Archive of Our Own

The ring lived in a sock.

Not in the velvet box it came in, that was too dangerous, too obviously a thing, the kind of object Oscar would clock from across a room with one flat glance and ask about in his terrible, can't-let-anything-go way. So Lando had taken the box out of his jacket on the first morning on the island, looked at it for a long time on the edge of the hotel bed, and then buried the ring inside a rolled-up sport sock at the very bottom of his suitcase, under the loud pink shirt, the swim shorts he'd packed and would never put on and a second pair of trainers he had absolutely no reason to bring.

It had seemed clever at the time. He'd had a window for it, too; that first morning Oscar had still been dead asleep when Lando crept out of bed, sprawled on his front with one arm flung over the pillow Lando had vacated, hair messy against the white linen, the sheet pooled low around his hips, looking — as he always did first thing, before the day got its hands on him — soft and warm and unguarded in a way he never quite let himself be once he was awake and aware of being looked at.

Lando had stood there a moment too long with the ring box in his hand, just looking, before he made himself get on with it. There'd be time for that later. There'd be time for everything later, once this was sorted.

It seemed considerably less clever now, with Olivia standing in the doorway of the hotel bedroom in nothing but a damp swimsuit and a sunhat two sizes too big, watching him excavate the suitcase like her father was burying a body in it.

"Daddy," she said. "Why are you doing that to your sock?"

Lando's whole spine went rigid. He turned around very slowly — the way a person turns when a wasp has landed on the back of their neck and any sudden movement might be fatal.

"Where's your mum?"

"Shower." Olivia padded into the room on small bare feet, leaving little damp prints on the tile, the oversized sunhat sliding down over one eye so she had to tip her head back to see him properly. She was five and three-quarters — she informed everyone of the three-quarters, unprompted, several times a day — with a riot of dark curls that no clip, hair tie, or act of God had ever successfully tamed, currently scraped half into two stubby bunches that had already half-escaped, and Oscar's flat, deeply unimpressed stare, which she deployed on her father now with terrifying precision.

"What's in the sock."

It was not a question. Olivia rarely asked questions. 

Lando glanced at the bathroom door. He could hear the shower running, and under it, Oscar humming something tuneless and cheerful, the unselfconscious humming of a man who had won a World Championship eleven days ago and still hadn't quite come back down to earth.

He crouched to Olivia's height. This was a tactical error he would come to deeply regret, though he didn't know that yet.

"Okay," he whispered. "Can you keep a secret?"

Her eyes went enormous. Properly enormous, Piastri-enormous, the exact same wide unblinking stare her mother gave the stewards after a contentious penalty. "Yes."

"A really big one. The biggest one."

"Yes."

He should have stopped there. Any sane parent would have stopped there. But Lando had been carrying this thing around for four months now — had bought the ring back in October, before the title was even mathematically locked up, which the omega would have called insane and presumptuous and you're jinxing it, you absolute idiot — he had no one on this island to tell, and his daughter was standing there in her too-big sunhat with her hands clasped under her chin like she was about to receive Communion, and he was, frankly, going to burst if he didn't tell someone.

He got the sock out. He unrolled it carefully and the ring sat in his palm: plain, gold, one small modest stone, because Oscar hated anything flashy and would have personally thrown a flashy one into the sea on principle.

Olivia stopped breathing.

"It's a ring," Lando whispered. "For Mama."

"For Mama," she breathed back.

"I'm going to ask him to marry me. Here. This week. And it has to be a surprise, so he doesn't know, so it's special. Do you understand?"

Olivia nodded so hard a curl fell across her eye. She did not, in fact, fully understand but she understood the crucial parts: Daddy had given her a Job, the Job was Important, and she was being trusted with something Mama himself was not allowed to have. Power flooded through her small body like warm milk.

"I can keep it," she said solemnly, drawing herself up to her full, considerable height of about three feet. "I'm five."

"You're so good," Lando said, and meant it with his whole heart. He rolled the ring back into the sock, buried it under the trainers again, and felt — for one beautiful, doomed moment — like he had everything completely under control.

The shower shut off.

"Right," he said, standing, brushing the knees of his shorts. "So we don't say anything. Not a word. Especially not to —"

The bathroom door opened and Oscar came out in a towel slung low around his hips, hair dripping dark against his shoulders, droplets catching the morning light, the championship glow still sitting on him like a second tan — not that he had much of a tan to begin with. He stopped when he saw the two of them frozen by the open suitcase.

"What."

"Nothing," said Lando.

"NOTHING," said Olivia, far too loudly, and then turned and walked directly into the doorframe with a soft, dignity-shattering bonk.

Oscar looked at his daughter peeling herself off the doorframe, rubbing her forehead, sunhat askew. He looked at Lando, who had arranged his face into something he sincerely believed passed for casual. It did not. Oscar's eyes narrowed, that small line appearing between his brows.

"You two are being weird."

"We're on holiday," Lando said, far too breezily. "Weird's the vibe."

Oscar made a noise that meant he was choosing — for now — to let it go, and padded off toward the wardrobe, towel dripping a trail of damp footprints across the tile. The second his back was turned, Olivia caught Lando's eye across the room and put one finger to her lips.

Lando smiled at her, weak with terror and love in equal measure.

The trouble started, in earnest, within the hour. Because Olivia did not possess a setting between no information and total commitment, and having been entrusted with a Secret, she immediately began behaving like a child with a Secret in every conceivable way except the one that mattered, which was keeping it.

She would not look at Oscar directly over breakfast, even when he asked for the jam. She slid it across the table without making eye contact, like a spy at a dead drop, and said, in a strangled little monotone, "Here is the jam. The jam, mama. Nothing else." She took to standing guard outside the bedroom whenever Lando went in alone. Arms folded, chin jutting, glaring down the corridor at absolutely nothing. When Oscar observed, mildly, that she was being a funny little thing this morning, she went rigid and announced, at volume, "I'm being NORMAL MAMA."

"Lan, she's been weird since we landed," Oscar said in the lift, with Olivia standing rigidly between them, facing the doors like a tiny bodyguard.

"Jetlag," said Lando.

"It's a two-hour flight from Sydney."

"It hit her hard."

Oscar looked down at his daughter. Olivia stared at the lift doors with the unblinking focus of a sniper awaiting a target.

"You good, possum?"

"I'm guarding," said Olivia and then, realising, clapped both hands over her own mouth.

"Guarding what?"

"The lift," Olivia said through her fingers, muffled, eyes huge over the top of her hands. "Lifts are dangerous."

Lando developed a small, persistent eye twitch for the rest of the day.

He had a quiet word with her that afternoon, crouched at the edge of the pool while Oscar swam slow, easy laps at the far end, the late sun turning the water to hammered gold. You don't have to guard anything, Liv. You don't have to do anything at all. Just keep being normal. The way to keep a secret is to act like there's no secret. Olivia had nodded, her small face screwed up in furious concentration and then immediately marched over to Oscar as he hauled himself out of the pool, water sluicing off him, and announced, "Mama. I have no secrets. I'm not guarding ANY lifts."

Lando had had to lie down on a sun lounger and put a towel over his face.

The week hadn't even properly started.

i.

The first night they ate at the restaurant on the hill. The one with the long timber deck that stretched out over black water. Oscar held a menu he had spent five minutes flicking through with studied indifference before ordering nearly everything on it. The whole island smelled of salt, frangipani and someone else's sunscreen. December at home in Monaco meant grey skies and the apartment heating cranked too high; here it was high Queensland summer, the air thick and gold as honey, the cicadas going off in the dark like a wall of static that never let up for anyone.

Oscar had been recognised twice on the walk up the hill. A bloke in a violently floral Hawaiian shirt had pumped his hand and said what a season, mate, what a bloody season, and Oscar had gone faintly, helplessly pink, mumbled his thanks, and steered them on with one hand resting at the back of Olivia's neck. He still didn't quite know what to do with it: the recognition, the warmth, proper home hero written all over strangers' faces. Lando watched him not know what to do with it and felt something enormous swell up under his ribs, something that felt a lot like pride and a little like grief, complicated the way good things sometimes are.

He was going to ask this man to marry him. He'd decided that back in October. The island was just the venue.

Olivia had dressed herself for dinner in a yellow sundress printed with little white daisies, the hem still slightly damp from where she'd insisted on one last paddle in the hotel fountain on the way out, her dark curls pulled into two lopsided plaits that Oscar had attempted and Lando had "fixed," which mostly meant making them lopsided in a different direction. She had Biscuit tucked under one arm — her ancient, one-eyed, distinctly grey stuffed koala, who had technically not been invited to dinner but had come anyway, as he always did — and a pair of light-up sandals that flashed pink with every step, which she stamped extra hard on the way to the table to make them flash more.

They got a table at the railing. Olivia immediately knelt up on her chair, sandals abandoned on the deck beneath her, to stare down at the water going dark below. She ignored the paper colouring sheet the waiter had brought, because colouring sheets were for babies, and she was, again, five and three-quarters.

Oscar had dressed up for dinner too, a soft linen shirt, pale and a little too big, sleeves pushed up to the elbow, open over a white t-shirt, the kind of thing that looked like he'd grabbed it without thinking and somehow ended up looking effortlessly, infuriatingly good anyway. His hair had dried wild from the pool earlier and he hadn't bothered to do anything about it, just pushed it back off his face with one hand. The candlelight from the table caught the side of his face while he frowned thoughtfully down at the menu, and Lando looked at him. Really looked, and thought, not for the first time that week, that he was possibly the luckiest idiot on the entire continent.

"Sit on your bum, possum," Oscar said, without looking up from the menu.

"I'm looking."

"You can look with your bum down."

She sat — briefly — and then leaned bodily across the table toward Oscar, vibrating with electric energy. Lando felt the temperature in his own chest drop about ten degrees, because he knew that lean. That was the lean of an Olivia about to detonate.

"Mama," Olivia said.

"Mm."

"We're not giving you anything."

Oscar lowered the menu a couple of inches. "Okay baby."

"For no reason." She nodded gravely. "There's no thing."

"Right."

"In Daddy's sock."

Lando's hand found his water glass with catastrophic precision and knocked it flying.

It went everywhere, across the table, into the bread basket, a cold splash down Oscar's lap that made him jerk back swearing softly under his breath. But in the lovely chaos of three people and a waiter all lunging for napkins at once, the words ‘in Daddy's sock’ dissolved into the general noise of the evening and were gone, unremarked, unheard. Lando apologised roughly nine times. He was, privately, deeply grateful to that glass. He would have knocked over ten of them.

"You're a menace," Oscar told him, mopping at his cotton shorts with a fistful of napkins.

"I'm clumsy. There's a difference."

"There really isn't."

"Oi there's a huge difference," Lando said, leaning in with the smugness of a man who knew he was wrong and didn't care. "Clumsy is an accident. Menace implies intent. I had no intent, I am a victim of my own beautiful, uncoordinated body."

"Your beautiful uncoordinated body just assaulted my lap with iced water."

"And yet," Lando said, "you're still here."

"Regrettably," said Oscar, but the corner of his mouth was doing the thing it did, the thing it had been doing for years whenever Lando talked nonsense at him with a straight face, and Lando counted that as a win. Man, he was beautiful.

When the table was dry again, the waiter had gone and Olivia had gone back to staring at the black water as though she personally held it accountable, Oscar looked at his daughter for a long moment over the rim of his wine glass.

"What's in your dad's sock, then?"

Olivia and Lando froze.

The cicadas, mercifully, did not freeze, and went on screaming in the dark.

"A foot," Olivia said.

A silence.

Then Oscar laughed: surprised out of him, the real one, the one that cracked his flat deadpan wide open and let the boy underneath show through, the one Lando had fallen for in a paddock a thousand years ago and never quite stopped falling for since. "A foot," he repeated. "Good. Glad we sorted that."

"Daddy has feet," Olivia confirmed, deadly serious, and reached for a chip.

"He does have feet," Oscar agreed. "Two of them, last I counted."

"And one of them's in a sock."

"Both of them are usually in socks, possum, that's how socks work."

"This one's special," said Olivia, and Lando's hand twitched toward his water glass again before he forced it flat against the table. Oscar watched the twitch with the faint, fond attention of a man cataloguing evidence and quietly filing it away for later.

Under the table, Lando found his daughter's free hand and gave it one small squeeze. Stop. Stop talking about socks. She squeezed back, palm sweaty.

And then Oscar's foot found his under the table — not purposeful exactly, just the easy drift of someone who had been finding him in small ways for years — and rested there, warm and solid. Under the table, in the dark between their chairs, Lando found Oscar's hand and Oscar's small hand found his. Oscar's thumb moved once across Lando's knuckles. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.

Oscar watched the two of them have their silent little exchange with Olivia and said nothing. The line between his eyebrows came back, faint.

Lando ordered another round of chips. Distraction by carbohydrate. It was, he reflected, his entire parenting strategy in a nutshell, and it had never once failed him.

It would not be enough. It was only the first night.

ii.

Whitehaven Beach did the thing it did to everyone, which was make Oscar go quiet.

They'd taken the boat out in the morning — the three of them, a cooler, and an unreasonable quantity of sun cream — and now Oscar stood at the edge of the water with Olivia on his hip, even though she was getting far too big and long-legged to be carried, looking out at the sand. It was the kind of white that didn't look real, the kind that squeaked underfoot, curving away round the headland into water so clear the boats anchored offshore looked like they were floating on glass rather than sitting in it. Oscar had grown up a three hours' flight from here and had still never seen it. Lando could tell from the back, from the set of his broad shoulders, that it had got him properly.

Olivia, riding on Oscar's hip, had on a little swimsuit the colour of a ripe peach, with a frill running round the bottom like a tutu, and an enormous floppy sunhat that kept sliding down over her eyes. Zinc stripes — white, slightly smudged — ran across both her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, applied by Oscar with far more enthusiasm than precision. She looked, with her dark curls escaping in damp ringlets around the hat's brim and her round cheeks already going pink despite all of it, exactly like what she was: a small, thoroughly loved creature, entirely unbothered by her own ridiculousness.

"S'good, isn't it," Oscar said, once Lando had stepped back to his side.

"It's alright, mate."

"It's good. Better than anything in England."

Lando came up behind him and wrapped both arms around his slim waist, chin finding the curve of his shoulder. He felt Oscar exhale — one long, slow breath — and lean back into it, just slightly, the way he only ever did when he'd forgotten to hold himself together. They stood like that a moment, Oscar and Olivia both staring out at the impossible water, Lando's arms around the pair of them.

"Alright," Lando said, into the back of his neck. "It's mint."

"Yup," Oscar agreed with a shiver, turning into his arms.

Olivia, wedged between them, looked from one to the other and then put her little zinc-striped head down on Oscar's shoulder, a dark curl stuck to her cheek with sweat and salt. She'd been clamped to Oscar all morning; got like this on holidays, when the routine fell away and there was nothing left to do but be near him, mama's girl that she was, had always been, since before she could walk. She'd cried for an hour the first time Oscar flew off to a test without her. She'd been eighteen months old. Oscar had never quite recovered from it and, Lando suspected, didn't particularly want to.

"Put me down," Olivia announced, having finally decided.

Oscar set her down on the squeaking sand. She immediately grabbed two fistfuls of it and held them up for inspection, the frill of her swimsuit bouncing.

"We should build something," Lando said. "Sandcastle. World's worst sandcastle."

"World's best," Olivia corrected, scandalised, planting her sandy fists on her hips.

They built the world's worst sandcastle. Oscar supervised from a towel with his sunglasses pushed up into his damp hair and his hat tipped down over his eyes, looking — Lando thought, glancing over more than was strictly necessary — completely indecent in a pair of board shorts and absolutely nothing else, all pale skin and loose-limbed pleased with the world. Lando dug, and Olivia patted, and the castle collapsed twice and on the third attempt achieved a kind of lopsided, leaning dignity that Olivia declared, generously, to be a palace.

She found a stick. She found a shell. She built up a whole ceremony in her head, narrating a story only she could fully see, and Lando half-listened the way tired fathers half-listen until something in the narration snagged his attention.

"— and then they get married," Olivia was saying, marching the shell solemnly up the slope of the castle, "and Mama wears the —"

Lando's hand shot out and flattened the entire castle in one motion.

"Daddy!"

"Earthquake," Lando screamed with alarm, like he was reporting genuine seismic activity. "Sorry. Couldn't stop it. Tectonic."

"You did it with your HAND."

"Daddy's big hand caused the earthquake. Geologists are baffled."

Olivia looked at the ruins of her castle and her lip began to do the thing — the wobble, the slow tragic curl — and Lando felt like the worst man alive for approximately four seconds, until Oscar sat up on the towel, sunglasses sliding down his nose, and said, lazily, "Liv. Look! You can do a mountain now. It's better wrecked. Trust me."

She considered this with enormous seriousness. She trusted Mama on most things. Mollified, she began building a sand mound, and the dangerous sentence about who wore what at whoever's wedding sank without trace into the rubble.

Oscar lay back down. From under the hat, eyes closed: "What was she saying?"

"Hm?"

"Before you nuked it."

"Something about a princess. Couldn't follow it. She's got a whole saga going."

"Mm." A pause. The hat didn't move. "You've got sand on the ring."

Lando's heart stopped dead.

"— finger," Oscar finished. "Sand on your ring finger. You're rubbing it. You keep doing it."

Lando looked down. He was, in fact, rubbing the base of his bare ring finger with his thumb. A habit he hadn't even noticed he'd picked up, weeks old now, ever since the box had first arrived in the post. He stopped immediately and pressed his hand flat against his own knee, like it had betrayed him to the enemy.

"Habit," he said.

"Weird habit."

"I'm a weird guy. You like it, Mr Heart Eyes."

Their oldest joke, worn smooth with use — and saying it here, on this stupid, perfect, impossible beach, with their daughter six feet away, made Lando want to do it right then. No ring. No plan. Just roll over and ask him, with sand in his hair and salt on his mouth and the whole sky going on forever overhead.

He didn't. He had a plan. The plan was good. He was going to stick to the plan.

He looked at Olivia instead, who had paused to watch the two of them, sensing — without understanding — that something was happening, her small face caught somewhere between her princess saga and her secret. He winked at her. She pressed one sandy finger to her sandy lips, eyes shining.

A cloud went over.

Two down, Lando thought with relief. Five days to go.

iii.

Hamilton Island had a wildlife sanctuary — a little pocket of bush near the resort where you could see the animals up close — and Olivia had been promised it since the moment they'd touched down on Australian soil, and would not, under any circumstances, be denied it. She wanted, specifically, to see a koala. She had a koala, a deeply loved one who had now been to four continents and lost an eye somewhere in Singapore. She wanted Biscuit to meet a real one.

"For comparison," she explained on the path, holding Biscuit up at eye level so he could take in the scenery. She had dressed herself again that morning, a small green t-shirt with a cartoon shark on it paired with denim shorts and one sock pulled up to the knee and the other one missing entirely, because Olivia had opinions about socks, clearly. And today's opinion was one. "So he knows what he is."

"Biscuit already knows what he is," Oscar said.

"He doesn't. He's never SEEN."

The real koala was, predictably, asleep; a grey lump wedged into the fork of a tree, doing its full twenty hours of nothing a day. Olivia stood beneath it, transfixed, holding Biscuit up so he could appreciate his enormous, unconscious cousin. A keeper began rattling off facts, and Oscar — Oscar, who could not be within ten feet of an expert on any subject without interrogating them to the studs — began asking an alarming number of follow-up questions. He'd done it to their paediatrician. He'd done it to their plumber. He'd once, memorably, done it to a sommelier, who'd ended up bringing out extra wine purely to make the conversation stop.

"So the twenty hours," Oscar was saying, leaning in, genuinely fascinated. "That's a metabolism thing, yeah? Eucalyptus is low-energy, so they conserve —"

"That's exactly right," the keeper said, visibly delighted, and entirely unaware of what she had just unleashed.

"And the toxins — how do they process those, is that a gut bacteria thing, or —"

"Mama, do you know —" Olivia tried.

"One sec, possum. Sorry — gut bacteria?"

"It's actually a great question —"

Lando had seen this before. Oscar could hold a person hostage on the subject of marsupial digestion for forty minutes without breaking a sweat. It was, frankly, the perfect cover. Lando would have been grateful for it, if it hadn't meant his daughter was now entirely unsupervised with a head full of boredom and a mouth full of secrets.

While Oscar was deep in the gut flora of Phascolarctos cinereus, Olivia drifted. Lando saw it happen almost in slow motion and could do nothing to stop it: she fished a packet of crackers out of the omega's bag, wandered ten feet to a low railing, propped Biscuit up beside her, and began to fill her stuffed koala in on current events.

"— so Daddy's got a ring," she was telling Biscuit, "and it's gold, and it's in the sock, and we can't tell Mama because it's a SECRET, and when he gives it to Mama then they're gonna get —"

A cockatoo landed on the railing beside Biscuit.

It was an enormous bird, white and sulphur-crested, without fear of anything. It regarded Biscuit with one flat, reptilian eye — and then, with the casual, magnificent evil of its entire species, plucked the cracker straight out of Olivia's other hand.

Olivia screamed.

It was a tremendous scream: a full-throated, five-year-old scream of betrayal and it brought Oscar across the path at a dead sprint. It also brought a keeper sprinting to scatter the cockatoo back into the trees, cracker and all, and in the marvellous bedlam of it all — Olivia weeping into Oscar's neck about her stolen cracker, Oscar holding her tight and murmuring I know, I know, baby, birds are like that, they're basically criminals — the secret evaporated, half-told, into the hot green air, and nobody but Lando had heard the end of the sentence.

Nobody but Lando, and Biscuit who, unlike his small owner, kept his secrets perfectly.

A thankful Lando retrieved Biscuit from the railing. He also retrieved his own heartbeat from somewhere around his collarbone. By the time Oscar had Olivia down to hiccups, Lando had rearranged his face into the picture of a father mildly concerned about a tantrum and nothing else.

"She alright?" he asked.

"Robbed," Oscar said. "In broad daylight. Weren't you, possum. Robbed by a bird — just like the seagulls back home."

"He took it," Olivia sobbed.

"He took it and I was — I was just talking to Biscuit —"

"You were telling Biscuit a secret," Oscar said seriously.

Lando died on his feet.

"— No," Olivia screamed.

Oscar pulled back to look at her properly. She'd gone from devastated to defensive in half a second, eyes suddenly bone-dry and very wide, fixed on his. Lando recognised it instantly. It was Oscar's own press-conference face, I have nothing further to add, transplanted directly onto a five-year-old and somehow even less convincing there.

"You were," Oscar said slowly. "I heard you. Secret this, secret that."

"It's BISCUIT'S secret," Olivia said indignant. "Not mine. I can't tell you Biscuit's secrets. That's PRIVATE."

Oscar stared at his daughter. Lando could see him weighing whether to push — could see the easy, championship-week looseness still in him wrestling with the part of him that noticed everything and let nothing go — and could see, with a relief that left him weak at the knees, the looseness win.

Oscar was too happy these days to interrogate a stuffed koala over the head of his own daughter. He kissed the top of her curls.

"Fair enough," he said. "Biscuit's allowed his privacy."

"Thank you mama," said Olivia, snatching Biscuit back and clutching him to her chest, and then she shot Lando one wide, panicked, triumphant look over Oscar's shoulder. Did I do it, Daddy? Did I save it?

Lando gave her the smallest nod in the world.

She'd saved it. Barely. The third time.

But she was starting to crack. He could see it. The secret was too big for her — and honestly, it was too big for him too. And was thirty-two with a fully developed prefrontal cortex; she was five and three-quarters and ran almost entirely on feelings, sugar, and devotion to Oscar. The longer he waited, the worse the odds got.

He should move the plan up. But the plan was Whitehaven, at sunset, on the very last night. It was perfect, the kind of thing Oscar would loudly call far too sappy and then secretly keep a photo of forever. Lando wanted to give him that. He wanted to give him the perfect thing.

He decided to give it one more day.

In hindsight, it was one day too many.

iv.

The fourth time was the pool, and it was the worst one. It was also — though he didn't know it — entirely Oscar's own fault.

It was the hot, slow middle of the afternoon. They'd done the morning hard: the lagoon, the kids' area, lunch out on the boat and now they were in the shallows of their resort's pool, all three of them.

Olivia was draped over Oscar's shoulders like a small, damp, sun-warmed scarf, refusing with her entire body to be put down, because the launching games had ended and proximity was the next best thing. She still had her swim goggles pushed up into her wet curls, the elastic leaving a faint pink line across her forehead, and her little rash vest had ridden halfway up her back, exposing a stripe of sun-warmed skin that Oscar kept absently tugging back down without seeming to notice he was doing it.

"You're a barnacle," Oscar told her.

"I'm a koala," Olivia said, and tightened her grip around his neck.

Lando floated nearby on his back, eyes closed, sun warm on his face, listening to the two of them and thinking — as he had been thinking, on a loop, all week, like a song stuck on repeat — about the speech. He had a speech. He'd written it on his phone back in October, rewritten it in November, deleted the whole thing in a panic in the first week of December, and rewritten it again on the jet somewhere over the Pacific at two in the morning, crying quietly into his own elbow while Oscar slept beside him with his mouth open and Olivia across both their laps.

The speech was about the day Oscar had become his teammate. And the day Oscar had turned up at his door three months pregnant and absolutely terrified. It was about shoes lined up neatly at the entryway and Oscar sharing his tremendously sweet morning hot chocolate with their daughter. It was good, made him cry a little every time he read it, which he took, privately, as a sign of quality.

"Daddy," Olivia said.

"Mm."

"What's a fee-on-say."

Lando's eyes snapped open. He came off his back so fast he swallowed half a mouthful of pool water.

He'd left a book by the bed: a slim, glossy wedding-planning book, Two Happy Grooms, One Perfect Day, which he'd been reading in secret in the bathroom like contraband. He'd left it face-up on the side table, because of course he had, and of course she'd seen the cover. The brain of a five-year-old is a sponge that absorbs the words you least want it to.

"Where," he said, choking on chlorine, "did you hear that word?"

"In the —"

"DON'T —"

"— swimming pool," Olivia finished — and it didn't really make sense but Lando realised, with a rush of pure parental awe, that she'd caught herself mid-sentence and rerouted in real time. His clever girl. His terrifying clever girl. He could have wept with pride right there.

Oscar, of course, had turned around in the water — barnacle still firmly attached to his back — and was looking at Lando with open suspicion.

"A fiancé," Oscar said slowly, "is when two people are going to get married. Why?"

Oh no.

"No reason," said Olivia.

"You don't say words for no reason," said Oscar, who had raised her.

"I do," Olivia said, with great dignity. "I say lots of words for no reason. Daddy says I never stop."

She turned to Lando. "Don't you, Daddy?"

"She never stops," Lando confirmed, weakly.

Oscar looked between the two of them. Olivia on his back had gone very still, and stillness — true, total stillness — was such an unnatural state for his daughter that it was, in itself, evidence. He could feel her tension transmitting straight through his own shoulders, like a tuning fork. He turned his head, trying to see her face.

"Liv," he said.

"What."

"Is there something you want to tell me?"

And this — this — was the closest it came, the whole week. Closer than the restaurant. Closer than the beach. Closer than the fucking bird. Because Olivia was clamped to her mother's back with her arms locked around his neck and her cheek pressed to his wet hair, and her whole small heart was probably straining at the seams with the size of the thing she'd been carrying — the gold ring, the sock, Daddy crying when he read his phone in the bathroom.

And her mama, her favourite person in the entire created world, was asking her directly, in his kindest voice, if there was something she wanted to tell him and she wanted to. God, she wanted to. She wanted to hand it over right now like a present, gift-wrapped, with a bow on it.

Her mouth opened.

"I —"

"WHO WANTS ICE CREAM," Lando bellowed, surging up out of the shallow end like a creature emerging from a swamp, sending a wall of displaced water sloshing across the pool in every direction. "Ice cream. Now. Immediately. I'm buying. C'mon, Liv. Ice cream. What flavour."

It was not subtle. It was, in fact, the least subtle thing he had ever done in his life, and he had once driven a forklift into the back of the team's hospitality unit on live television. But it worked — because the only force in the known universe more powerful than Olivia's love for her mother was Olivia's love for ice cream. 

She detached from Oscar's back like a missile leaving a silo and swam for the steps yelling BUBBLEGUM, BUBBLEGUM, THE BLUE ONE at a volume that startled a passing waiter. The moment broke apart into noise and splashing, and Lando's heart slammed against his ribs while he hauled himself out and wrapped his shaking, delighted daughter in a towel.

Oscar stood alone in the shallow end and watched them go.

He stood there a while.

He was not a stupid man. He'd been a racing driver his entire adult life — reading a situation faster than it could develop was, in a very real sense, the whole job. There was a book on the side table Lando wouldn't let him see. There was a habit with the ring finger. There was a sock he'd been mysteriously warned away from, a daughter who'd been strange all week, and now a fiancé word she'd learned from somewhere, and an alpha who had just emptied half a swimming pool rather than let their daughter finish one single sentence.

He did the maths. It wasn't hard. It came out the same way every time.

He didn't say anything. He climbed out of the pool, dried off, ate half a bubblegum ice cream he was given without asking, watched Lando be an absolute wreck for the rest of the afternoon — jumpy, overly bright, laughing at things that weren't funny — and felt something warm and enormous open up quietly in his own chest, something he had absolutely no intention of letting show on his face.

He'd let him have it. He'd act surprised. It was the very least he could do.

He was, Oscar thought, going to say yes so fast it would give Lando whiplash.

v.

The night before the last night, Olivia would not sleep.

This was not unusual. This was, in fact, the established baseline state of Olivia on holiday: overtired, overstimulated, full of sun and sugar. Constitutionally unwilling, under any circumstances, to be alone in a dark room while her mother existed somewhere else in the world and was not currently holding her. 

They had tried, over the years, all the things. The gradual retreat. The chair moving a foot closer to the door each night. The firm and loving boundary, calmly and consistently enforced. None of it had ever survived contact with her, who simply outlasted every adult in the building through sheer, immovable devotion, and ended up — every single time — in the big bed between them, a starfish, a furnace, an object that could not be moved by any known force.

Tonight she was, technically, in her own bed in the little adjoining room. She had been out three times already — once for water, once because Biscuit was "scared," once for no stated reason whatsoever — and now Oscar had abandoned all pretence and was lying on top of the covers in the dark, on his back, in an old cream satin pyjamas set, with Olivia tucked into his side, her cheek on his chest, and his arm curled loosely around her. She'd changed into pyjamas covered in tiny cartoon stars, the sleeves too long so only her fingertips peeked out, and her two stubborn plaits had come almost entirely undone, leaving her hair a soft dark cloud against Oscar's shoulder. One small bare foot stuck out from under the covers, toes curling and uncurling slowly as she fought sleep.

She had her hand fisted in the front of his camisole — she always did this, had done it since she was small enough to fit in the crook of one arm — found a fistful of him and held on, an anchor against the dark, against sleep, against the small, unbearable possibility that he might somehow get up and cease to exist while she wasn't looking. Oscar had given up trying to unpeel that hand. He just let her hold on. He'd told Lando once, embarrassed, half-asleep himself, that he liked it — that he'd miss it when she stopped, the way he missed everything she'd already stopped doing — and then he'd said don't tell anyone I said that or I'll kill you, and Lando never had, not once.

Lando stood in the doorway with the light from the other room spilling in gold behind him, and he didn't breathe a word. This was the whole thing, he thought, right here — the reason for the speech he'd rewritten four times on three continents. This. The two of them, tangled together in lamplight. He'd have torched every championship trophy in the world to keep this exact picture.

"You should sleep, possum," Oscar murmured.

"I'm not tired."

"You're so tired. You're the tiredest person on the island."

"You're the tiredest person on the island."

"I really am," Oscar agreed gravely. "Champion of being tired."

Olivia giggled into his ribs, a small breathless huff of a laugh. Then she went quiet, her breathing slowing, her grip on Biscuit going slack, his one remaining eye staring blankly at the ceiling.

Lando waited in the doorway.

And then, in the soft, drifting voice of someone speaking from the very edge of sleep, Olivia said:

"Mama."

"Mm."

"Tomorrow's gonna be the best day."

"Yeah? Why's that, baby."

A long pause. Lando's blood turned to ice in the doorway. No. No no no. Not now. Not half-asleep.

"Because," Olivia mumbled, "Daddy's gonna —"

"— take you on the boat," Lando said, stepping into the room, keeping his voice as soft and even as he could make it. "Remember, Liv? The big boat tomorrow. The one with the glass bottom. You can see all the fish through the floor."

"Fish through the floor," Olivia echoed dreamily, already gone, the sentence she'd been about to finish dissolving harmlessly into fish and floors and sleep.

"Sleep now, you pest," Lando said softly.

She slept.

Oscar lay very still in the dark with his daughter's weight warm against his side and her curls tickling his chin. He didn't open his eyes. He didn't say anything for a long moment.

"Boat tomorrow, is it," he said, finally. Very quiet.

"Glass-bottom boat. Booked it ages ago." This part, at least, was entirely true. Lando had booked it weeks ago, mostly as cover.

"Mm." Oscar's mouth did something that was almost a smile, and he was glad of the dark, glad Lando couldn't see it. "Liv said it’s gonna be the best day."

"Fuck's sake, she's five, Osc. Every day's the best day."

"Right." A beat. "'Course."

Lando came over and crouched by the bed and, very gently, so as not to wake her, brushed a stray curl off his daughter's sleeping face. Then he looked up — and Oscar was watching him, eyes open now, just barely, a glint catching the low lamplight — and for one long second the two of them simply looked at each other over the top of their sleeping child. Something enormous moved through Lando's chest.

"What," Lando whispered.

"Nothing." Oscar's voice was barely a breath. "You're being weird this week. That's all."

"We're on holiday. Weird's the —"

"— vibe. Yeah. So you said." Oscar closed his eyes again, but his mouth curved, soft in the dark. "Go to bed, Lando."

Lando went to bed.

He lay awake a long time, listening through the wall to the small sounds of his family sleeping — Oscar's slow, even breathing, the occasional sleepy mutter from Olivia, the cicadas finally, gradually winding down outside. Tomorrow. Whitehaven, at sunset. He had it all planned out, every beat of it: the boat in the afternoon to wear Liv out, then the headland at golden hour, then the speech, then the ring — he'd move it from the sock to his pocket first thing in the morning — then down on one knee in the white sand with the water turning pink behind them.

It was going to be perfect.

It was going to be much, much better than perfect.

The only person on the island who fully understood what was coming was his five years old daughter, asleep, with a one-eyed koala in a headlock who against all odds and all reasonable expectation, successfully held the biggest secret of her short life for six entire days.

She barely had one day left in her.

+1.

The plan died at four o'clock the next afternoon, when the sky over the Whitsundays turned the colour of a bruise and the wind came up off the water in long cold gusts. The boat's captain looked at the horizon with the great unbothered calm only an Australian can summon and said, "Yeah, nah. That's coming in. We'll head back."

Lando stood at the rail of the boat and watched his perfect sunset recede ungently.

"It's fine," Oscar said, beside him, hair already whipping in the wind. "We'll get burgers."

"It's not… I wanted —" Lando stopped. "I wanted the beach tonight."

"Beach'll be there tomorrow."

"We fly tomorrow."

"Day after, then. Some other beach. There's a lot of beaches, Lan, it's Australia." Oscar looked at him sideways, and there was something careful in it, something that knew more than it was saying — but Lando was too busy quietly grieving his sunset to notice. "You alright? It's a storm. It's not the end of the world."

It felt, to Lando, very much like the end of the world.

They got back to the resort just as the first fat drops started, and ran the last stretch laughing under the rain — Olivia shrieking with joy on Oscar's hip, her little yellow raincoat completely useless against the sideways rain — and got inside just as the sky properly opened: a tropical downpour, warm and total, the kind that turns the whole world to grey static and drums on every roof at once.

They stood dripping in the room. Olivia was delighted. Olivia loved rain the way she loved everything loud and dramatic and not bedtime.

And the day went on, and the storm went on, and Lando's moment kept not arriving.

He couldn't get Oscar alone. That was the thing nobody warns you about proposing with a needy five-year-old in the room: there is no alone. There is never alone. He tried after dinner, and Olivia needed a bath. He tried after the bath, and she needed three stories and a song. He tried during the song, and she made him sing it again.

He'd very nearly done it once, around eight, in a gap.

Olivia had been splashing happily in the bath, narrating an epic to a flannel, and Oscar had wandered out onto the little balcony where Lando stood watching the rain come down in silver sheets off the eaves. He'd changed out of his wet clothes into an old Quadrant t-shirt — too big on him, soft and worn thin from years of washing, the collar gone loose — and a pair of black satin sleep shorts, hair still damp and curling slightly at the ends.

He stood there in the doorway with his arms wrapped loosely around himself against the cool air coming off the rain, looking soft and rumpled and entirely at ease in a way that made something in Lando's chest go tight and warm all at once.

For one perfect second, they were alone, properly alone, the two of them, the rain roaring softly all around. Oscar had turned to look at him — really look, the way he did sometimes when he wasn't performing anything — and stepped in close, close enough that Lando could feel the cool air still coming off him from the rain. He reached up and tucked a piece of Lando's damp hair back off his forehead, an entirely unnecessary gesture, and left his hand there just a moment against the side of his face. His thumb moved once, slow, along Lando's cheekbone. Lando had felt his hand close around the ring in his pocket, felt his heart climb straight up into his throat, and he'd opened his mouth and said —

"Oscar —"

— and from the bathroom, Olivia had bellowed, at the absolute top of her lungs, "MAMA, I'M DONE, COME LOOK HOW CLEAN," and Oscar had laughed, pressed the briefest, softest kiss to the corner of Lando's mouth — one sec, babe — and was gone. Didn't come back at all.

Lando stood on the balcony a while longer, hand still in his pocket, heart still wedged in his throat, the ghost of that touch still warm on his face. He thought: tomorrow. Some beach. Or some other day. And he knew, even as he thought it, that it was a lie. There would always be a bath, or a bird, or a storm, or a sentence cut off halfway, that the perfect clean moment he kept waiting for was never, ever going to arrive, because they didn't have a clean life. If he kept waiting for the postcard, he was going to spend the rest of his life standing on balconies with his hand in his pocket.

He still hadn't done anything about it by nine o'clock.

The storm had eased to a steady, warm hush against the windows, and Olivia was finally, finally fading, sprawled on the big bed between them in her star-printed pyjamas, Biscuit tucked under one arm, plaits long gone, hair a dark halo on the pillow.

Tomorrow they flew home. Tonight was the night. It was the only night left. And he was sitting on the end of the bed watching his daughter fight sleep, with a phone full of a speech he was apparently never going to get to give because the universe had sent a storm and one small, devoted, deeply stubborn person to stop him.

Olivia, between her parents, was not asleep.

She was pretending. She'd learned the lying-very-still trick from Oscar, but she'd never quite mastered the breathing, and Lando could tell from across the bed that she was awake, and thinking — thinking hard, her small face working in the lamplight — because something was wrong. The day had been wrong. Daddy had been sad on the boat, sad at dinner, and now he was sad on the end of the bed with his sad phone, and the secret, the big gold secret, the one she'd carried so carefully for six whole days, was supposed to fix everything, and it hadn't happened.

Daddy hadn't done it.

Olivia had been waiting all week for Daddy to do it. She'd done her job. She'd kept it from Mama. She'd kept it. It had been the hardest thing she had ever done in her entire life — harder than the time she didn't tell Nana about the broken vase, harder than anything. And now the week was nearly over, and Daddy was sad, and the ring was still in the sock — no, it wasn't, she'd watched him take it out that morning, it was in his pocket now, she'd seen the little shape of it — and Mama still didn't know, and tomorrow they were going home, and if Daddy didn't do it tonight, then all of it would have been for absolutely nothing.

To a five-year-old, this was an unbearable thought. The sheer injustice of it.

She opened her eyes.

"Daddy," she said, into the quiet room.

"Hey, possum. Sleep now. Big flight tomorrow."

"You didn't do it."

Lando went very still. Across the bed, Oscar, who had his eyes shut and was so close to sleep himself, opened them.

"Do what, baby?" Oscar said.

"Liv," said Lando — a warning, a plea, both at once.

But she was done.

The keeping had failed, the plan had failed, the grown-ups had failed, and there was a perfectly obvious solution sitting right there that none of them seemed brave enough to take — and Olivia had never once in her life been accused of a shortage of bravery.

She sat bolt upright in the bed between them, hair completely wild, Biscuit forgotten and tipping sideways off the pillow, and she looked at her father with the blazing, betrayed, take-charge fury of a child who knows if you want something done properly, you simply have to do it yourself.

"You said you were gonna ASK Mama," she announced, at full volume, to the entire room, to the storm, to the island, to the world. "You said he'd be a fee-on-say. And you didn't DO it. And now we're going home." She turned to Oscar, her voice cracking, wobbling, going enormous and wet all at once.

"Mama. Daddy has a RING. It's in his pocket. It's GOLD. He wants you to MARRY him and he's been too SCARED ALL WEEK and I KEPT IT SECRET SO LONG and he won't DO it —"

"Olivia —" Lando started, half a laugh, half a sob, his whole face on fire.

"— so sorry Daddy I'm can’t keep your secret," Olivia finished, and burst into tears.

There was a silence in the hotel room. Outside, the rain kept up its soft, steady drumming. The lamp glowed warm and gold. Olivia cried, devastated and relieved all at once. Six days of pressure released in a single instant into the space between her parents.

And Oscar — Oscar started to laugh.

Not unkindly. The real laugh, the one that cracked his deadpan wide open and let everything underneath spill out, and he scooped his sobbing daughter straight into his lap, pressing his face into her wild dark curls.

"Oh, possum. Oh. You held that the whole week? The whole week? You poor thing. You poor, poor thing." Olivia cried harder, into his chest, with total relief. Oscar looked over the top of her head at Lando while he rocked her gently.

Lando hadn't moved. He sat at the end of the bed, one hand frozen halfway to his pocket, four months of careful planning detonating in the most beautiful possible way, right in front of him.

"It was going to be the beach," Lando said. His voice didn't work properly. "There was a — I had a speech. There was meant to be a sunset. Whitehaven, the white sand, it was going to be —" He stopped. He laughed, wetly. "It was going to be perfect."

"This is better," Oscar said.

"It's a hotel room. It's raining. Our daughter just did it for me. She's crying. Baby, please stop crying."

"I know." Oscar's eyes were bright, glassy in the lamplight. He still had Olivia clamped tight against his chest, her hiccupping slowly easing. "It's so much better, Lando. I don't care about the fuc— white sand."

And Lando looked at the two of them.

Oscar was right; white sand and a pink sky would have made a beautiful photograph. But this was their life: this exact, ridiculous, unrepeatable scene, and he wouldn't have changed a single thing about it.

He got off the end of the bed.

He got down on one knee on the hotel carpet — slightly damp from three sets of wet feet — and got the ring out of his pocket, out at last, after six days. Olivia twisted around in Oscar's lap to watch, hiccupping, tears not yet dry, her whole small face transformed into pure wonder. It was happening. It was finally happening. Daddy was doing the thing.

"Oscar," Lando said.

"Yeah," Oscar said. He'd stopped laughing. His voice had gone rough, low, completely unguarded.

"I had a whole speech. I rewrote it four times. It's on my phone. It's about the first day I really saw you — and the day you knocked on our door, scared out of your mind —"

"I remember," Oscar said quietly.

"— and it's about the shoes lined by the door every time I come home, and breakfast in bed, and the trophies —" Lando's voice gave out entirely. He gave up on the speech. He looked at the two of them, his whole world, sitting together on a hotel bed in the lamplight, and said the only thing left.

"I don't need the speech. You're it. You've been it from the beginning. Both of you've made me…just. Marry me, Oscar. Please."

Olivia, before Oscar could even draw breath to answer, leaned right out of his lap and put both her small hands on either side of her mother's face, turning it toward her own, fierce and tear-streaked and absolute:

"Say yes, Mama."

Oscar laughed, and it broke, tears finally spilling over and running down into his daughter's small cupped hands.

"Yeah," he said. "Yes. Course it's yes, you stupid alpha. It was always going to be yes, you absolute —" He couldn't finish it. He held out his hand, and it was shaking — the famously steady hand, the one that had held a car at two hundred miles to victory without so much as a tremor two weeks ago — and Lando slid the ring onto it, plain and gold with its one small stone. The one Oscar would never have thrown into the sea, and it fit perfectly. Lando had been right about the size; he'd measured a sleeping Oscar's finger with a piece of string back in October.

Olivia, predictably, detonated.

"YES," she screamed, "MAMA SAID YES, you're a FEE-ON-SAY, I DID IT, I HELPED, Daddy I HELPED —" and she launched at Lando, who caught her, he'd been catching her for five and three-quarter years and would catch her for fifty more.

She wrapped her whole small self around him, sobbing and laughing all at once, while Oscar slid off the bed and folded down around the both of them onto the damp carpet.

"You held it a whole week," Oscar said again, into the pile of them, marvelling, his hand — the one with the ring on it now — resting warm against Olivia's back. "Six days. You're tougher than I am, possum. I'd have cracked by Tuesday."

"It was SO hard," Olivia wept into Lando's neck. "It was the hardest thing."

"I know, baby."

"The mean bird! And last night I did almost tell and Daddy said —"

"The see-through boat,” Lando said, laughing, completely wrecked. "I remember. Best save of my life."

"I kept it though." She pulled back to look at the two of them, fierce and proud and utterly spent with relief. "And made Daddy do it."

"You did," Oscar said. He kissed her wet cheek, soft and lingering. "You're the only reason it happened at all. He was going to chicken out forever."

"I was not — You knew."

"There was a book in the bathroom called “Two Happy Grooms, One Perfect Day”. You kept rubbing your finger. You emptied half a swimming pool to stop our daughter from speaking." Oscar's mouth tilted — that real one, the boy underneath, still right there after all these years. "I just figured… you were so nervous about it. The least I could do was let you keep your surprise."

A beat. His voice went quieter. "Wasn't acting just now, though. For the record."

"So all week you were —"

"Acting clueless. Yeah. Doing my best." He looked down at the ring on his hand and turned it slowly with his thumb, and his voice dropped, went quiet and not at all flat.

Lando reached across his daughter to kiss his fiancé: soft, slow, entirely unhurried, like they had all the time in the world, which, as of about ninety seconds ago, they technically now did.

Olivia made a loud, theatrically disgusted noise and did not, in fact, move so much as an inch away from either of them, mama's girl that she was, she had absolutely no intention of being left out of anything that involved being held by both of them at once.

Later, much later, after Olivia had finally crashed mid-sentence, face-down and starfished across the big bed, Biscuit recovered and tucked firmly under one arm, Lando and Oscar lay on either side of her in the dark and the rain, and Lando found Oscar's hand resting on their daughter's sleeping back — the one with the ring on it now — and held it.

"The beach would've been nicer," Lando said, into the dark.

"Would've been a nice postcard," Oscar said. "This is the one we'll actually tell people about. Our five-year-old proposed for you. It's a better story."

"She's going to make a speech and tell it to everyone at our wedding, isn't she."

"God help us."

A pause in the rain. The slow, even breathing of their sleeping child between them.

"Hey," Oscar said quietly. "You remember what I said. Back in Monaco. After the —" He stopped, suddenly uncertain. "After she stopped drinking my milk. About when we'd talk about another one."

Lando's heart turned over. He remembered. "You said after your championship."

"Mm." Oscar's thumb moved once over the ring, over Lando's knuckles, slow and deliberate. "Well after is kinda now…"

The rain kept falling. Somewhere out past the resort the storm was already clearing, the way storms do, leaving everything washed and dripping and new. Lando lay in the dark, holding his fiancé's hand across the back of their sleeping daughter and didn't say anything for a long moment, his throat had closed up entirely.

"Yeah?" he managed, finally. "You want another?"

"Think so," Oscar said. "So… hopefully soon. After the wedding. You don't?"

"'Course I want it, Osc. There's nothing in the world I want more."

Lando said nothing after that and held his hand tighter.

After that they slept, or nearly slept, or lay awake grinning into the dark like idiots while the ring sat warm, plain, gold and finally free of its sock on the finger it had been measured for in secret. Exactly where it had always, always been going to end up.

Olivia had been right, in the end.

It really had been the best day.