The rain didn't just fall. It arrived, uninvited and indifferent, the way bad news always does. It began as a thin mist that clung to the air like regret, then thickened into deliberate curtains, each drop heavy and personal. By the time it reached the ground it felt like an apology the sky had practiced for months but still couldn't get right. Thunder didn't crack overhead; it groaned low and long, the sound of something ancient and exhausted finally giving up. James Hunt sat motionless on the wroughtiron bench in the empty park, elbows braced on his knees, spine curved in the posture of a man who had forgotten how to straighten. His face was tilted upward, not in defiance but in surrender, as though he were offering his skin to be erased. Rain traced cold, deliberate paths down his cheekbones, slipped beneath the collar of his sodden jacket, and soaked through to flesh that had stopped registering temperature weeks ago. Only his eyes movedslow, unfocused sweeps across the churning grey above, searching for an answer the clouds had stopped pretending to hold years earlier.
He spoke so quietly the words nearly dissolved in the downpour before they left his mouth.
"If it happens… it was always going to happen."
A pause. Rain tapped his lips like impatient fingers.
"Right, Mom? That's the rule you lived by. No accidents. Just sequence. Just… what had to be."
His mouth curvednot a smile, but the ghost of one, the kind people wear when they remember something beautiful they are no longer allowed to touch. The expression lasted less than a second, then collapsed back into the same blank mask he had worn since the day the world ended.
"I'll be sad for four to six days," he recited, voice cracking like dry paper left too long in the sun. "I'll cry until I can't breathe. Then I'll stand up. I'll check on Dad. On Finn. On the hangar. On the team. Life keeps moving. The clocks don't stop. That's what you said. That's what you did… every single time the world tried to break you."
The words hung between him and the rain. They sounded smaller out loud than they had inside his head for five months. He waited for the tremor he knew was coming. It started in his shoulderssmall, almost politethen erupted without warning. The sob that followed was not loud. It was deep, subterranean, the kind that rises from the place beneath the ribs where children hide when the nightmares have teeth. He pressed both palms hard against his face, as though he could physically hold the grief inside his skull where it belonged. Water and tears mixed between his fingers and ran down his wrists.
"But it's not four to six days, Mom." The words came out shredded, barely audible over the rain. "It's been one hundred and fiftythree. And every single morning I wake up and the first thing I do is reach for the phone that isn't ringing anymore. Every qualifying lap I still hear your voice counting down the sector times in my headset even though you never once sat on the pit wall. Every time I smell jet fuel on my hands I smell your perfume underneath itthe one you wore to every race, the one you said made the hangar feel like home. I can't… I can't do the math anymore. I can't calculate how many days it's supposed to take before the hole in my chest stops screaming your name."
He rocked forward slowly, forehead almost touching his knees, the movement mechanical, like a machine running on failing batteries. The rain drummed on his back in steady, merciless rhythm.
"Why wasn't it me?" The whisper was so soft it might have been meant for no one. "Why did the universe pick you? You were the strong one. You were the one who could carry everything. The diagnosis. The treatments. The way Dad fell apart in the waiting room and Finn pretended he was fine. I was supposed to be the one who broke… not you. Never you. I was the kid who skipped the pills and collapsed in the backyard. I was the one who should have gone first."
Lightning bleached the entire park white for one frozen heartbeat. In that instant his face looked twenty years olderhollowed cheeks, eyes sunken into dark hollows, mouth a thin line of permanent hurt that no amount of rain could wash away. Then the light vanished and the world returned to grey.
A handlarge, calloused, trembling slightlysettled on his shoulder. Not sudden. Just there, as if it had always been waiting for permission that would never come.
James didn't flinch this time. He barely registered the touch at first. His body had grown used to being touched without feeling it.
His father stood behind the bench, rain streaming off the brim of the old racing cap Jenna had bought him in Monaco thirty years earlier. The fabric was faded now, the logo cracked, but he still wore it every time the weather turned bad, as though the cap could somehow keep her voice inside it. Water dripped from the peak and fell onto James's neck like tears his father hadn't allowed himself to shed in weeks.
"Son."
One word. It contained an entire collapse.
James didn't answer. He only leaned sideways, slow and deliberate, until his temple rested against his father's thigh. The movement was small, automaticlike muscle memory from when he was six and nightmares had teeth and his mother would carry him downstairs to the kitchen for warm milk while his father stood in the doorway looking helpless.
His father stayed standing for another moment, then sank onto the bench beside him. The iron creaked under their combined weight. For a long minute there was only rain and breathingtwo broken men sitting side by side, trying to remember how lungs were supposed to work when the air itself felt like betrayal.
Then his father lifted his face to the storm and spoke to the woman who used to sleep beside him every night for twentynine years.
"Jenna…" His voice fractured on her name the way thin ice fractures under too much weight. "Look at him. Look at our boy. He hasn't let a single tear fall since the funeral. Not one. He stood there in the rain while they lowered you and his face was stone. And todaytoday he's ripping himself open right here where anyone could see if anyone were left to look. Are you watching, love? Are you seeing what it costs him to finally feel it?"
He reached across and pulled James against his side. James went without resistance, curling into the shape he had outgrown decades ago. His head fit against his father's shoulder the way it had when he was small and the world was only as big as the hangar and her laugh. For a while neither of them spoke. The rain eased into slower, sadder intervals, as if even the sky had run out of things to say.
"I'm sorry," his father whispered into his son's wet hair. The words were so quiet they might have been imagined. "I'm so sorry she left you the hardest job. Being the one who stays."
They sat like that until the downpour finally tired itself out and became nothing more than a cold drizzle. Then they rose togetherslow, stiffand walked out of the park without another word. The path home was the same one they had walked a thousand times when she was still there to meet them at the door with coffee and questions about lap times. Tonight the house was dark when they reached it. They stood in the hallway dripping water onto the floorboards for a long time before either of them moved to turn on a light.
Three days later the sky had the audacity to clear. Sunlight lay across the cemetery grass like spilled goldtoo bright, too clean, an insult to everything that had happened beneath it. James knelt before the headstone in the same black jacket he had worn to the funeral, now faded and stiff from too many washings. White lilies trembled slightly in his left hand, their stems cool and damp. He placed them one at a time, slowmotion deliberate, as though each stem were the last tether he had left to the living world.
JENNA HUNT
1978–2027
BELOVED WIFE · MOTHER · THE ONE WHO NEVER BROKE
He traced the second date with one fingertip. Stopped. Swallowed once. Traced it again. The stone was smooth under his skin, warmed slightly by the sun, but it still felt colder than the rain had. He stayed on his knees longer than necessary, arranging and rearranging the lilies until the bouquet looked exactly the way she would have liked itbalanced, honest, no wasted space.
Gravel crunched behind him. Finn arrived without greeting. He lowered himself to the grass a few feet away, knees drawn up, forearms resting on them. The same brother posture they had invented as children whenever the hangar felt too big and the future felt too loud.
They sat in silence for what felt like hours. The sun moved across the sky in small, reluctant increments.
"You were eight," Finn said eventually. His voice was low, careful, the way people speak when they know every word could reopen a wound. "Skipped the pills because you wanted to beat Tommy Reynolds in that stupid bike race behind the hangar. Collapsed right there on the grass. Mom carried you inside herself. Didn't even call for help until she'd already started CPR on the kitchen floor."
James gave the smallest nod. He remembered the ceiling tiles above him spinning. He remembered her hands steady on his chest.
"She told you what would happen if you died," Finn continued. "Four to six days. She'd cry. She'd be empty. But the rest of us still needed her. Dad. Me. The business. The house. She said your death wouldn't stop the Earth turning. She'd think about you every single day for the rest of her life… but she'd keep walking forward. For us."
James stared at the lilies until the white blurred at the edges. He didn't wipe his eyes.
"I hated her for saying it," he whispered. The words felt like stones in his mouth. "I thought it meant she didn't love me enough to be destroyed by losing me."
Finn exhaled through his nose, a small, tired sound. "She loved you so much she was already practicing how to survive you. Just in case. She wrote it all down in that notebook she kept by the bedthe one with the list of who to call first, what songs to play at the service, how to keep the team running if she was gone. She rehearsed it so we wouldn't have to."
A long silence stretched between them. Wind moved the grass in slow, indifferent waves. Somewhere far off a bird called once and fell quiet again.
James spoke suddenly, voice barely above the breeze.
"I saw her face tear in half."
The memory arrived without warning, the way they always did nowsharp, uninvited, overlapping the present until he couldn't tell which second he was living in.
The final lap. Silverstone 2027. The jet screaming at Mach 1.8, neckandneck with Maverick's crimson streak. His telemetry perfect. His heart rate steady for the first time since the diagnosis. The family photo tucked in the corner of the cockpit screenher smile wide, eyes bright, the one taken at his first podium when he was nineteen. Then turbulence. The photo slid. Caught on that loose nut by the comms panel. The glass cracked with a sound like a bone snapping. Her face split clean from forehead to chin. In that single second he saw everything at once: the hospital room, the monitors flatlining, her hand reaching for his one last time while he was still in the air. He remembered her voice from the childhood hospital bed: "Four to six days, baby. Then I move on. You have to promise me you will too." His hand twitched on the throttle. The jet bled speed like blood from a wound. Maverick flashed past on the inside line, crossing the finish pylon 0.03 seconds ahead. Two points. Championship lost by two fucking points.
And twenty minutes earlierwhile he was still flyingshe had slipped away. She had waited. She had actually waited until the checkered flag so her son could finish the race before his world ended.
James laughed onceshort, ugly, wet. The sound died quickly.
"Two points," he said. "Maverick took it by half a wingspan. Champagne everywhere. Fireworks. The podium I should have been standing on. And she died right after the flag. So I could finish. So I could lose everything and still cross the line second."
He pressed both palms flat against the marble. Hard. As though he could push himself through the stone and reach the other side where she was waiting. The pressure turned his knuckles white.
"I didn't cry at the funeral," he said. "I didn't cry when they shoveled the dirt on top of her. I didn't cry when Dad broke in half at the graveside and Finn had to hold him up. I just stood there. Empty. Like someone had reached inside my chest and turned all the lights off forever."
He looked at Finnreally looked, for the first time in months. His brother's eyes held the same ghosts.
"I'm still in that cockpit, Finn. I never landed. Every night the photo falls again. Every morning I wake up hearing Maverick's engine note crossing the line ahead of mine. Every time I almost smile at something smallFinn, a good lap time, the smell of coffeeI feel the glass cut her face again. I feel like I killed her by losing focus. By letting her down in the one moment she needed me to be strong."
Finn reached over without hesitation. Laid his hand on top of James's, pressing it harder against the stone. The pressure was solid. Real. Alive.
"She left you something," Finn said quietly. "Not instructions. Not some rulebook you have to follow perfectly. She left you the proof that love doesn't disappear when someone dies. It just… changes shape. It becomes memory. It becomes the reason you get back in the jet even when every instinct says stop. It becomes the reason you're still here, on your knees in front of her grave, instead of lying in one right next to her."
James's shoulders began to shake againnot violently, not theatrically, but steadily, like a man finally allowing himself to feel the full weight after months of pretending the weight didn't exist. Tears came. Silent. Unwiped. They tracked down his face and fell onto the lilies.
"I don't know how to be her," he choked out. The words were raw, honest in a way he hadn't allowed since the hospital. "I don't know how to survive losing her the way she survived losing everything else. The way she survived me almost dying at eight. The way she survived every bad result, every crash scare, every time the doctors said the odds were bad. She just… kept going. I can't do that. I'm not built like that."
"You don't have to be her," Finn said. His voice was steady but quiet, the way their mother's had been in the worst moments. "You just have to be the part of you she believed in. The part that kept flying after openheart surgery at eight. The part that qualified on pole four seconds faster than anyone thought possible. The part that still gets up every morning even when it hurts to breathe. That's enough, James. That's what she asked for."
James closed his eyes. Let the tears come without hiding them this time. They fell freely now, mixing with the last traces of morning dew on the grass.
"I miss her so much I can't think straight," he whispered. "I miss her so much it feels like betrayal to keep living. Every good thing feels like stealing from her memory. Every time I laugheven for a secondI feel guilty. Like I'm forgetting her already. Like I'm proving she was right about moving on, and I hate myself for it."
Finn didn't answer with words. He simply shifted closer until their shoulders touchedsolid, warm, alive. They stayed like that as the sun moved overhead. A single cloud drifted across its face. Shadow passed over the grave, cool and brief, then light returnedbrighter somehow, sharper, almost accusatory.
James stayed on his knees until the gold light turned to amber, until the air cooled and crickets began testing their voices in the tall grass beyond the stones. When he finally stood his legs were unsteady, the circulation slow to return after so long on the damp ground. He didn't fall. He simply waited until the world stopped tilting.
He looked down at the headstone one last time.
"I'm trying, Mom," he said. His voice was hoarse but steady in its exhaustion. "I'm trying to be sad for four to six days… and then some more days… and then maybe a few after that. I don't know when it stops hurting. Maybe it never does. Maybe this is just who I am now. But I promise I won't stop walking forward. Not because the world needs me to. Not because the clocks demand it. Because you did. Because you waited for me to finish the lap before you left."
He turned away slowly, shoulders still rounded, the same posture he had carried out of the park three days earlier.
Behind him the lilies stayed perfectly still. No breeze stirred them. No gentle nod. No permission granted from beyond the stone.
Just white flowers against grey marble, unchanging.
He walked away. Slow. Deliberate. Each step measured as though the ground itself might open if he moved too quickly. The path out of the cemetery stretched long and empty in front of him. He didn't look back. He never did anymore. Looking back only brought the cockpit, the torn photograph, the flatline he hadn't been there to hear.
The sun kept shining anyway. The crickets kept singing. The world kept turning exactly as she had promised it would.
And James kept walking, carrying the weight she had once carried so easily, wondering how many more days it would take before the screaming in his chest quieted to a murmur he could live with.
He didn't know.
He suspected he never would.