way he never missed a chance to anymore.
He wasn't the only one who came.
Vince had made the trip too, thinner than the last time anyone had laid eyes on him, still in the middle of his cancer treatment, moving like a man who counted his energy out in careful portions.
Two old men in the same room, and the air in it turned heavy.
When the rest of the family drifted out of earshot for a moment and left the two of them alone, the politeness went with them.
"Look who it is." William's voice came low and even, almost pleasant, which was worse than shouting. "My grandson's made his peace with having you around. That's his to give, and he gave it. I haven't made mine." A pause, deliberate. "I never will. Not after what you did to my daughter."
Vince's jaw tightened. He didn't argue.
"I know my sins, dad—"
"Don't call me dad." It landed flat and final. "You lost that the day you put your hands on another woman. You don't get it back because you got sick."
"And the cancer doesn't move me an inch. You want to know where my mind goes, watching you sit there wasting away? It goes to her. To my girl in a bed, worn down to nothing, while you were out somewhere enjoying yourself. So tell me. How does it—"
The words died in his throat.
Lucas had come back into view with the girls, the family spilling toward them across the room, and William's face changed in the space of a single breath.
The hard set of his mouth bent into something soft and grandfatherly, the venom packed away so fast it might never have been there.
"...You take care of yourself now, you hear me? Nasty business, an illness like that. You get plenty of rest." And he was already turning, already crossing the floor toward Sera with both arms open and a wide grin on his face, as though the last thirty seconds had belonged to some other man entirely.
Vince sat with it, speechless. The conversation that had just happened to him sat in the air like it had never happened at all.
Lucas had seen the tail end of it. He read the shift on the old man's face, read the stillness on his father's, and put it together easily enough.
He didn't make anything of it. He crossed over and took the seat beside Vince while the rest of the family found their fun on the other side of the room.
The quiet held for a while before Vince broke it.
"Don't ever tear this apart for another woman." He kept his eyes forward. "Whatever it is, however it dresses itself up. Don't make the mistake I made."
Lucas didn't look at him. "I never planned to."
The answer came back cold, no give in it at all. Vince didn't seem to mind. A small smile found him anyway. "I'm glad, then."
Lucas turned his head a fraction, enough to take him in. Still thin from the treatment, the bones of his face closer to the surface than they should have been; but he was coming back, slowly.
There was a little meat on him again, color creeping in where there'd been none.
"You really do regret it..."
It wasn't a question.
It was all in Vince's eyes before he said a word. "I was a fool. I didn't see what I'd done until it was already in pieces on the floor, and by the time I understood it, there was nothing left of me to put it back together with. I'm a hollow man, Lucas. I know exactly what I am."
He looked at his son. "But you let me sit in this room anyway. You didn't have to do that. I know you haven't forgiven me, not really, not all the way down. I'm not asking you to. It's enough that you let me be near them at all. More than enough."
Lucas didn't answer. His eyes drifted somewhere past the room, past all of it.
There were wounds that never truly closed, only scarred over, and a man learned to carry them the way he carried an old break in the cold.
Lucas had stopped keeping the tally on his father's long ago. Not out of mercy, and not because the man across from him had earned the reprieve, but because the anger had quietly burned itself out somewhere along the years and never come back, and what sat in the space it left was nothing grander than this: an old man running short on time, parked at the edge of a family that had grown up whole without him.
So Lucas let him stay. That was the whole of it, and the whole of what it would ever be. He had no forgiveness in him to hand across. He simply no longer carried the wound it would have been given to heal.
---
Time moved the way it always did when nothing was pushing against it. Before the house had finished pulling the decorations off its own walls, the year had turned over and it was 2024.
A new year was loud the way only a new one could be, the whole world throwing itself into the occasion at once.
And it was into all that noise that Stefano's answer finally arrived.
Neil had built the ask to be refused. He'd walked out of that suite in Mexico more than half convinced no board on earth would put its signature under a number that size, against a risk that size.
The reply that came back months later wasn't the no he'd braced for. It wasn't even a plain yes.
It was something he hadn't seen coming at all.
Formula 1 hadn't simply met the money. They'd reached past cash entirely and offered a different kind of currency.
Equity.
An actual stake in the sport itself.
He got Lucas on the phone the same hour, sprawled face-down on a massage table with the masseuse working at his shoulders and the handset wedged against his ear.
"They're not paying you off, Lucas. They're cutting you in." He shifted, waving the masseuse a half-inch off. "Listen to me, because this isn't a fee. A fee you take, you spend, it's gone and you've got a memory of it. This is a piece of Formula 1. A real stake in the whole operation."
"And the timing on it is obscene, in the good way. The sport's never been worth more, and it climbs every single year. American money's flooding in, the races sell out a year ahead, the broadcast deals fatten up every cycle. A slice you hold today is worth more the longer you sit on it."
"They're not writing you a check, man. They're making you an owner."
Lucas was beside Jennifer as he listened, taking it in without a word until Neil ran out of road.
"Then we sign."
On the table, Neil's face pulled into something complicated. "You're sure? Because the equity's only the front half of this. The back half is you climbing into a car that's a whisper off race spec and driving it in front of the entire planet. That part doesn't get one bit safer just because the money got prettier."
Lucas thought on it, longer than a man usually did before saying what he'd clearly already decided. "I'm sure. It's not the kind of offer a man turns down and feels clever about later."
Neil let out a long breath. "If you say so."
He let a beat go by, then remembered the other thing. "Oh. Before I lose it. Goldenvoice called. Their CEO, himself, not a deputy. Fifteen million for you to headline Coachella. What do you want me to tell him?"
"I've been waiting on that one." There was no hesitation anywhere in it. "Take it."
"Alright, alright. Though I was thinking, if I lean on him a little, I could probably squeeze some more out of—"
"Don't." The word came easy and flat. "Not this one, Neil. You don't haggle Coachella. Fifteen million to stand on that stage is already a number that doesn't make sense, and they put it on the table without me lifting a finger. You start nickel-and-diming the people who run the biggest stage in music, all you do is make yourself look small standing on it. Some things you take with both hands and you say thank you. This is one of them."
Neil, caught flat, mumbled something that was most of the way to an apology and let the idea quietly die.
---
The days that followed were supposed to be the empty kind.
Jennifer was never idle for long, though. Her cosmetics line and the fashion house both ran on her attention, and she gave it to them in the gaps between the quiet mornings and everything else the family needed.
Lucas kept half an eye on his own holdings, and one of them had started drawing the wrong sort of attention. His stake in Tesla had people circling it, several of them angling to buy him out of it altogether, and the loudest of the bunch was the man who ran the company himself. Elon wanted the whole thing under his own name, full control, no outside hands on the wheel; and Lucas's piece sat squarely in the way of that.
Then Netflix came knocking.
Drive to Survive, the docuseries that had done more to sell Formula 1 to America than any marketing department ever managed, wanted Lucas.
The reason was no mystery to anyone. He'd spent months living inside the sport and then put a genuine F1 car around a circuit at two hundred miles an hour with every camera in the place running.
He agreed to it anyway.
It wasn't much of a shoot. A day, maybe two. A crew turned up, set their lights, and put him in a chair across from a camera for the kind of long sit-down the show liked to cut episodes around.
They had him go back over the whole stretch, the months in the paddock, the training with Brad, the F2 they'd dressed up to look like the real thing, the race weekends.
But everyone in that room knew which part they'd actually come for, and the questions kept drifting back to it. The McLaren. What it felt like to drop into an honest-to-god F1 car and run it flat out at two hundred.
He told them. Most of it, anyway.
They got what they wanted, he was done inside of two days, and the show had its episode.
With that out of the way, only one thing was still hanging over him, and it had nothing to do with Netflix. The Formula 1 contract. The deal was agreed, the terms were settled; all that was left now was to sit down and put his name on it.
He brought Jennifer along for it.
"You're really going to sign it?" She kept her voice light, but the worry sat plain underneath. "I know what they're offering. It's generous. More than generous, even by their standards. But generous doesn't make a car like that one bit safer."
"Don't worry about the car." Lucas met her eyes. "I know exactly what I can do behind a wheel. You just have to trust me on that part."
"I do." She leaned in and kissed his cheek. Then a small spark lit. "Although... If you want me trusting you all the way down, you could always just show me. Drive me somewhere. Properly."
Lucas smiled. "Why not. I'll book out Thermal for a day and take you round the whole circuit. Give you the full version."
"Why wait for a track?" Her eyes were glowing now. "Take over from Shawn. Right here, right now. Let me see it."
Lucas glanced toward the front. Shawn caught the look in the mirror and wore one of his own, the helpless kind of a man who already knew how this ended.
So they traded seats, Shawn folding into the back, Lucas behind the wheel.
He pulled into traffic and, for a stretch, it was only ordinary driving, smooth and unhurried and nothing to write home about.
Then it stopped being ordinary.
Coming up on a car braked dead in the lane ahead, he let the nose run right at its bumper and brought everything to a stop with a few clean inches to spare, exactly when he meant to, not a hair early, not a hair late.
He threaded the next two lanes like the gaps had been measured for him. And when it came time to put the car away, he laid it into the parking space in one fluid pass, fast and precise and perfect, the kind of park that made the whole thing look easy.
Jennifer's breath caught. So did Shawn's, and the man drove for a living. In the car trailing behind them, Jack and Simon traded a look that said the same thing.
"Okay, no." Jennifer twisted around in her seat to look at him properly. "That was not normal driving. Since when do you drive like that?"
"Since a couple of months ago." Lucas couldn't keep the grin off it. "I didn't just stand around looking pretty for this one. Brad and me, we put in real hours. The studio had us in those cars for weeks."
"Weeks." She said it like the word wasn't doing enough. "People spend their whole lives not driving like that, Lucas."
"Then I guess I'm a fast study." He shrugged, far too pleased with himself.
She shook her head and laughed under her breath, the surprise folding back into something she'd long since made her peace with.
Of course he was. It was so completely him that there was almost no point being shocked anymore.
---
After a little more of it, they made their way to the private room where Neil was already waiting with a representative from Formula 1, the papers laid out and ready between them.
They walked the terms through.
The bulk of it sat in the equity, the stake in the sport itself, and they put a value on that piece of around two hundred and twenty million dollars.
To round the thing off, thirty million in straight cash came on top.
A quarter of a billion dollars, all told. For one man.
Lucas signed.
Jennifer watched him do it and found the whole thing almost impossible to hold in her head.
It had to be the largest figure any entertainer had ever been handed in the history of the business.
Who on earth would believe it, that an actor had pulled a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar deal out of Formula 1? It read like something too good to be true.
But it was Lucas. And where Lucas was concerned, a number like that wasn't a shock at all. It was only what everyone had quietly come to expect.
The handshake done, Lucas didn't get up right away. The representative pulled out his phone, dialed, and a moment later Stefano's face filled the screen on a FaceTime call.
It was light, easy talk, nothing that needed saying over a signed contract. Stefano was all warmth, and when he caught sight of Jennifer in the frame he greeted her too, like a man pleased to have the whole family in on the moment.
A few minutes of the usual, and that was that.
They set the phone down, gathered themselves, and left the room with Neil falling in behind them.
Jennifer was still turning it over as they walked. "It's not even the money, is it? I keep trying to be amazed at the number and then I remember that's not the part that matters." She looked up at him. "They gave you a piece of it. The actual sport. People spend whole fortunes and never get within a mile of that, and they just handed it to you."
"Because there's only one of him." Neil said it dry, but he wasn't joking, not really. "I've sat across a lot of tables, and nobody gives away ownership."
Lucas let them have it.
"And that's before Coachella's even in the room," Neil went on, warming up. "Another fifteen million sitting on top, for a weekend of you doing what you'd do for free in the shower."
Lucas only smiled and rode along with it, while his wife and his manager kept circling back to the same thing. Not the size of the check. The fact that the most closed-off sport on earth had cracked its own door open and pulled him inside.