And this was why I didn’t feel too bad about calling it quits at the end of next season. This wasn’t a result of age or lassitude. I didn’t think I would ever grow tired of racing. But I wanted to spend more time with my seven-year-old daughter, Alexa. She wasn’t my biological child. Elizaveta and I tried to conceive for a while but eventually discovered we were infertile. That’s when Elizaveta suggested adopting a foreign-born child, specifically one from Russia. This was not for nationalistic reasons. She simply knew what the conditions were like in Russian orphanages, and she wanted to give a Russian child the life and opportunities that had never been afforded to her.

So we went through the long adoption process, visited Moscow twice, and finally brought home Alexa two years ago—and she was proving to be everything we could have asked for and more.

I finished the LA Times story I was reading about the Clippers owner heckling his own player from his courtside seats, then looked away from the newspaper to give my eyes a break. The Starbucks had emptied out a little in the hour or so I’d been there. Across the café an attractive woman dressed in a pastel sweater, metallic mini skirt, and sneakers was seated at a round table, staring at me. I lowered my eyes to the paper again. I wasn’t Nic Cage or anything. A race car driver was like the drummer in a rock ’n’ roll band: people might know your name, but not your face, and you could walk down the street in complete anonymity. Having said that, every so often someone recognized you. It’s happened to me on several occasions off the track, or away from the typical driver hangouts, and I always loathed it. Not that I minded signing an autograph. But when other people saw me doing this, they came over too. They’d ask me what movie I was in or something along those lines, I’d tell them I raced cars, and more often than not they’d be suitably unimpressed and wander off, cracking a joke or mumbling a derogatory remark to their friend.

I scanned the NBA and NHL standings, but couldn’t concentrate. I had a feeling the woman was still staring at me, so I looked up, and sure enough she was, only now her lips had curled into a playful smirk.

I was wondering if I should continue to ignore her, or get up and leave, when the front door opened and Elizaveta strolled inside. She would be turning forty in February, but she looked ten years younger. She saw me and waved. I waved back. She came over and sat down, setting her leather jacket and shopping bags on the chair next to her.

“What did you buy?” I asked her.

“Christmas presents,” she said, pushing her sunglasses up her forehead.