Race With a Heart
Chapter 190: Trying to Grasp Reality

Chapter 190: Trying to Grasp Reality

Steve left the medical facility a little disoriented. He didn’t quite know if he was really in the place where he was. Actually, he knew exactly where, he saw the buildings, he knew the address, he was not able to fully explain this phenomenon, but he felt as if he was taken out of this reality.

This was not the first time he had felt something like this, and it was almost certainly not the last.

This feeling, difficult to capture and describe, was called dizziness by the doctor. This surprised Steve and he was actually relieved to be diagnosed with the diagnosis as for a while he wondered if he was losing his senses. Actually, he was losing them, but not in a psychiatric sense.

Steve had been experiencing constant tinnitus for some time, which was starting to drive him into a highly irritated state. He tried to hide it from Martin, but not only was the boy smart, he loved him too, and he could see every change in Paxton. Lying to him was not only difficult, but sometimes even impossible. Steve had to tell him the truth, or at least part of it. So he spoke of the noise and the headache, but not of the strange experience of breaking out of reality that he began to have more and more often. He thought his mind was breaking ...

It wouldn’t be all that strange. Three and a half years ago, a girl in love with him caught him having sex with a man. Shocked by the discovery that the boy who was her first love is making love to a man, she ran into the street, right under the wheels of an oncoming car. Steve saw the impact. He saw the girl fall to the asphalt road. He had seen her blood... Guilt mingled with shock, and at that moment something snapped in Paxton’s mind, taking him to the hell his own mind had prepared for him. It was a very dark period in his life.

But he was alive. Somehow he stayed afloat, although he sometimes dived so deep that the risk of not swimming out was very real.

Until one day, Martin appeared in his life and changed everything. And everything was supposed to be fine, and it could have been, had it not been for the excess of ambition and lack of morality of Steve’s younger colleague, who decided to remove him from the path to his career. Paxton didn’t break down just because he had Martin with him.

But just then Steve began to notice that something had changed in his perception of reality. It was as if he was losing touch with her. So Paxton assumed it was psychological in nature.

But he was wrong, and he breathed a sigh of relief. But only for a moment. Maybe he wasn’t going insane, but he was definitely losing his senses.

Neurological tests found nothing, so he could breathe a sigh of relief - it was nothing that could be life-threatening. But something influenced his everyday life, and although he tried to hide it, it became more and more difficult for him to do so.

Steve has just visited another medical specialist. This time it was an audiologist. He was with her the second time. During the first visit, the doctor referred him for tests, today she discussed the results.

Paxton, holding onto the railing, descended the stairs, stood slightly to one side, and leaned against the wall. The reality around him was difficult to grasp. Tinnitus buzzed in his head. Steve took out his phone to call Martin...

He closed his eyes. He will call Martin and tell him what? Will he tell him a lie so that the boy will calmly take part in the first race in his life, or will he tell him the truth, risking that the shocked Martin will not be able to take part in the competition? And right now, at this point, Steve really needed Martin to take part in this race. Maybe it was selfish of him, but he really wanted to see Martin, in the red and yellow colors of the Fergus Stables, traverse the professional track. Nor did he want to lie to that sweet young man to whom he owed so much. He probably owed him his life, because without Martin, Steve would have been consumed by the darkness he carried within him. The darkness was starting to look at him again.

Instead of Martin, Steve chose the number for Karl Walton, his best and not long ago only friend.

Karl answered on the fifth ring.

"Hi Steve! What’s up? "

"Karl ... I really don’t know what to do ..."

"Steve?"

Paxton took a deep breath. He really wanted to sound calm, but his voice trembled as he said:

"We need to talk very seriously."

***

Michael Moore looked up from the report he had just analyzed and looked at his secretary.

"How accurate is this information?" He asked.

"Very," announced the secretary. "Simons’ Group will not withdraw from supporting Fergus due to the planned marriage of Simons’ daughter and young Walton, but they no longer have the strength. They came into conflict with Cavanaugh over the purchase of land for investment. It seems Cavanaugh, Terrence and Okabe have come to an understanding. Terrence is gearing up to take over Berry’s Breweries."

"I can see what’s in the report and I didn’t ask for a summary," Moore growled at him.

"I apologize, sir."

Yes, Michael Moore saw very well that new arrangements were starting to form, and a new leader in the form of Terrence was suddenly beginning to emerge. It seemed that the goal of the new and bold capital was to quickly seize supremacy on almost all levels of the surrounding business and to displace the old forces.

Moore’s Corporation was safe at this point. For decades, they have not limited their business or capital to just one place, spreading their influence around the world and getting rich through various, often risky ventures. They opened factories where there was the greatest unemployment and planted plantations there, there was extreme poverty. They risked a lot, but thanks to that they had sufficiently strong support from various governments and local corporations that benefited from the support of a foreign partner. However, there were companies in this city that were not doing as well as they could, and they faced either takeover or bankruptcy.

Fergus was in the spotlight of Michael Moore for obvious reasons. The old man was once a famous altruist and was famous for his passion for car racing. It was he who founded a car stable in this city and built a track, which was a damn daring investment. Even before GP2 was created and at the very beginning of the series, the Fergus Stable was successful and the investment quickly returned, and car racing became the favorite sport of the inhabitants of this city. But then a series of mishaps followed: the driver who turned out to have alcohol problems, the deterioration of Old Fergus’ health, the fire at the hospital construction site that took extra money... All this made the Fergus Stables lose money and has so far been unable to finally get out of financial trouble. Things were already starting to go right this season when the stable’s top driver Steve Paxton started having some very strange incidents on the track.

Michael Moore wasn’t paranoid, but years of experience in a business where not everyone is playing clean told him that the Fergus Stables trouble was not accidental.

Moore had wanted to help Old Fergus for a while now, a bit out of sentiment, a bit because he was also sniffing out opportunities for good money for himself. However, he was not a charity, so a donation was out of the question and the terms of the investment had to be discussed, and then something very unexpected resulted. His son was seduced by one of the drivers of the Fergus Stable.

There is no business that you could not quit before signing the contract. The stable was a nice investment for him, but when Michael thought he would help Lambert, the man who slept with his son...

However, nothing is carved in stone and the situation, especially in business, is changing every day. Today, Moore was the largest investor in the Fergus Stable in return for the commercial services of two of the four current drivers of the stable.

So at this point, the well-being of the Fergus Stable was also his.

"Terrence never had such ambitions," Michael remarked. "Are there any rumors about what might have changed?"