Take This Life / Daniel Ricciardo

Chapter 2

DANIEL'S POV

Well, well, well, Dothy's daughter. Must say I was in a quite shock when I'd seen her for the first time with Kelly and Christian. It wasn't a shock cause she looked weird or unusual or anything else, it was a shock cause she looked almost like her father, good ol' Thomas Dothy. For the first moment I thought it was him but smaller and with longer hair. And well, with a woman's body obviously.

I missed Dothy a lot actually. He was a really great guy and an engineer. We had a really good contact and we worked together perfectly. Of course, we couldn't win every race and sometimes there were problems and DNFs, but I enjoyed every part of working with him and listening to his tips and advices how to improve the times and results.

I remembered one day especially when we had a talk with him about quitting the job due to his health. He told only us and his wife about it and wanted to keep it as a secret even though we all were telling him that hiding things from his own daughter was a really bad idea. But he didn't want to listen, the same old stubborn Dothy.

The talk was about making his daughter step into his position when his time would come. He wanted to surprise her for her birthday and give her "the best present she could ever get for her 23th birthday" as he said many times. Red Bull had mixed opinions about that, but after many hours of convincing the team and reassuring she would learn everything she would need to work and her having done the degree at the college, the team agreed.

The news about his so early death crushed the team a lot. It happened after Chinese GP when we were back in the UK, in Milton. One morning, it was 1st of May, we went to the factory to start working on improvements after China and not too great results and we got a message from Christian, that he was rushed to the hospital in the middle of a night. Sadly he couldn't make it and he died the same day in the night. Patricia and Johanna managed to fly to the UK few hours before he passed away. Christian was there also to say goodbye and thanks from the team.

The funeral took place the week after. Since it was literally a day before Spanish GP, only few of us could fly there. Christian and Thomas' mechanics friends were there. They didn't t say a lot what happened there and it was quite logical why - they didn't want us to do bad on the weekend. I was 3rd there and I dedicated the race to him and his family.

She had the exactly same eyes as him, the same shade of blue. But there was actually a difference between her colour and her father's - her blue was slightly dull, like she was tired. And well, the dark circles under those eyes were visible as hell.

Her looking tired was quite worrying. Besides those really dark circles under the eyes, you could also see how pale she looked. She looked like she hadn't slept in a long time and after her confirming that she had slept 2 hours the last night, I got quite concerned about it. But it was pretty common for people to sometimes have night like these, so I tried to act calm and think of it that way.

But even if she looked like her father, there was one thing that was different. She was skinny as hell. Even though she was wearing skinny black jeans, a loose buttoned up shirt and a cardigan, you could see she was seriously thin. Maybe not like unhealthy thin, but really really thin. In general she was quite small, as her father, but by being that skinny, she was looking even smaller and more fragile.

I noticed also her face expression when I touched the topic of her father. You could see that her muscles tensed and the colour of her face dropped each time I mentioned him. Especially it was visible when I hugged her and told her he would've been proud of her, which was true. She really tensed up then and she started to act weird, little awkward. I found her reactions to her father really strange, but at the same time there was no way for me to blame her cause the topic was probably still fresh and harsh for her.