Maybe you were overthinking it, or maybe it was because you hadn’t seen, heard from or touched your husband in 3 days. 3 long, excruciating days. Michael usually would call, but it seemed the concentration and focus the album needed was at the centre of his mind.

So, you had situated yourself in front of the television — a movie you’d already seen twice playing in front of your tired eyes. Barely focusing on what the actors were saying — you drifted off to a place where your husband was. Picturing him sat beside you — warm, salty popcorn in a bowl and a freshly squeezed orange juice in hand, giggling away at a movie he loved.

The soft smile that had crept onto your face slowly sank away into the depths of despair at the reminder your man wasn’t here, and you had no idea when you’d next see him.

You knew you could see him if you really wanted to by paying Westlake Recording Studios a visit, but, Quincy Jones was a perfectionist like Michael, and any unnecessary distractions this close to finishing the album were not permitted to enter the studio.

And you were definitely a distraction to Michael.

Despite being a busy man, whenever you did spent time together, by God did he make up for lost time. That man would spend 50 days and 50 nights making up for any time you’d spent apart by showering you in irrevocable affection to show you just how much he missed you too.

With an exaggerated yawn, you glanced at the glistening gold watch around your wrist, one Michael had gifted you for your 4th wedding anniversary. Mumbling about the time, the numbers 20:38 stared back at you.

‘Time to get ready to sleep alone, again’ You thought to yourself.

Sighing dramatically, you pushed yourself off the couch, switching off the television and dragging your tired feet towards the stairs. The house was always eerily dark and quiet at this time of night, especially being alone, leaving goosebumps down your arms as you reached your even quieter bedroom.

A wave of sadness hit you as you observed your cold, dark and pitiful bedroom — once filled with glistening low lighting, a bottle of Champagne and love-making all night, giggling with your other half. Now, the total opposite.

And the worst thought of it all — even when the album was finished, you knew he’d be touring, and you’d either be stuck at home alone permanently or living on the road for the next year. Either way, you’d do anything for Michael — which agitated you even more.

There was no one better — he was the one for you, the one you promised at the alter that you’d be there, sickness and in health, for better and for worse. This was the worse they were referring to. You loved him more than life itself to ever leave him — it’d break your heart more than this loneliness ever would.

For now, you’d wait for his call. Sit around all night, yawning and rubbing your tired eyes — awaiting a call that would never come, before succumbing to sleep and kicking yourself in the morning for not staying up for him.

Brushing away the negative thoughts that corrupted your mind, you trudged to the bathroom, deciding a floral scented body cream to flood your nostrils would hopefully cheer you up. Grabbing the large bottle, you squeezed a small amount out of the tube — rubbing the delightful smelling cream into your arms, your eyes locking on the phone on your nightstand.

‘If he didn’t call by 10 o’clock, you’d call.’ You decided, knowing that the next hour would be spend watching the time, feeling as though watching paint dry would be quicker. But, what else would a viciously devoted wife do?

Once your body was slicked with the fanciest lotion Michael could’ve possibly bought, just because, you slipped under the covers of your four-poster bed, the Emerald green, satin bedsheets sliding over your skin like water as you settled down.

21:05, Check the clock.

21:18, Sigh irritatingly at the ceiling.

21:25, Rest your eyes for a moment to pass the time.

21:29, Surely at least 10 minutes had gone by—oh, no, just 4 minutes!

"Oh, fuck this." You mumbled to yourself, ignoring the 21:34 on the clock metaphorically screaming ‘You’re weak’ at you as you picked up the phone and dialled the number to Westlake Studios.

The sound of the phone ringing droned on throughout the room — your nails tapping impatiently on the handle, your bottom lips being gnawed on as you waited.

"Hello, Westlake Recording Studios, this is Susie, how can I help?"

"Hi Susie. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you why I’m calling, huh?" You chuckled into the phone, knowing your voice was recognisable by now.

"Oh, good-evening, Mrs Jackson," She replied, a smile evident in her voice, "Let me check with Mr Jones that he’s available, okay? Give me a sec, sweetie."

"No problem."

A rustle, a click and the sound of the hold music indicated Susie, the receptionist at Westlake, was calling Quincy Jones to make sure your husband wasn’t knee deep in a song. Knowing your husband, he probably was.

Click! "Hey, sweetie, just gonna connect you now."

Butterflies erupted in your stomach like a lovesick teenager at the confirmation you were about to speak to your husband, having to bite back a smile at the thought of hearing his sweet voice.

Click! "Baby?"

Oh, Lord, it was better than you imagined.

You sighed a sweet relief, "Oh, darling, it’s so good to hear your voice." You admitted straight off the bat, "Hi, my love."

Michael laughed, a smile that hurt your cheeks creeping up onto your face, "Hi, sweet girl, are you okay?"

"I’m so much better now I’m talking to you." You spoke, clutching the phone in two hands in desperation, "Mikey, I miss you so much."

"I know, baby, I miss you too." Michael agreed, "I’m coming home tonight, so don’t fret that little head anymore, okay?"

"Really?"

"Yes, really, my baby, I can’t wait to hold you." His voice as sweet as sugar, echoing in your brain like an addiction begging to be tended to, "My beautiful wife all alone — makes me so sad."

"So alone." You pouted, craving to be babied, "Need you so bad, Mike." You whispered.

Michael breathed out a laugh, your grin deepening as you pictured his flustered face behind the phone — blush creeping onto his face at your suggestive words, "Oh, darling." He whispered, "I love you, I hope you know that."

"I love you so much more." You sighed, "The house is so quiet and boring without you."

"I know, I know. I’m sorry I’ve left you for so long — things have been hectic here. Y’know how Quincy gets when the album’s nearly finished, he just gets so excited and just wants to make that push to the finish line without stopping."

"I know." You mumbled, toying with the phone cord, "I just can’t wait to have you all to myself."

"Won’t be long, baby. Only a few hours."

"Mm, I can’t wai—" "Mikey, come back, the album won’t finish itself!"

Silence filled the room as your eyes widened, the smile wiped clean off your face as the reality of what you just heard hit you.

A female voice — calling your husband the nickname you have for him, beckoning him back to the studio. A voice laced with an undertone you didn’t like nor want to hear the other end of the phone knowing she was with your man and not you.

Absolutely the fuck not.

"O-Okay, Coming!" Michael called out, "Baby, I gotta go."

"Who was that?" You pressed, your eyebrows knitted together.

"Oh, just another producer. I’ll speak to you later, okay? Don’t wait up for me. Love you."

Click! Beeeeep!

Your jaw dropped, moving the beeping phone away from your ear as the line disconnected. You blinked, in utter shock at the conversation that just occurred in your ear without even a second to process.

Your brain ran a mile a minute as you replayed the scene in your head. An unfamiliar female voice, with a suspicious tone, calling your husband back to the studio, then being hung up on after being told to not wait up for him, ending with the ‘I’ missing from ‘I love you’, had you spiralling as you placed the phone down.

The silence that consumed the room was deafening — your heart beating out of your chest as your mind ran away with itself.

Michael, tired, lonely, and equally as sexually frustrated as you, alone with a musically talented woman who’s investing in his career and spending more 1-on-1 time with him than you, could easily lead to—

You’d never picked the phone back up quicker, speed dialling the Studio back, the mortifying thought of anything happening clouding your judgement, your foot tapping impatiently against the floor, now sitting on the edge of your bed cautiously.

"Hello, Westlake Recording Studio, this is—“

"Hi, Susie, it’s me again. I need you to connect me with Michael again right now please." You rushed through gritted teeth.

"Oh! Hello, again, I thought I already connected you, sweetie?"

"You did. But, I need connecting again, please. Now." You pleaded, your shaking fingers pinching the bridge of your nose.

"Let me check with Mr Jones, okay? One second."

Click! Before you even had chance to plead her to just put you through, the hold music sounded again. Groaning as you flung backwards onto the bed, phone still pressed to your ear, you could feel the anger growing inside you.

Click! "Hey, honey, I’m afraid I can’t put you through. Mr Jackson’s very busy right now."

Could worse words ever be spoken.

"Okay, I appreciate that, Susie, but I must speak to my husband right now."

"I’m sorry, Mrs Jackson, there’s nothing I can do."

"Please. Let me just speak to Quincy, I’m sure he’ll let me speak to him."

"I’m sorry, but Mr Jones has just left for the night, so Mr Jackson is with one of our other producers who has left me with strict instructions to make sure Mr Jackson has no distractions. Goodnight, Mrs Jackson." Beeeeep!

You placed the phone down once more — the beeping subsiding as you stared off into the distance, zoning out as the recollection of the past few minutes clouded your mind.

He’s in there, alone with her. Not even Quincy was there anymore. Your heart was in your throat as you remained perched on the end of the bed, chest heaving in pure adrenaline — visions of your husband doing things he shouldn’t polluting your thoughts.

How he didn’t even notice how concerned you sounded when asking who she was made anger and jealousy bubble in your chest. Knowing that you’d been dying to see Michael for days, not counting the past few weeks, months and even years he’s been busy working on music where you’ve missed out on marital business because of his work — and now she was getting to spend alone time with him without even having to lift a finger?

Furious didn’t even cover half of it.

Michael didn’t know what he was walking into when he pushed open the door to the Hayvenhurst mansion, sighing tiredly. It was just past midnight, his eyes were heavy and his feet were dragging against the floor as he trudged through to the kitchen, expecting an empty room to make himself a warm glass of milk and head up to bed, to hold you as promised.

What he didn’t expect to see was you, in a long sheer gown, feathers on the edges, barely covering the matching black and baby pink lacy lingerie set that adorned your delicious body. Your tits pushed up perfectly, and your hips, waist and glorious legs all on display, with your hair perfectly groomed and a glass of wine in hand, stood on the opposite side of the kitchen island.

His heart jumped into his mouth at the sight of you — in shock of not expecting you to be there and the vision of your beautiful body on full display for him.

"Baby, wow, you look— wow, incredible." He breathed, taking in the sight of you as a took a swig of your wine, "What are you doing awake? I told you not to wait up."

You didn’t answer straight away — just stared at him, taking sips of your wine as you remained in constant eye contact with him. After a few seconds of silence, Michael’s eyebrows furrowed together in confusion.

"Honey, you okay?"

"Do you like what you see, Michael?"

Michael breathed out a laugh, "Like? Baby, I’m in love. You look breathtaking."

His eyes never left yours as you sauntered your way around the kitchen island, slowly heading towards him, your high-heels clicking against the floor.

"I called you back, did you get the message?"

"Sorry?" Michael questioned, utterly confused at your words.

"Earlier. I called you back — did someone tell you I called again?"

Michael scratched the back of his neck, puffing out air as he thought, "Uhh, no. Sorry, honey, I was really busy."

You hummed in response, standing before him, eyeing him up and down, "So I was told. Something about a new producer not wanting you to be disturbed, hm?"

"Oh, yeah, that’s Ester, she’s great. Been helping me and Q with the album." Michael innocently complimented, a smile on his face as he looked down at you, "God, baby, I can’t get over how amazing you look. I just wanna touch you all over."

You brushed past him before he got a chance to grab a hold of you, a waft of your sickly, addicting perfume clouding his nostrils, "Come get me then." You beckoned, heading towards the stairs, your gown traipsing behind you.

Michael trailed behind you like a predator to prey — his eyes glistening in desire at the sight of you, your plump ass and curvy thighs on perfect display as he practically crawled up the stairs like a rapid dog behind you.

"Come here, darling, wanna touch you so bad."

"Patience, Mikey." You dragged out the nickname, "Gotta catch me."

Playfulness glistened in his eyes as you turned around, walking backwards up the stairs slowly, as if assessing the threat that crawled slowly behind you, his eyes never once leaving yours.

After making it up the stairs without being ‘caught’, you waltzed into the bedroom with an aura radiating off you that Michael had never seen — your hair bouncing as you walked, along with the wobble of your perfect ass, which he couldn’t help but stare at, his cock twitching in arousal.

Michael remained behind you as he watched you slip your gown off, letting it fall of your body sensually, your half naked body now fully exposed to him. A shaky breath left his lips at the sight of you as you crawled onto the bed on all fours — your hips swaying while looking back to meet his eyes.

"Fuck." Michael groaned under his breath, his gaze not daring to look away from your frame, contorting into sensual positions.

You slid slowly onto your back, your arms holding you up and your legs pressed together, your eyes never leaving his own blown out ones — observing as his chest rose and fell quicker as he anticipated your next move. Fulfilling his undeniable need, you slowly parted your legs, revelling in the gasp that ripped from his throat at the sight of your crotchless panties, your gushing cunt exposed to him so suddenly.

"Oh, baby." He sighed, falling to his knees at the edge of the bed, his eyes locked on your glistening pussy.

"Is she pretty?"

"Mhm, the prettiest pussy I’ve ever seen." He mumbled, barely listening to you as he gawked at you.

"No — Is she pretty?"

That’s when it hit him — the reason you were awake, the outfit, the wine, the questions. It all finally clicked in his head what was going on.

"What? Ester?"

"Yes, her." You spat, a foul look on your face, acting as those even referring to her tasted vile in your mouth.

Michael breathed out a laugh, "Baby, no. Not at all. Never in a million years. She’s my producer." He answered, a playful smile on his face, "Enough of that — let me taste this sweet pussy that I’ve missed so much."

Leaning forward in attempt to press his face between your thighs, he was met with a forceful being stopping his path.

Your shoe — the heel pressing firmly on his forehead, stopping him in his tracks.

"Ah, ah, ah! No touching for you, Mikey." You teased, "Or is it only her that’s allowed to call you that?"

Michael groaned, a hint of a pathetic whine threatening to blend with the gruff of his voice, the severity of the situation really setting in for him now.

"Baby—"

"No. Beg."

"Honey, please," He wasted no time, his eyes meeting your own challenging ones from between your legs, all of his wrong-doings becoming apparent to him now he was being denied your pussy, "I don’t know why she called me that — that name is reserved for you and you only. You, my beautiful, loving, perfect wife. Not her." He rambled, his eyebrows curved upwards in despair as his voice threatened to break, desperation dripping off him more than the slick from your wet pussy at the submissive sight of him, "And I am beyond sorry at the fact I didn’t say ‘I love you’, I was in a rush and I didn’t think. But, I should’ve thought. How dare I deny my gorgeous sweet little one the words of my true love. And I should’ve answered your second call, and I should’ve been here to begin with. I hate leaving you alone for so long, but I’m an idiot husband, please, please, forgive me."

You stayed silent as your high-heel, the Armani ones he’d bought for your birthday, still remained pressed against his warm forehead. His puppy dog eyes, now a silent plea of desperation as he looked at you, his face a complete wreck at the pure fact that he was being denied your glorious pussy.

"Hm." You spoke finally, lowering your foot off of his face, "I suppose I’ll forgive you."

"Thank you, thank you, thank you." He chanted, grabbing a hold of your ankle, craving any sort of touch at this point.

"If."

"Yes, baby, anything." He rambled, "Anything — just let me feel you, please."

His obvious built up sexual frustration was manifesting itself in the most submissive, pathetic manner you’d ever seen — his voice cracking and stuttering as he begged you for physical contact.

"You let me use that pretty mouth and cock of yours until I decide you’ve made up for it."

He could’ve cum on the spot at the pure erotica that left your pretty pink lips, swallowing hard as his cheeks flushed, trying to ignore the way his cock throbbed in his boxers.

"Jesus, sweetheart." He breathed, "You’re killing me over here."

"Is that a yes?"

"Yes, absolutely, 1000%, yes."

"Lay down then."

Michael wasted no time doing what you asked. Usually, he would dominate in the bedroom, and he knew deep down the second he slid his achingly hard cock into your tight little cunt, that you’d submit to him that millisecond, but right now, he’d humour you — secretly enjoying letting you take the reigns for once, especially if it meant getting to devour your pretty pussy.

You crawled up his body, before hovering over his face, your legs either side of his head — your clenching cunt just centimetres above his eager mouth that had him twitching in excitement at the thought of the taste of your sweet pussy, one he’s missed for so long.

"Lemme take care of you, sweet girl. Make everything alright again." He promised, two firm hands coming to grab a handful of your shaking thighs.

Without giving him a second to prepare, you lowered your pussy down onto his face — both of you moaning at the feeling of one another after so long.

"Oh, Michael." You cried out, your hands flying to the headboard above your bed, as his tongue wasted no time in delving between your lips.

His tongue slithering its way around your quivering sex — the tip of the warm muscle swiping over your throbbing clit, eliciting the most needy, pornographic whine from your lips. Michael couldn’t help but smile into you — knowing the dominant act was going to wear off pretty soon with that way he was devouring your cunt like his last meal.

The erotic noises that filled your once depressingly quiet bedroom had Michael twitching uncontrollably in his pants — his cock screaming to be freed as you began rocking your hips back and forth on his face, moaning like a bitch in heat at the feeling is his nose nudging your sensitive nub.

"O-Oh, baby, yes! Yes, God, baby, so good." You whined, your voice a high-pitched strain of undeniable ecstasy as you rode his face.

Michael was in heaven — after weeks of not even seeing you naked let alone having his face stuffed full of your pussy, he couldn’t be stopped from devouring you even if anyone tried. He didn’t even care that his dick was begging to be touched — he wanted, no, needed to be forgiven, to make things right. Prove to you that you were the only woman he needed in his life.

A devilish hand slid up your thigh to grab a handful of your ass, earning a moan of delight into your pussy as Michael sucked your aching clit. Nearly buckling over at the vibrations of his noises — you hunched over, knuckles turning white as you gripped onto the headboard for dear life at the feeling of his swollen lips wrapping around your clit like his life depended on it.

It was only when two of his long, slender fingers dipped suddenly into your hole, reaching such depths so quickly that you came on the spot — crying out deliciously as you coated Michael’s face in your juices.

"Michael—ah! God, yes! Don’t stop!"

Your hips rocked back and forth faster than before, denying him of oxygen, not that he cared, but prolonging your orgasm as his slicked nose repeatedly abused your extremely overstimulated clit.

Lifting off his face with a whine, your legs threatened to collapse before Michael caught you, two strong, reliable hands holding your waist and legs before they gave way. Michael picked you up with a smile, before laying you gently on the bed beneath him.

"You’re such a good girl for me, baby." He whispered, leaning down to press a sweet, gentle kiss on your forehead, cheek and nose, "Did so good for me."

You hummed tiredly, looking up at him innocently — one side of your bra strap had fallen down in the bustling of your orgasm, revealing your rounded left breast, your erect nipple on show for him, as well as your now dripping wet pussy one buck upwards away from meeting his thick bulge as he situated between your open legs.

He knew your dominatrix act would let up after he made you cum.

"Look what you did to me, sweet girl." Michael revealed, guiding your hand gently to grab a handful of his despicably hard cock, a loud gasp ripping from your throat, "So fucking hard for you baby. Missed feeling you cum against me so fucking bad."

"Mikey." You whined, irresistibly desperate beneath him.

"Fuck, I only love it when you say it, darling."

You wrapped your arms swiftly around his neck, pulling him down to connect your lips in a fiery, needy, frantic kiss. You hummed into his mouth, the taste of your tangy release still evident on his tongue. Michael kissed you with a burning passion that had you rubbing your legs together once more — the feeling of irrefutable arousal radiating off you like heat.

Michael, without needing to be told, freed himself quickly from his boxers, hissing into your mouth at the contact of his warm hand around the base, guiding it towards your slick cunt.

"Legs up, baby." He mumbled into your mouth, not daring to break the intense kiss.

Michael hummed in pure delight at the feeling of your heeled feet wrapping around his waist and forcing his hips closer to you — his leaking tip now colliding with your clit.

Michael cursed under his breath as his positioned his cock at your hole, his hands shaking at your sides, as he pushed in slowly. The feeling of his pulsating tip, dribbling with anticipatory pre-cum, stretching your pleading pussy had both of you crying out in euphoria — your moans already growing louder before he’d even filled you to the brim.

"Oh, my fuck — this pussy is to die for, Jesus." Michael whined as he pushed further into your tight cunt, inch by inch, his cock stretching you so perfectly.

Once bottomed out and fitted perfectly into your abused cunt — Michael began to set a brutal pace. One that you seeing stars and moaning beyond control underneath him — your sharp nails dragging down his muscular back as he ploughed deeper.

"Mhm!, Mikey, right there!" You gasped blissfully, your eyes rolling to the back of your head as he slammed perfectly into your G-Spot, brushing your cervix perfectly.

Michael was a piece of string held taut and being sawed at — ready to snap at any given moment. You hadn’t had sex this good in months — the build up frustration and lack of communication had you both needing each other like water in the desert.

"M-Michael?"

"Yeah, baby?" He panted above you, leaning down to press a kiss against your cheek, and down your neck.

You whined, "Pass me the phone."

"What?"

“Don’t stop. Just pass me the phone."

Michael obliged reluctantly, unsure of where this was going. He reached over, his thrusts slowly slighly, one handed to grab the phone, handing it back to you.

"Dial her number."

Michael’s face drained of colour as his thrusts slowed to a stop, which earnt him a slap on the ass from behind, like a jockey on a horse, "Don’t stop, I said. Now, dial her number."

Michael’s swallowed thickly as he searched your face for any sign of humour, but your knitted eyebrows in pleasure paired with your oh so serious eyes had him reaching over to the phone and dialling Westlake Recording Studio.

This late at night had the calls connecting directly to Michael’s studio, Susie long gone, and the only person left in the Studio, was the one person you wanted to answer the phone the most.

"Hello, Ester from Westlake Studio speaking."

A wicked smile flickered over your face as her muffled voice filled your ears. You took the phone from Michael’s hand, sneaking out from under him, pushing him onto the bed and climbing on top of him, guiding his slicked, hard cock back inside you — now riding him just how you knew he loved. Michael strained a loud moan that threatened to escape his lips.

"Hello?" Her voice sounding more confused at the rustling and whispering on the other side of the phone.

You handed the phone back to Michael who eyed you confusedly. His only instruction was the word ‘Speak’ that you mouthed at him, before lifting your cunt off his throbbing cock and bouncing straight back down, his cock nudging your cervix perfectly now.

"H-Hi Ester, it’s M-Michael."

"Michael? What are you doing calling this late?"

Michael looked at your fucked out face for answers — as your beautiful frame and gorgeous complexion stared right back at him, your wedding ring glistening in the moonlight as you grabbed a handful of your tits, he knew exactly what he needed to do to make things right.

"I’ve decided your actions at the Studio are wildly inappropriate and disrespectful to my wife." He started, his voice huffed as he bucked his hips up into you, "Using a personal and private nickname that is reserved for my wife and my wife only is—ah, baby! unprofessional and calls for immediate dismissal."

"What? A-Are you firing me over a nickname?"

"Yes, e-exactly." Michael breathed, "My w-wife is the most important thing in my life, and anyone who upsets her will be—o-oh fuck—banished effective immediately."

Michael positioned the phone to be held up with his shoulder as he gripped your hips — slamming upwards into your tightening pussy, forcing your moans and whines to grow deliberately louder.

"What the fuck? Are you having sex?"

"Pack your stuff and be gone by tonight," Michael breathed, biting his lips momentarily at the sight of your tits bouncing as he fucked up into you, "And never disrespect my wife again."

Not even bothering to hang up, knowing the embarrassed woman on the other line would, Michael threw the phone onto the floor and thrust up into your drooling pussy like he had seconds left to live.

"Oh, Michael, I love you—I love you so so much. Thank you, baby—mmhm!!— thank you, you’re so good to me!"

"I love you, sweetheart, god, M’love you so much."

With a tentative hand crawling down your body to rub tight circles on your clit, to the way it made you clench around his twitching cock — the both of you came with a strangled cry.

"Yeah — cum on my cock, baby, give it to me." Michael coaxed, a whine following shortly after as he forced his cock as deep as it would go before letting his much needed release fire up inside of your oh so willing cunt.

Whining on top of him, juices flowing down his length, coating his tightened balls, your orgasm subsided and you crashed onto his chest, heaving as he, too, came down from filling your cunt up to the brim with his hot seed, before slipping out as he softened.

His gentle hand came up to caress your head, the other taking a hold of your left hand, lifting it carefully to display your wedding ring to the both of you, the 24 Carat gold rock glistened in front of both your eyes, a smile creeping onto your face as it remained a reminder of your dedication to one another no matter.

"This will get you anything you want and more." He admitted, "Just say the word and I’ll go to the ends of the Earth for you, darling."

You peered up at him, your eyes a hazy, fucked out mess, "Will it get me a week alone with my husband?"

Michael smiled, pressing a kiss to your jewelled finger, a boyish giggle leaving his lips before he spoke, "I’d have to check with Quincy—“

"That’s so not funny."

requests are open!

SET AFTER:

Rockstar - Brendon Park meets his match against PTMC's fiery new attending.

Pussy Wagon - A spilled drink leads you to see a different side of your nemesis Park The Shark.

The First Time (NSFW) - Fireworks aren't the only explosive thing happening at Jesse's Fourth of July party.

A Loaded Gun (NSFW) - Hate sex has never been so fucking hot...

This Is Not A Love Story - Brandon tries to set a rule after a 'sticky' situation.

The Game - Brendon finds himself breaking his own rules when it comes to you.

Pittfest -Brendon comforts you when you fall apart after the events of Pittfest.

Is He Prettier Than Me? - Brandon gets curious when he learns you have other plans.

The Drawer - Brendon realises your relationship may be shifting when he discovers he has a drawer at your place.

Scrunchies - Scrunchies… they’re the downfall of Brendon Park.

Love Games (NSFW) - Brendon and you love to play games, especially with each other.

An Exquisite Form of Torture (NSFW) - Brendon continues to turn up the heat as he holds you captive.

THAT Guy - Brendon is forced to face up to his feelings for you when he finds out your meeting up with an ex.

Seven Days - Seven days is far too long to go without you...

Save It - A thirty six hour shift leads to another admission about your relationship with Brendon.

Doctor Dick - Brendon's day takes a turn when Whitaker gives him some critical information.

A Manipulative Fuck - You and Brendon discuss what happened with your ex.

The Call (NSFW) - Brendon decides to put a stop to David's calls once and for all.

The One That Hates The Ravens - David's attempt at revenge backfires spectacularly.

The Lovin Spoonful - You wake up to an unexpected surprise.

Delete, Block, Rinse, Repeat - A series of cryptic messages force Brendon to confront a secret he's been keeping for almost a decade.

His Father's Son - Brendon reflects on the past as he debates taking that first sip of whiskey.

The Cost of Dignity - Brendon's greatest secret comes with a cost.

A Kiss For Luck - Brendon struggles to navigate working at the hospital after the release of THAT video.

The Craziest Fucking Thing - You take matters into your own hands after receiving bad news from Brendon.

Ride Or Die - You wake up to the sound of an angry blender after Brendon discovers what happened with Rowena.

Baby Shark - Once a year Brendon always ends up back at the aquarium.

Diamonds (NSFW) - A bet leads to naughty shenanigans in a five star restaurant.

The Call Out - Brendon's focus on wedding planning is disrupted when he's called out to the scene of a multi-car pile up.

Good Hands - Abbot reminds Brendon you're in good hands as they proceed with the amputation.

Flayed - Brendon's world crashes down as he learns the truth about the accident.

Ten Things I Love About You - Brendon discovers a pink envelope in the pocket of the jacket you were wearing at the time of the accident.

The Parent Trap - Brendon faces your parents, leading to a surprise revelation.

Sledgehammer - Brendon struggles to cope in the aftermath of everything that's happened.

Et Tu Marianne? - Your mother throws Brendon under the bus after you wake up from surgery.

SET BEFORE:

The Fucking Patient - Abbot has some harsh words for Brendon regarding your care.

Chemistry - You and Brendon finally have a moment alone to talk.

A Serial Absconder - Your habit of disappearing leads to a healing journey Brendon doesn't expect.

Home - Brendon introduces you to your new home after the accident.

The Change Up - When you struggle to reacclimate at home Brendon realises you need a change up.

Your mother is pissed.

Brendon knows that because apparently, she’s the one you get your temper from. The eyes that narrow, creasing at the edges breaking into crow’s feet. The flared nostrils that accommodate a heaving chest. The thin purse of her mouth, lips clamped together as she paces like a tiger, fists clenched in agitation, protecting her cub.

“Marianne…” Brendon begins as he slows his walk, his dark eyebrows etching into a deep frown. “What’s going on?”

She swings her gaze to the visitor’s chair outside of your room where a bouquet of roses sits. A dozen of them, blood red and peppered with baby’s breath like some huge horrific Valentine’s Day nightmare. There’s a card sticking out of the top, expensive cream with a gold inlay. Brendon snatches it up, his teeth grinding together as he reads words written in fountain pen.

I’ve told you before choices have consequences, now no one will want you, not even me.

Good luck, you’ll certainly need it.

- David

“That evil fucker.” He mutters, crumpling the card up in his hand. The sharp edges dig into his palm, the fury of a thousand fires burning underneath his skin.

“I’m going to kill him.” Marianne informs Brendon, using her hands to mime wringing someone’s neck. “I’m going to go to his shitty little hospital and stab the tires in his stupid Audi-”

“Has she seen this?” Brendon asks his gaze straying to the closed door where your nurse is helping you to dress.

Marianne nods, her eyes turning sad. “She tried to get rid of them, but her nurse pulled them out of the trash thinking it was a mistake.”

Brendon growls, a low involuntary sound that emits from the depths of his chest as his palm scrubs over the nape of his neck roughly. He wants to beat the shit out of your ex-fiancé, to choke the life right out of him but that’s not where his focus should be right now, it should be on you, the woman who received this spiteful little message. “Is she... ok?”

“I think if she could tape knives onto her wheelchair, she would have by now.” Marianne tells him, casting a glare at the roses. “She’s beyond pissed, she didn’t want you to see them just in case we had to bail you out for murder. Obviously, another thing she doesn’t need.”

The phrase is pointed, meaningful.

Don’t do anything fucking stupid.

It’s usually Jean that talks him down, Jean that…

“Where is Jean?” He asks because your father’s coat is lying over the back of that chair but there’s no sign of the man himself.

“He needed to take a walk after seeing the card, so he decided to get us all some coffee from the canteen before your shift.” Marianne informs him, crossing her arms over her chest. “He was so pissed off Bren, I thought he was going to smash the vase they came in.”

“The canteen doesn’t open for another hour.” Brendon says checking his watch. The thing is Jean would know that, the four of you have established a routine in the week since your surgery.

“Oh fuck….” Marianne curses, slipping her phone out of her pocket and hitting the number one on her speed dial. “Do not tell me he’s gone after that asshole.” The call goes straight to voicemail, and her eyes ignite with a new emotion, fear. “He never turns it off, he keeps it on in case Rae ever needs him.”

“Ok.” Brendon pinches his brow, rubbing the space in between his eyes as he tries to think through their next steps. “How would he even know where David is?”

Marianne’s finger flicks across her screen, bringing up Instagram. She types for a few seconds before holding the phone up for Brendon to see. There’s David standing outside the coffee truck that must park itself outside of Mercy Hospital, holding up the most complicated coffee order in the world. “It looks like he’s there, every day at 7am.”

“Shit…” Brendon mutters, raking his hand through his hair. “Look I’ll go, you just stay with Rae, make sure she doesn’t actually start taping knives to her wheelchair.”

He wouldn’t put it past you, he’s well versed in your acts of vengeance from the enemies to lovers part of your love story.

It takes him ten minutes to drive to Mercy, breaking a few speed limits here and there. He doesn’t bother with a parking space, he just swings in behind the coffee truck, throwing open his door, slamming it shut behind him with such force the Porsche rocks.

He hears the shouting before he rounds the side of the coffee truck and already, he knows he’s too late.

There’s already a small cluster of people with their phones out, recording what has got to be the most pathetic fight he has ever seen. It’s barely a scrap, just two men scuffling on the grass. David attempts to break away, but Jean grapples him, tugging him back by that pristine white coat of his that no fucker ever wears unless they want attention. David tumbles back onto the grass, his face dripping with blood from a nose that is most certainly broken. Jean straddles his hips, pinning him to the ground, drawing back his fist for another blow but Brendon intervenes, catching his arm before he can throw it.

“This isn’t going to help Rae.” He’s surprised how calm his voice sounds in the moment, how measured it is despite the fact he wants to take Jean’s place and kick the shit out of David. “She doesn’t need her dad locked up over him.”

He doesn’t use David’s name, he doesn’t allow him that importance, that dignity.

“He called her a slut right to my fucking face.” Jean snarls as Brendon drags him to his feet, his shirt stained with David’s coffee order. “He said he got what she deserves for slutting it up with a damn ortho surgeon.”

For a second, just one, Brendon seriously thinks about releasing your father, about just letting him beat that son of a bitch to death. But there’s a dozen witnesses, camera phones everywhere and he doesn’t want Jean in any more trouble than he already is.

“He’s a vindictive, petty little shit.” Brendon tells him, stepping between the two of them so Jean’s entire attention is focused on him and not the man currently lying on the grass, whining about his broken nose. “And I swear to you he will get what’s coming to him.”

“You don’t know that!” Jean shoves at his chest but Brendon’s a wall, firm and unrelenting. This man he saved him from doing something stupid once upon a time, now it’s his turn to step up.

“I do.” He says tripping Jean’s biceps to stop him from lashing out again, forcing him to listen. “You think I didn’t do a deep dive on him after he was harassing Rae? That I don’t know the real reason he left Philly.”

Jean’s gaze strays over his shoulder to where David is climbing to his feet, using the back of his hand to wipe the blood from his nose. “What the fuck did he do?”

Brendon sighs as he follows Jean’s glare, levelling his own at David. “He was accused of sexual harassment at his old hospital and asked to leave before they completed the investigation. I know there are a few very pissed off female residents out there who I’m sure would love a chance to tell their story.”

“It wasn’t my fucking fault.” David snaps, cupping his hand to his nose to stem the bleeding. “They came on to me, they wanted…”

“You fucking groomed them.” Brandon spits back, acid burning into his tongue as he escorts Jean towards the Porsche. “It all started the same fucking way, you have a pattern of behaviour, one I’m sure your hospital would be very interested in knowing about.”

“You can’t do that to me!” David shouts after him as Brendon holds the car door open for Jean, making sure his future father-in-law climbs inside. “I don’t deserve to be hung, drawn and quartered over a couple of fumbled passes.”

The audacity of this man, it makes Brendon want to throttle him.

“You should have thought about that before you fucked with Rae.” Brendon tells him as he moves to the driver’s side of the Porsch, yanking the door open. “Enjoy your shift, I’m sure it’ll be your last.”

Like My Work? - Tip your friendly fan fic writer here!

Max is always glued to y/n's side. He wants her to be with her all the time so y/n has to find ways to try and encourage him to be social just so she's not the only person on the planet that he interacts with outside of work.

"You should go." Y/n smiles while sitting with Max on his jet and on this occasion with Lando and Carlos catching a ride.

"You should come." Max follows up with his own smile. "We can be a team."

"That's us winning." Carlos comments since Max has dragged y/n to play padel before and she's possibly the best rival to have because she sucks.

Despite y/n dating multi-championship winning athlete, Max is not dating y/n for her athletic abilities. Or even her coordination, which reaches an all time low when she tries physical activity.

"Baby-"

"Please?"

Max is not ashamed of looking like he melts for his girlfriend in front of anyone so him begging her to come with him for something as small as a padel game isn't unusual.

Lando and Carlos don't even make comment about it.

"Fine." Y/n sighs earning a cheer from the two men who really just needed someone willing to go up against them. Y/n smiles looking at Max with a fond gaze. "You are ridiculous."

"On the bright side if we ever need to know where Max is, we just need to find him and he's right there next to you." Lando comments earning a grin.

-

Hosting a new years party was meant to be an opportunity to socialise and enjoy the night. Y/n had really tried to push the rule of only seeing each other at midnight for a kiss.

Max on the other hand thought y/n was genuinely joking when she said that. So he treated it as such. Instead following her around like a shadow while she tried to play the best host ever.

He did help her in that regard but only by being sent off to greet people and trying to get him to take drinks over. As if he was being purposely obtuse, but she knows he wasn't, he would do each assigned job promptly and he'd do it with her hand locked into his own.

Some people might honestly mistake Max's clinginess for anxiety or jealousy. But it's not that deep, it's just Max is always by y/n's side and he likes it that way.

"Max, baby. Do you not wanna see the boys?" Y/n asks softly when they move to get there own drinks.

"Yeah, we can go see them."

Y/n knows she should be grateful, she knows that there's plenty of men who would just kill for a man who loves on them the way Max loves on her. But she more so worries that other people think she's asking him to act like this or has acted in way towards him that makes him want to act like this.

Eventually midnight comes and her life is made easier than the other women that she can see rushing around to find their boyfriends who had somehow disappeared in the last 20 minute count down.

"I guess I should be grateful that you are always here so when I need you I don't have to go hunting for you...I can't wait to love you for another year." Y/n smiles as the people around them begin shouting for the final 10 seconds.

"I'm going to love you for so many years." Max grins and before y/n can make a comment about how he just had to one up her, midnight strikes and y/n is caught in the most amazing kiss that pulls the air from her lungs.

-

Y/n knew to an extent that people must've noticed that Max is walked like a dog by her.

But what really was a gift was fans making a compilation of her walking around in several locations, including the paddock and not being able to get a step away from Max unless he's practically dragged away from her by Rupert and even then they captured how he hugs her tightly and insists on three kisses before he will actually move.

It's actually become y/n's new favourite thing about Max's fans and equally it's become the bane of Max's existence.

Not that he's dare vocalise his complaint, mainly because seeing y/n so amused by it makes him happy even if she can tell he is getting sick of the Walk Em Like A Dog song.

"This will be a clip for later." Y/n grins as she feels Max latch onto her after walking into the paddock with her a few steps ahead of him after his pass wouldn't let him through on the first go.

"That's not going to change me." Max smiles before he squeezes her hand tightly then lifting it to his lips and kissing the back of it as he finally falls in rhythm with her walking though he is slightly behind her.

"Good. I like that I never have to come searching for you. You're always next to me-I'm going to tell your fans to make an edit to that song with all these clips they have of us." Y/n gasps in excitement making him groan playfully as they walk into the Red Bull hospitality. "I'm going to grab some food."

"I'm hungry." Max shrugs moving with her despite him having eaten way more than he should've for breakfast from the hotel while y/n hadn't felt like eating earlier. Especially since the food at the track is always so good in her opinion. The teams feed their employees well and there's a perk about being Max's girlfriend since he so often gets to put in special requests and she uses that for herself. Obviously making him request it on her behalf.

"Alright, baby." Y/n smiles lightly as they move to get some breakfast, and on this occasion the option of a beautiful topped acai bowl doesn't require her to make any special requests.

They get settled down together and y/n smiles feeling Max sitting close enough to her that he's touching her and she almost has to move away from knocking into him so much. But that would only be followed by him shifting to close the gap again so she accepts it and adjusts her eating position accordingly.

SET AFTER:

Rockstar - Brendon Park meets his match against PTMC's fiery new attending.

Pussy Wagon - A spilled drink leads you to see a different side of your nemesis Park The Shark.

The First Time (NSFW) - Fireworks aren't the only explosive thing happening at Jesse's Fourth of July party.

A Loaded Gun (NSFW) - Hate sex has never been so fucking hot...

This Is Not A Love Story - Brandon tries to set a rule after a 'sticky' situation.

The Game - Brendon finds himself breaking his own rules when it comes to you.

Pittfest -Brendon comforts you when you fall apart after the events of Pittfest.

Is He Prettier Than Me? - Brandon gets curious when he learns you have other plans.

The Drawer - Brendon realises your relationship may be shifting when he discovers he has a drawer at your place.

Scrunchies - Scrunchies… they’re the downfall of Brendon Park.

Love Games (NSFW) - Brendon and you love to play games, especially with each other.

An Exquisite Form of Torture (NSFW) - Brendon continues to turn up the heat as he holds you captive.

THAT Guy - Brendon is forced to face up to his feelings for you when he finds out your meeting up with an ex.

Seven Days - Seven days is far too long to go without you...

Save It - A thirty six hour shift leads to another admission about your relationship with Brendon.

Doctor Dick - Brendon's day takes a turn when Whitaker gives him some critical information.

A Manipulative Fuck - You and Brendon discuss what happened with your ex.

The Call (NSFW) - Brendon decides to put a stop to David's calls once and for all.

The One That Hates The Ravens - David's attempt at revenge backfires spectacularly.

The Lovin Spoonful - You wake up to an unexpected surprise.

Delete, Block, Rinse, Repeat - A series of cryptic messages force Brendon to confront a secret he's been keeping for almost a decade.

His Father's Son - Brendon reflects on the past as he debates taking that first sip of whiskey.

The Cost of Dignity - Brendon's greatest secret comes with a cost.

A Kiss For Luck - Brendon struggles to navigate working at the hospital after the release of THAT video.

The Craziest Fucking Thing - You take matters into your own hands after receiving bad news from Brendon.

Ride Or Die - You wake up to the sound of an angry blender after Brendon discovers what happened with Rowena.

Baby Shark - Once a year Brendon always ends up back at the aquarium.

Diamonds (NSFW) - A bet leads to naughty shenanigans in a five star restaurant.

The Call Out - Brendon's focus on wedding planning is disrupted when he's called out to the scene of a multi-car pile up.

Good Hands - Abbot reminds Brendon you're in good hands as they proceed with the amputation.

Flayed - Brendon's world crashes down as he learns the truth about the accident.

Ten Things I Love About You - Brendon discovers a pink envelope in the pocket of the jacket you were wearing at the time of the accident.

The Parent Trap - Brendon faces your parents, leading to a surprise revelation.

Sledgehammer - Brendon struggles to cope in the aftermath of everything that's happened.

Et Tu Marianne? - Your mother throws Brendon under the bus after you wake up from surgery.

The Fucking Patient - Abbot has some harsh words for Brendon regarding your care.

Chemistry - You and Brendon finally have a moment alone to talk.

A Serial Absconder - Your habit of disappearing leads to a healing journey Brendon doesn't expect.

Home - Brendon introduces you to your new home after the accident.

It’s your first day in the house and reacclimating is a problem, a big one.

You love the house. You love all the work Brendon, and your father have put into adapting it. The fact it already feels like home despite the fact you’ve only just rolled through the door.

So, the real problem, you realise. The real problem is you.

You don’t seem to fit.

Literally.

That side of the couch you always sit on when you’re catching a Raven’s game, you can’t get comfortable because it seems too low for your leg and if you tuck a cushion underneath it puts strain on your hip.

When you wheel yourself into the kitchen to make a cup of tea you realise the kettle is unobtainable, pushed back against the backsplash in its usual place. Any attempt to lean over in your chair results in you almost tipping it over and falling out.

It’s the same with the bookcase, there’s only one bookshelf you can comfortably reach and it’s the one directly in front of you with the framed pictures of you and your parents, you and Bren. The books are either too high or too low to grasp.

“I need a grabber.” You say glumly as you sit in your wheelchair alongside the couch, your chin on your hand as you watch the Bengals get slaughtered by the Steelers. Even your archenemies bitter defeat isn’t doing much to improve your mood.

“We can get you one.” Brendon says from his position on the couch as he twists his head, his full attention coming to rest on you. “But what you really need is a change up.”

“What does that even mean?” You ask, scowling as you attempt to decipher his words.

His gaze slips to your stump, his dark eyebrows furrowing as if he’s doing math. You can see the cogs slowly turning and it pisses you off even more than you aren’t part of whatever conversion he’s doing in his head.

“Alright…” He says finally, rising to his feet. “We’re four weeks post op so I think I should be able to get away with doing this.”

“What are you– ummphhh.” Your question is drowned out when he literally picks you up from the wheelchair and tosses you over his shoulder.

“Does this hurt?” He asks, adjusting his grip because you’re now about five pounds lighter and your weight disruption is a little uneven.

“No you neanderthal, it doesn’t.” You land a smack right on his ass from your new vantage point. The sound vibrates through the room and you can feel his smile against your hip as he playfully bites your ass through your shorts, making you yelp.

“Good.” He says taking you with him on his journey into the open plan kitchen. “Because we’re going to fix some shit.”

He sets you down on the worksurface carefully, adjusting your hips with his palms so that your stump isn’t hanging over the edge of the counter. “What about the kitchen isn’t working for you?”

You run your hand through your hair, shoving it away from your features as you gesture at the kettle, the biggest offender in this space. “Everything is too far away when I’m in my chair. The appliances, the teabags, the mugs. I almost fall out of it, trying to reach them.”

“Shit.” He states his eyes sweeping over your form before assessing his own. “I forgot you’re almost a foot shorter than me so when I was testing out what you could reach with a dining chair...”

“Oh.” You say, because that is incredibly romantic in its own special little way. “You actually did that?”

“Yeah.” He says scrubbing his palm over the back of his neck as he pulls a face at his own mistake. “I thought I was being helpful, but I guess there were some factors I should have taken into consideration.”

“You were helpful.” You assure him as he drifts towards the opposite side of the kitchen and begins to adjust the location of the appliances you like to use. “You just forgot I’m a shortass.”

The edges of his mouth tip up as he shifts the kettle into a more manoeuvrable space, the tea station comes next, along with the mug you like to use. “Alright then shortass, you can do the things on your side of the counter and I’ll do mine.”

It takes a couple of minutes for the two of you to reorganise the kitchen but in the aftermath, you feel better already, seeing everything you need within arm’s reach. It’s a good step towards your independence, especially when Brendon returns to work in a few days.

“Ok passenger princess.” Brendon parks himself between your thighs, his palms coming to rest on the counter alongside your hips as he steals a kiss. “What’s next on our agenda?”

“The bookshelf.” You tell him, your fingers running his hair making him arch like a cat against you. It’s getting a little long these days, just enough for you to grab in your fists if you were that way inclined, and you do feel inclined, very inclined. You’re just scared of how different things are going to be when you do eventually decide to get back on that horse. “I can only reach the shelf I’m eye level with, so we need to move the pictures to a higher one and those ones down…and they’re in the wrong order.”

That kind of thing, it drives you absolutely fucking crazy. You can’t wait to pull them all off the shelf and reorganise them.

“So, the problem is you can’t reach your billionaire romances or your murder mysteries. We can fix that… hold on.”

His hands slide under your ass, grasping it so your core is snug against his cock. Your fingers lace at the back of his neck as he lifts you again, holding on for dear life as he manhandles you.

Christ you’ve missed his, having his hands on you. There’s no tentativeness, no unsurety, just the skilled dexterity of the man you love as he carries you back towards the couch.

“Oh, what are you…” He sets you down on his side of the sofa, the one that hasn’t been indented with years of you sitting there.

“I’m putting you down in my seat.” He explains, rearranging the cushions behind you. “You have a different shape now, so you need something a little more firmer, that’s more supportive of your leg. How does that feel?”

“Better actually. A lot better.” You admit, testing the flexibility of the cushion. It’s unrelenting under your weight, keeping your thigh situated without putting additional pressure on your hip.

“Good.” He says, moving away to procure your books but you catch his hand, tugging him back to you.

“Bren.” You say softly, the anxiety filtering into your voice. “I want to talk about sex.”

“OK.” He says dropping down into the seat alongside you. His arm rests on the back of the sofa, his fingertips stroking gently through your hair, soothing you as you try to find the words.

“You know things are going to be different right?” You blurt out and his eyes narrow as he tries to understand your concerns. “I’m not the same person I was before, my body is… it’s not that I don’t feel sexy, which is weird because I lost a leg and that makes most people feel incredibly unsexy. It’s just when we do get to do that again… I’m going to need help, our go to positions, the kinky shit we did… I’m not sure of how much of that we’ll be able to do anymore. We’ll have to make adjustments, it’s probably going to be a little weird...”

“You mean we’ll get to explore lots of new and interesting things together.” Brendon breaks into the conversation, his fingers trailing along your jaw, tipping up your chin so he can look into your eyes. “I think, when you are ready to dip your toes back into the pool the two of you are going to have a lot of fun figuring out what works for us.”

“Yeah?” You say almost shyly as his thumb traces over the shape of your lips, dragging the lower one down just enough to make sparks shoot through your body. “You really think that?”

“I know that Rae.” He says softly, leaning over to capture your mouth. That kiss, it’s filthy. It makes your heart race, your blood pumping through veins as his tongue swipes along the seam of your mouth. “You and me, we’re going to have a lot of fun.”

Like My Work? - Tip your friendly fan fic writer here!

Tony had been shamelessly flirting with you since the first day he laid eyes on you. Something about Pepper’s innocent little assistant just drove him absolutely nuts.

And those mini skirts you wore around the office? He could have sworn you were doing it just for him. And don’t even get him started on when you wore pants—your ass had never looked better.

So when he finally got you into his bed, he made sure you had the best seat in the house: his face.

You cute little innocent thing, you really thought you were going to hurt him if you put your full weight on him. To prove you wrong, he secured his strong hands around you, pinning you flush against him before he started expertly licking and sucking on your clit. You threw your head back in pure pleasure, the vibration of Tony's low groans echoing underneath you.

It wasn’t the first time you’d been eaten out, but it was definitely the first time a man had devoured you exactly the way God intended.

Tony was utterly lost, taking his sweet time to explore your folds with his expert tongue while his nose nudged at your clit, flicking it to absolute perfection.

Every flick of his tongue was precise, finding the exact rhythm that made your toes curl and your breath hitch. He started sucking on your clit once again, pulling you into his mouth until you were whimpering his name, your hips helplessly rolling against his face.

He had never been so damn hard in his entire life. 

Unable to take it anymore, he slipped one of his hands down to the hem of his briefs, freeing his thick cock.

With your head still thrown back, you opened your heavy eyes, only to catch your reflection in the mirror on the ceiling directly above the bed.

“You like what you see?” Tony mumbled against you, noticing how you immediately bucked your hips against his mouth at the sight.

Your eyes stayed glued to the ceiling mirror, slowly tracking down from his broad chest and marked abs to where his hand was now rhythmically stroking his length. Your cheeks flushed a deep, breathless crimson.

“You like being dirty, don’t you?” he asked, though it sounded a whole lot more like a statement. 

You only bit your lip, nodding as a breathless gasp escaped you. The sheer sight of Tony Stark completely beneath you, driven absolutely crazy just by eating you out, was something you found mind-numbing, extremely hot.

You could stop looking at how he stroked himself. 

Tony smiled against your skin, his chest vibrating with a low laugh. “The shy ones are always the naughtiest,” he murmured, before immediately diving back into his ministrations.

SET AFTER:

Rockstar - Brendon Park meets his match against PTMC's fiery new attending.

Pussy Wagon - A spilled drink leads you to see a different side of your nemesis Park The Shark.

The First Time (NSFW) - Fireworks aren't the only explosive thing happening at Jesse's Fourth of July party.

A Loaded Gun (NSFW) - Hate sex has never been so fucking hot...

This Is Not A Love Story - Brandon tries to set a rule after a 'sticky' situation.

The Game - Brendon finds himself breaking his own rules when it comes to you.

Pittfest -Brendon comforts you when you fall apart after the events of Pittfest.

Is He Prettier Than Me? - Brandon gets curious when he learns you have other plans.

The Drawer - Brendon realises your relationship may be shifting when he discovers he has a drawer at your place.

Scrunchies - Scrunchies… they’re the downfall of Brendon Park.

Love Games (NSFW) - Brendon and you love to play games, especially with each other.

An Exquisite Form of Torture (NSFW) - Brendon continues to turn up the heat as he holds you captive.

THAT Guy - Brendon is forced to face up to his feelings for you when he finds out your meeting up with an ex.

Seven Days - Seven days is far too long to go without you...

Save It - A thirty six hour shift leads to another admission about your relationship with Brendon.

Doctor Dick - Brendon's day takes a turn when Whitaker gives him some critical information.

A Manipulative Fuck - You and Brendon discuss what happened with your ex.

The Call (NSFW) - Brendon decides to put a stop to David's calls once and for all.

The One That Hates The Ravens - David's attempt at revenge backfires spectacularly.

The Lovin Spoonful - You wake up to an unexpected surprise.

Delete, Block, Rinse, Repeat - A series of cryptic messages force Brendon to confront a secret he's been keeping for almost a decade.

His Father's Son - Brendon reflects on the past as he debates taking that first sip of whiskey.

The Cost of Dignity - Brendon's greatest secret comes with a cost.

A Kiss For Luck - Brendon struggles to navigate working at the hospital after the release of THAT video.

The Craziest Fucking Thing - You take matters into your own hands after receiving bad news from Brendon.

Ride Or Die - You wake up to the sound of an angry blender after Brendon discovers what happened with Rowena.

Baby Shark - Once a year Brendon always ends up back at the aquarium.

Diamonds (NSFW) - A bet leads to naughty shenanigans in a five star restaurant.

The Call Out - Brendon's focus on wedding planning is disrupted when he's called out to the scene of a multi-car pile up.

Good Hands - Abbot reminds Brendon you're in good hands as they proceed with the amputation.

Flayed - Brendon's world crashes down as he learns the truth about the accident.

Ten Things I Love About You - Brendon discovers a pink envelope in the pocket of the jacket you were wearing at the time of the accident.

The Parent Trap - Brendon faces your parents, leading to a surprise revelation.

Sledgehammer - Brendon struggles to cope in the aftermath of everything that's happened.

Et Tu Marianne? - Your mother throws Brendon under the bus after you wake up from surgery.

The Fucking Patient - Abbot has some harsh words for Brendon regarding your care.

Chemistry - You and Brendon finally have a moment alone to talk.

A Serial Absconder - Your habit of disappearing leads to a healing journey Brendon doesn't expect.

You’re anxious.

You don’t tell Brendon that, but he can sense it underneath the surface as you sit inside the car he’s rented because your wheelchair won’t fit in the Porshe without total disassembly. He’s thinking of trading it in, getting something that will suit your needs more.

“I know that this is scary.” He says gently as your hands curl into fists, the fabric of your shorts bunching up as you grip it. “But you’re ready to come home, they wouldn’t have let you out if you weren’t.”

“It’s not that.” Your jaw clenches as you suck in a breath, holding it for a couple of seconds before exhaling. “It’s the car. I haven’t been in one since the accident, it’s… I didn’t expect it to be so tough.”

He kicks himself for not thinking of that. He’d been so focused on making sure the house was ready, that you had everything you needed that he didn’t even think about the journey from A to B.

“I’ll take it slow.” He offers. If he could take this away from you, helicopter you home instead, he would but the yard is only so big, and that cost would be even more than he could afford. “We can stop if you need to, just say the word…”

You nod shakily, your shoulders tensing as he turns on the engine.

“Would it help if you closed your eyes and put on one of your Quinn stories in your earbuds?” He suggests. Distraction was always something his own counsellor recommended when he was trying to curb his drinking. “Yes Chef, always seems to make you laugh, or there’s that one about the sexy groundskeeper.”

The edges of your mouth tip up into a smile as you reach into your fanny pack in search of your headphones. It’s new, something he picked up a couple of days ago when he realised how much you had to juggle in terms of navigating your altered balance and carrying a purse. It’s been a saving grace on your many trips around the hospital. Everything you need is right there in reach.

“I find it interesting it you know the contents of my Quinn originals.” You note as you open the tiny white container and take out your earbuds. “Do you want to roleplay chopping wood while I pretend to be a princess?”

“I prefer going down on you in the kitchen.” He shoots back before considering the other scenario. There is a wood burner in your new house, and he could see you getting a little hot and bothered as you sit on the decking in the garden watching him swing an axe. “But I could be persuaded into a little lumberjack fantasy.”

You cackle as you hook up your Bluetooth to your headphones. He waits until you’re settled, eyes closed, head leaning against the headrest before he pulls out of the disabled parking space and hits the road. Your fist clenches again but you take another deep breath dispelling that nervousness just like in the exercises your therapist has been teaching you.

It’s a short journey, only twenty minutes. He takes it as carefully as he can, trying not to agitate your anxiety. When he pulls up outside the house, his hand comes to rest on your good knee squeezing gently.

“We’re home.” He says softly as you pull out your ear buds.

You open your eyes, your breath catching. You press your fingers to your lips, your eyes glossy as you stare at the house in front of you with two hanging baskets full of flowers and a wheelchair ramp leading up to the front door. “You didn’t…”

“It was meant to be a wedding gift.” He tells you as your hair falls over your features so he can’t read your expression. “Your something new but then the accident happened and it seemed the perfect place for you to recover since your apartment was on the third floor and the stairs in my condo would have killed you.”

“Did you move all of my stuff in?” Your voice is small, unreadable. His heart starts to pound, every beat thudding against his ribcage as the blood rushes in his ears.  

“Everything is in there.” He confirms, his knuckles turning white as he grips the steering wheel. “I wanted it to feel like home for you, for you to be around all your things. I did have to put the rugs and coffee table into storage for now as they aren’t wheelchair friendly but once you get your new leg you’ll have better mobility so we can bring them back out again.”

There’s silence, it hangs heavy between the two of you before he breaks it. “Did I fuck up?”

You shake your head with a sniffle, and that’s when he realises you’re crying. It’s the first time you’ve shed a tear since this whole thing happened and it breaks his fucking heart.

“Oh Rae.” He unfastens his seat belt and reaching over the console to wrap his arm around your shoulders. He draws you into the shelter of his form, the back of your head resting in the crook of his neck as he kisses your hair. “I know this is a lot of change, but we’ll find our way.”

“It’s not that.” You tell him, using the back of your hand to wipe away the tears that mar your cheeks. “It’s just so perfect, you’ve thought of everything and I just… I’m so fucking lucky to have you in my life.”

“No.” He says fiercely, his lips brushing over your temple. “I’m the lucky one, you saved me Rae, you really did. You lit a fire in me… first by pissing me off and then…” He trails off but you understand, he knows you do. “Do you want to see inside?”

“Yeah.” You say brushing more tears away from underneath your eyes. “I really do.”

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Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 10 October 2025

Max woke at 07:03 to an empty bed and the immediate, unpleasant certainty that Ana had done something deeply Ana with the morning.

For one stupid second, still halfway in sleep, he reached across the mattress expecting warmth and found only the cool sheet and the soft dent where she had been.

He opened one eye.

The bedroom was washed in that early Monaco light. 

The house was quiet. Too quiet. Not the good quiet of two people still asleep and the world held briefly at bay.

Working quiet.

Max lay there for another few seconds, listening.

Nothing from the shower.

Nothing from the kitchen.

No clatter of mugs or the low murmur of the coffee machine or the sound of Ana moving through domestic space with that clipped, efficient softness of hers.

Then, faintly, from downstairs—

Her voice.

Not close.

Lower in the house.

Sharper than normal.

Max closed his eyes.

Of course.

He pushed himself upright more carefully than pride would have preferred, negotiated the leg, the crutches, the general insult of being a man in recovery, and made his way downstairs in sleep trousers and a T-shirt with his hair doing whatever the hell it wanted.

The kitchen was empty.

The cats were nowhere to be found. 

From below, Ana’s voice rose again, clear enough now to be understood.

“No, Solomon, that is not what I said. That would be idiotic. I said if the second fault tree still assumes single-point validation under full load, then you are building optimism into a system that should be structurally incapable of optimism. Those are not the same sentence.”

There was a pause.

Then Ana again:

“No, I don’t care that it worked in simulation. It works until it doesn’t, and by the time it doesn’t, someone is in a wall at three hundred kilometres an hour. Try again.”

Max stood in the kitchen for a second, staring into the middle distance, and thought, with total clarity:

Well.

He forced himself down the basement staircase, (he had crutches now, damnit, he didn’t need the goddamn elevator) and found the door to Ana’s basement office open. 

The office looked like the inside of Ana’s brain if it had been given square footage and no budget. 

Screens everywhere. Notes. Systems diagrams. 

A wall of organized brilliance that made him feel, not for the first time, that he had somehow gotten romantically involved with the concept of terrifying competence and it had turned out very well for him personally.

Sassy had curled herself together on the couch in Ana‘s office.

Ana was barefoot in her pyjamas. Meanwhile, Jimmy had decided that sitting on Ana‘s lap was the best place to be. 

That, somehow, made it worse.

Or better.

Nastya was wearing striped pyjama trousers that were so old that the fabric was washed out and had an underminable colour and one of his shirts. 

Her hair was tied up, glasses on, one leg folded underneath her in the desk chair as if she had simply descended here before dawn and become part of the systems architecture herself.

She did not look around when he came in.

She just lifted one hand briefly in acknowledgment and kept talking into the headset.

“No. No, listen to me. You are still assuming the driver will have time to compensate if the arbitration layer hesitates.” She clicked something on the screen with sharp irritation. “That assumption is unacceptable. If I can see the delay in the model, the driver will definitely feel it.”

Max stopped about halfway into the room.

There it was.

The thing he had never really gotten to see properly before.

Not Ana working generally. 

He’d seen that. 

Everyone had. She was always working, or thinking, or rearranging some problem until the world behaved better. But this—this specific version of her, deep inside Mercedes, fully in command, furious about systems and safety and the scale of consequence—this was different.

It was fascinating.

It was also kind of hot.

Which felt like a poor character trait given that she was currently verbally disassembling one of the best systems engineers in Formula One before breakfast.

“Solomon,” she said, in a tone that made Max almost want to apologize on Solomon’s behalf despite having no idea what the technical argument actually was, “if I ask for redundancy, I do not mean decorative redundancy. I mean I want the kind that survives contact with reality. Please stop giving me the engineering equivalent of a false wall in a murder mystery.”

A beat.

Then, colder: “No. I’m not being dramatic. You’re just all being intellectually lazy.”

Max leaned on the crutches and watched. 

This, he thought, was honestly incredible.

Also, somewhere under the admiration and the very real attraction, there was the more domestic and much more inconvenient fact that she should stop and come eat breakfast with him like a normal person instead of doing engineering warfare in pyjamas at seven in the morning while scratching his cat under his chin. 

Ana clicked through another set of diagrams on the leftmost screen, eyes narrowed.

The whole thing had a pattern to it, he realized after a minute.

She was not actually angry with Solomon. Not in the personal sense. Irritated, yes. Ruthless, yes. But what sharpened her was something else.

Fear, maybe. Or not fear exactly. Urgency.

Because every time she came back to the point, it was the same axis.

Not elegance. Not performance. Not even only competitiveness.

Driver safety.

The car not lying. The system not hesitating. The architecture not expecting a human being to save it from itself at two hundred miles an hour.

And Max felt that knowledge settle into him with strange quiet force: nobody in that building, possibly nobody in the sport, was as insane about systems and driver safety as Ana was.

Nobody.

Because for most people it was engineering. For her it was personal.

Ana finally looked over and saw him properly.

Just for a second, something in her face softened.

Then she held up one finger—one minute—and went right back to destroying Solomon Becker’s self-esteem.

“No,” she said. “You don’t get to say ‘good enough’ to me about this. Not after Baku. Not ever again.”

That shut the room up.

Even through the phone, Max could tell.

Ana leaned back slightly, rubbing once at the bridge of her nose with the hand not holding the headset.

Then, quieter and somehow more dangerous:

“Fix it and send me the revised model before lunch. If Elliott signs off on the same compromised logic again, I’m coming to Brackley and becoming everyone’s problem in person.”

A longer pause.

Then: “Yes. Excellent. Thank you. Goodbye.”

She ended the call.

The room went still.

Ana stayed exactly where she was for one second longer, eyes on the screens, like she was still mentally three layers deep in the system and needed to climb back out manually.

Then she pushed the headset off and turned toward him.

“Good morning.”

Max stared at her.

“You’re insane.”

“Yes,” she said. “Good morning to you too.”

He came closer, slower because of the leg, and stopped beside the desk.

“You’ve been down here doing Mercedes work in pyjamas at seven in the morning.”

Ana took off her glasses and rubbed at one eye. “That is a fairly ordinary event.”

“It is not ordinary.”

“It is for me.”

“That’s the problem.”

That got the smallest flicker at one corner of her mouth.

Max looked at the screens, then back at her.

“You were calling Solomon an idiot.”

“I was calling a systems assumption idiotic,” she corrected. “Solomon merely happened to be nearby.”

“Interesting distinction.”

“It matters. Solomon isn’t an idiot. Solomon is very smart.”

He let that go because, probably, in Ana’s world, it actually did matter.

Instead he asked, “What was that about?”

Ana leaned back in the chair.

“The arbitration layer,” she said. “There’s still too much lag under compounded fault assumptions. It’s not catastrophic, but it’s not good enough.” Her jaw tightened briefly. “And Solomon keeps trying to solve for elegant compromise when I want structural paranoia.”

Max nodded once.

That made sense. Of course it did.

Because yes—there it was again, plain as anything. No one was going to be as unreasonable about this as she was, because no one else was carrying the same internal equation between systems failure and flesh.

“No one else is as insane about this as you are,” he said quietly.

Ana looked at him.

“No,” she agreed. “Probably not.”

No denial. No false modesty. Just fact.

Max rested his hand lightly on the back of her chair.

“And because of that,” he said, “you should stop before breakfast and come eat with me like a person.”

That made her actually look faintly offended.

“I am a person.”

“I know, but you are currently also a basement gremlin with a headset.”

She exhaled through her nose.

Not quite a laugh. Close.

Then she looked back at the screens.

For a second he thought she might refuse.

Instead she said, a little too casually, “I may go with them to COTA.”

Max stilled.

Not because the sentence surprised him. Because he could hear everything under it that she was not saying.

Mercedes. 

The car. 

The need to be there if the architecture wasn’t settling into shape fast enough for her to trust it from another continent.

He looked at her profile.

“Okay.”

That made her glance back at him.

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

Ana studied his face as if she were checking for hidden hurt.

Max shrugged one shoulder.

“I’m going to miss you,” he said. “A lot.” Then, because that also deserved to be said cleanly: “But go, if you need to, Nastya.”

Something in her face changed then. Not relief exactly. Something quieter. More dangerous.

Because maybe she had expected resistance.

Or guilt.

Or one of those soft selfishnesses couples sometimes called love when what they really meant was choose me over the thing that steadies your mind.

Max reached out and tucked one loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“I understand,” he said.

And he did.

Because this was part of loving Ana: understanding that sometimes the thing she needed most was not comfort or rest or being persuaded to stay home and let other people fail.

Sometimes what she needed was to go directly toward the problem and force it into a safer shape with her own hands.

Ana looked down for a second.

Then said, quietly, “Thank you.”

Max bent and kissed her forehead.

“You can thank me by coming upstairs and eating breakfast before you start another war with Brackley.”

“That was not a war.”

“That was absolutely a war.”

“It was a disagreement.”

“You threatened to become everyone’s problem in person.”

Ana considered that.

“That was simply motivational.”

Max laughed then, because honestly, what else was there to do.

Then he held out a hand.

“Come on.”

She looked at it. Then at him. Then at the screens.

And finally, with the visible reluctance of a woman leaving behind several active lines of thought she would absolutely return to, she put her hand in his and let him pull her carefully to her feet.

The basement office glowed behind them with charts and systems and the future of Mercedes depending, apparently, on whether enough men in Brackley learned to fear her before lunch.

Max led her toward the stairs anyway.

Breakfast first.

Then global engineering domination.

***

Wolff Residence, Monaco - 10 October 2025

Toto knew Jack had noticed before his son said a word.

That was the problem with children, especially bright ones and especially their children: they missed great sweeping abstractions all the time and then clocked, with surgical accuracy, the one thing you had hoped might pass beneath notice. 

A changed tone. A silence held half a second too long. The wrong kind of quiet between adults who usually knew how to move around one another without leaving sharp edges in the air.

Breakfast was soft-boiled eggs, toast, berries, and coffee that Toto did not particularly taste.

The kitchen was full of morning light. 

Susie was standing at the island in a blouse and slim dark trousers, moving through the final stages of breakfast with her usual efficient calm. Jack sat at the table in his school uniform, building a precise wall out of strawberries at the edge of his plate before eating the fruit itself, because apparently that was the order things were happening in today.

Toto sat opposite him with the paper open and unread.

That, he suspected, was probably what gave him away.

Jack looked up from his strawberries.

Then at Susie. Then at Toto. Then back at his strawberries again.

Finally he said, with the unnerving directness of children who had not yet learned adults often preferred to be lied to gently: “Did you have a fight?”

The question sat in the morning light like a dropped spoon.

Toto looked up over the newspaper. Susie, by the coffee machine, did not move for one beat.

Then she turned and said, very evenly, “Why do you ask?”

Jack shrugged one shoulder in that particular way children did when they were trying to make instinct sound like nothing at all. “You’re being weird.”

Toto let out one breath through his nose that might have been a laugh under better circumstances. “That’s quite vague.”

Jack looked at him with deep eight-year-old skepticism. “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

That, Toto thought, was unfortunately fair.

Susie brought the coffee over and set one cup by Toto’s hand, then sat beside Jack and reached to straighten the collar he had already straightened twice himself.

“We’re all right,” she said. “We just had a difficult adult conversation.”

Jack considered that.

Then, with the graciousness of a child allowing adults one chance to recover their dignity, nodded once.

“Okay.”

He bit into a strawberry.

Toto looked at Susie over the rim of his coffee.

She did not quite look back, but the corner of her mouth moved by a fraction in a way that said: later.

Jack, having apparently decided not to interrogate his parents‘ marriage before school, moved on to the next logistical concern in his universe.

“We’re still going to Scotland this afternoon, right?”

That one Toto could answer without having to think.

“Yes.”

Jack brightened immediately. “With Ana and Max.”

“Yes.”

“And Mama.”

“Yes,” Susie said, smoothing butter over her toast. “I’m included in the trip to my home country, darling.”

Jack ignored the tone entirely, because sarcasm was one of the many linguistic arts he recognized without yet respecting.

“Good,” he said. “Because I already told Matteo I was going.”

Susie actually smiled at that.

Toto watched it happen with a kind of tired gratitude. Whatever had lived between them the night before had not vanished, exactly, but the shape of it had altered in daylight. Less incendiary. More precise. Still there. Still waiting.

Jack, blissfully unaware of the emotional architecture beneath the kitchen table, continued with the breathless importance of a child with plans.

“Will Ana and Max come straight after school?”

Toto looked at him, then at Susie, then back again. “That’s the plan.”

Jack nodded, satisfied. “And then we fly.”

“Yes.”

“And Jimmy and Sassy are staying here.”

“Yes.”

Jack speared another strawberry with exaggerated seriousness. “Good.”

Toto stared at him for a second. “What?”

Jack looked up. “I like when the plans stay the same.”

There it was.

Small. Simple. Load-bearing.

Toto glanced at Susie without meaning to.

She had heard it too, of course she had, and her face had gentled in that particular quiet way it did around Jack when he said something more revealing than he intended. “Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”

Breakfast finished without further emotional catastrophe.

Jack found his shoes. Then his schoolbag. Then the one notebook he was convinced had vanished forever and was, naturally, exactly where it always belonged. 

Jack talked most of the way to school.

About a Lego structure that needed improving. About a teacher who didn’t understand the superiority of neat columns. About whether Scottish rain was “worse” than Monaco rain or just “more committed.”

Toto answered where required.  Susie did better. 

At the school gates, Jack stopped before getting out of the car and looked between them one last time.

“You’re okay, right?”

The question was quieter than the one at breakfast. More careful. Less interested in being correct than in being reassured.

And this time Toto answered before Susie could. “Yes,” he said.

Jack looked at him. Toto held his gaze. “Yes,” he repeated, more steadily. “We’re okay.”

Jack nodded once, accepted it, and climbed out with the swift resilience of a loved child already being pulled toward the next adventure.

They watched him run toward the entrance, turn once to wave, then disappear into school.

The car was quiet after that.

Toto started the engine and pulled back into Monaco traffic, the morning already sharpening around them, heading now not home but toward Ana’s house.

For a while Susie said nothing.

Neither did he.

The city slid past in bright fragments—stone, glass, sea, clipped greenery, expensive silence.

Then, when they were three lights away from the house and there was no longer enough road left to pretend the conversation could be indefinitely postponed, Susie said:

“Next time.”

Toto kept his eyes on the road. He knew that tone too.

Not anger now. Not the white-hot version of the night before.

Something steadier. Colder. Still absolute.

“Next time,” she repeated, “I want to hear it from you. Unprompted.”

Toto tightened his hands on the steering wheel.

“Yes.”

Susie turned slightly toward him.

“I mean it, Toto.”

“I know.”

“No,” she said, voice still quiet. “I want to be very clear. I do not ever again want to learn something so fundamental about what happened to our daughter because someone else happened to mention it.”

He swallowed once.

The word our in her mouth still had the power to undo him at strange angles. Not because it was new. 

It really wasn’t. But it was becoming official, and because sometimes the legal shape of love arrived after the real one.

“You should have heard it from me earlier,” he said.

“Yes,” Susie replied. “I should have.”

The car moved through another turn, sunlight flashing hard off the windscreen.

Toto exhaled slowly. “I told myself,” he said, “that if it was old, and already over, and I could not change it, then dragging it up again would only make more pain.”

Susie was quiet for one beat. Then: “That’s a very convenient theory for the person who withheld the information.”

He shut his eyes briefly at the red light, then opened them again. “Yes.”

“I’m not asking for perfection.”

“I know.”

“I’m asking that you stop deciding, on your own, what I do and don’t need to know about Ana.”

That was fair. More than fair.

“Yes,” he said again.

Susie looked out the window for a moment, then back at him.

“You don’t get to protect me from the difficult things about her childhood,” she said. “Not if what you’re actually doing is protecting yourself from having to say them aloud.”

That one hurt because it was true.

Toto drove the next stretch in silence. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone lower.

“I am trying,” he said, “to stop doing that.”

Susie’s face softened. Not much. Enough.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m still here having this conversation in the car instead of making you discover my absence by lunchtime.”

That got a short breath of laughter out of him, tired and real. “Comforting.”

“It was meant to be instructional.”

He nodded once. That, too, was fair.

They turned through the gates a minute later. The house stood bright and elegant against the garden, all glass and pale stone and deliberate calm, as if it had no idea that inside it lived one of the most formidable women he knew and several of the most emotionally complicated decisions of his life.

Toto parked and killed the engine.

For a second neither of them moved.

Then Susie reached for the door handle and said, without looking at him: “Today is about paperwork.”

“Yes.”

“And after that we fly to Scotland with the children.”

That word again. Children.

“Yes.”

She turned to him then, one hand still on the door.

“Try to remember,” she said, “that being ashamed of what happened to Ana is only useful if it makes you better now.”

Then she got out of the car.

Toto sat where he was for one second longer, looking at the front door of the house where his daughter was waiting, where Max would probably appear in the hall on crutches and try to look as though he had not been listening for the car. 

Then he opened the door and followed his wife inside.

***

Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 10 October 2025

Susie saw Ana before Ana saw her.

The house was bright with late morning light, all pale stone and sea-glass calm, the kind of house that made beauty look inevitable.  

Nikolai had let them in.  

Toto had gone still beside her in the hall in that way he sometimes did now around Ana’s home. A kind of reverence sharpened by guilt.

Susie barely noticed him.

Ana was standing at the kitchen island in dark trousers and a soft blouse, hair pulled back badly enough that it had to have been done in a hurry, one hand curled around a coffee cup she had clearly forgotten to drink from. Max was opposite her, looking like a man trying to be upright and useful and mildly offended by the concept of physiotherapy before noon.

And yet there she was.

There she was.

Not as a story. 

Not as a child reconstructed from other people’s failures.

Not as the little eight-year-old girl  Susie had spent half the night imagining in rooms that had not loved her properly.

Just Ana.

Alive. Elegant. Tired around the eyes. Existing in a house that looked built for her rather than around her.

Susie felt the ache of it hit low and clean before she had time to brace against it.

Because this was the terrible thing about loving children who had not been handed to you young enough: you could see the ghost versions too. 

The baby you never got to rock against your shoulder. 

The little girl you never got to kneel in front of and zip into her coat and tell she was allowed to cry properly. 

The thin, watchful child Susie had not known until it was far too late to protect from the earliest wounds.

Ana looked up then and saw them.

Her whole face changed.

Just enough to unmake Susie in one quick, private place under her ribs.

“Hi,” Ana said.

There was tiredness in it. And relief. And no idea at all, Susie realized instantly, that anything had changed between the adults since yesterday.

Good, Susie thought with a cold steadiness that surprised even her. Let it stay that way for now.

Let Ana have one morning in her own house without having to manage the fallout of truths she had not asked to become current problems

“Hello, darling,” Susie said, and crossed the room.

Ana set the cup down just in time to be kissed on the cheek, brief and warm and entirely normal. Susie made it entirely normal by force.

Up close, she could see it more sharply: the fatigue still sitting under Ana’s skin, the slight too-tightness around her mouth that meant the therapy session with Toto and Dr. Chirac had cost more than Ana would ever publicly invoice for, the faint flattening of affect that came when her resources were being rationed carefully.

And beneath all of that— Toto’s eyes.

Not in a sentimental sense. Not merely the dark color. The expression sometimes. The way watchfulness lived behind composure. The way intelligence and restraint could sit in a face together and make softness look almost accidental until it arrived full force and caught you entirely unprepared.

Susie had always seen it.

She saw it now and hated, all over again, the fact that there had been years in which no one had looked at that face and thought first child before problem, adjustment, too much, too difficult, too adult to need what other children needed.

Mine, a fierce and almost irrational part of her thought.

Mine now.

Not by blood. Not by chronology. Not by anything old enough to satisfy people who confused biology with devotion.

But by love. By years. By choice.

They didn’t want her, that furious private part of Susie went on, meaner now, sharper.

Irina with her abandonment dressed up as necessity. Stephanie with her contempt. Johanna too, in her own unforgivable way.

They didn’t want her. I do.

The thought arrived with such clarity Susie had to smooth one hand lightly down Ana’s sleeve just to ground herself in the present and not the violence of all the lost years.

She’s mine. And nobody gets to touch her like that again.

“Everything all right?” Max asked, because he knew Susie well enough to clock when she had gone very still in some internal place and did not altogether trust the direction of travel.

Susie turned her head toward him and found him watching both her and Ana with the expression of a man who was actually extremely good at detecting danger once it involved someone he loved.

“Yes,” she said. Then, because that answer needed help: “Just looking at her.”

Ana looked faintly suspicious. “That sounds ominous.”

“It’s affectionate,” Susie said.

Max, traitorously, nodded. “That means it isn’t ominous.”

Ana gave them both a look and returned to her coffee.

Toto had stayed nearer the doorway for longer than usual, which Susie noted. He entered the room now, more carefully than he would have twenty-four hours earlier, and Ana glanced toward him with an ease that hurt Susie almost as much as it relieved her.

There it was again, that miracle she kept tripping over now that the worst of the truth had been named:

Ana still came back. Still let them in. Still stood in rooms with the people who had failed her in childhood and offered them her adulthood anyway.

Instead she said, briskly enough to clear the air, “What is the timing?”

Ana blinked once, pulled fully back into the present. “Lawyers in forty minutes. I need to change my shoes.”

Max made a face. “I am going to get tortured by Alastor.”

Toto, perhaps grateful beyond words for the reprieve into logistics, said, “That sounds dramatic.”

“It’s physiotherapy,” Max replied. “So yes.”

Ana looked at him over the rim of her cup, dry as dust. “Ask him what you should do this weekend.”

Max stared at her.

The room held for one perfect second while Susie watched the sentence land in its full domestic absurdity. 

A world champion, recovering from surgery, being clinically advised by his fiancée to use his physiotherapy appointment for homework allocation.

Max’s expression shifted into one of profound betrayal.

“Nastya, I love you so, so much,” he said, “but I also really hate you right now.”

Ana’s mouth moved at the corner. “That’s fair.”

Susie smiled despite herself.

Even Toto did, briefly.

Max looked at Ana with that peculiar blend of aggravation and devotion he seemed to reserve exclusively for her, then shook his head once as if resigning himself yet again to the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman whose primary instinct in moments of stress was to operationalize everyone.

“I’m serious,” he said. 

“So am I,” Ana replied. “You need a weekend plan that isn’t self-directed idiocy.”

“That is a very rude summary of my instincts.”

“It is an accurate one.”

Daniel should have been there to witness it, Susie thought. He would have died of delight.

Instead it was only the four of them in the kitchen, and the moment was small and ordinary in the best way—Max being handled, Ana being exact, Toto trying and failing not to stare at the two of them with the strange, slightly dazed expression of a father still adjusting to the emotional geography of his daughter’s actual life.

And Susie, standing in the middle of it, felt the legal meeting waiting ahead of them like a second heartbeat.

The adoption. The papers. The signatures. The officious language that would try to reduce something living and enormous into acceptable legal form.

She had thought about it half the night after leaving Toto alone with his shame. Thought about the absurdity of law catching up to love so late. Thought about how many people had touched the early shape of Ana’s life carelessly, inadequately, selfishly.

Not this time.

Not now.

They didn’t want her. I do.

The sentence kept returning, each time steadier, less grief and more vow.

She’s mine.

Which was not possession. Not conquest. Not a replacement fantasy for everything that had gone wrong before Susie arrived.

It was simpler and fiercer than that.

Mine to claim. Mine to defend. Mine to love without asking her to become smaller first.

“Ana,” Susie said.

Ana looked up again.

“Shoes,” Susie said. “Go.”

That got a faint flash of humor.

“Yes, Susie.”

Ana set down the cup and moved toward the stairs, and Susie watched her go with that same painful doubling of vision: the woman she was, all precision and tired elegance, and the little girl she had never gotten to hold.

She imagined eight-year-old Ana in Vienna and could have screamed.

Tiny. Trying too hard. No stuffed animal in her arms. No mother. No language yet for how the rooms kept teaching her that adults preferred her quiet.

Susie wanted to go backward in time and gather that child up bodily.

Wanted to sit her on a kitchen counter and put something soft in her hands and say, in a voice so certain it became law: You are not a guest. You are not too much. You are not temporary. You are not wrong for making sound.

Instead she stood in Monaco and waited for the adult version to come back downstairs in different shoes.

That was what loving older children required, she was learning. You did not get the beginning. You only got the now, and had to love fiercely enough that the now could hold some of what the beginning had dropped.

Max shifted his weight and looked at Susie.

“You all right?”

She turned to him. “Yes,” she said.

He watched her for a second as if deciding whether to believe that.

Then, because he was not stupid, he did something far more useful than probing.

“I’ll make sure her stuff is packed for Scotland after Alastor.” he said. 

Susie looked at him properly then.

And understood, not for the first time, why Ana loved him.

Not because he said the perfect thing. Because he so rarely tried to say the perfect thing at all.

He just positioned himself, over and over, between her and avoidable strain and called that love.

“Thank you,” Susie said.

Max shrugged one shoulder, as though this were nothing, as though taking care of Ana in the aftermath of legal meetings and therapy and childhood ghosts and upcoming family flights were merely the obvious structure of the day.

Toto, at the edge of the room, heard it too.

And Susie felt a flash of renewed anger—not at Max, never at Max, but at the fact that this man on crutches was more intuitively protective of Ana’s nervous system than some of the adults who had once had full custody of her childhood.

Good, a vicious little part of her thought.

Let it shame them all.

Ana returned a minute later in other shoes and and a matching blazer, hair slightly improved but not enough to suggest she had wasted effort on it.

Susie smiled immediately.

“There you are.”

Ana glanced between them all. “I assume we’re leaving.”

“We are,” Toto said.

Max pushed off from the counter and reached for his crutches. Ana crossed to him first, adjusting the fall of his shirt automatically where it had caught wrong near the shoulder. The intimacy of it was so unstudied that Susie had to look away for half a second, not because it embarrassed her, but because the tenderness of competent people taking care of each other in tiny habitual ways was one of the few things still capable of making her cry at inopportune times.

“All right,” Ana said to Max quietly. “Don’t let Alastor win.”

Max looked at her with deep offense. “That’s not how this works.”

“That’s quitter talk.”

“I truly love you,” he said again, “and I truly hate you a little.”

This time Ana smiled properly.

“There’s the spirit.”

Then she turned back to Susie and Toto.

“I’m ready.”

Susie picked up her bag and moved toward the door with the rest of them, but as they stepped into the hall, she let herself look at Ana one more time—not only as she was, but as all the ages inside her at once.

The baby she never held. The little girl she never got to tuck in. The teenager she had first met, far too thin and far too self-contained, already trying to pretend she needed less than she did. The woman standing here now, brilliant and tired and still somehow willing to let herself be loved.

Mine, Susie thought again, fiercely and without apology.

***

Baumgartner & Chevallier, Monaco - 10 October 2025

Clean pale stone. 

Quiet glass. 

A receptionist whose entire existence suggested confidentiality and expensive toner. 

The sort of building where documents did not merely get signed: they were executed, filed, witnessed, and then put into very serious folders that cost too much money.

There was a weird kind of peace in law offices as far as Ana was concerned. 

Ana sat beside Susie in one of the meeting chairs and watched Maitre Chevallier arrange papers into neat, inevitable piles.

Toto was on her other side, jacket on, expression controlled in that familiar way that meant he was treating the entire morning like something between a board matter and a surgical procedure.

Susie, by contrast, looked composed enough to frighten lawmakers in several jurisdictions. Her hand rested near Ana’s on the table, not touching, just there.

Maitre Chevallier turned a page and said, “As discussed, once these are signed, the petition proceeds formally. There will be a hearing, but given the circumstances, the residency, and the existing family structure, we do not foresee any issues.”

Any issues.

Ana almost smiled.

What an absurd phrase for the legal recognition of a relationship that had existed, in every way that mattered, for years already.

Any issues.

As if the difficulty had ever been paperwork.

She looked down at the first signature line.

The paper was cream. The pen heavy. The language exact in the way only legal language could be—clinical where ordinary life was not, flattening where feeling rose, but still useful because it made things legible to systems larger than any one family.

Susie signed first. Then Toto.

When the papers turned toward Ana, she took the pen and, for one brief second, just looked at her own hand.

Signing things had always felt stranger to her than it was for other people.

At Mercedes she signed AYW on contracts, NDAs, technical approvals, discreet internal documents that needed to move quickly between departments and lawyers and people who never quite looked directly at the amount of power hidden in neat handwriting. 

AYW was efficient. Corporate. Contained. Easy to repeat. An acronym version of a self that functioned well in systems.

But here, with legal paper in front of her and family seated beside her and the shape of this moment too intimate for initials, she wrote it properly.

Anastasia Yelena Wolff.

The name moved across the page with the old familiarity of something she had chosen and kept and grown into so fully that sometimes she forgot it had once been otherwise.

But it had been otherwise.

She had been born Anastasia Mikhailovna Solovyova.

That name still existed somewhere, she supposed. 

In old Russian documents maybe. Hospital records. The earliest legal traces of a child in Moscow with a grandmother who smelled faintly of tea and lavender and old books and whose piano had been the first place Ana had ever learned that repetition could become beauty.

Mikhailovna for a grandfather, because she hadn’t known her father then. Solovyova from a family line she had not kept.

Then Vienna.

Then lawyers.

Then the unraveling of that whole administrative catastrophe—custody arrangements, citizenship, names, permissions, signatures, translations, adults trying to sort a child’s existence into the boxes states required before they would agree she belonged anywhere at all.

She had not kept Solovyova. That had felt, even then, like a skin already shed.

She had taken Wolff.

Not because it erased Moscow or Irina or the whole wound of being dropped into Austria like an obligation with a passport. But because it had been her father‘s name. And a part of her had wanted to pretend that she was part of hi family, that she had the same right to carry that name as Benedict or Rosa had. 

She had chosen Yelena as her middle name.

Not Irina. Never Irina.

Yelena.

Her grandmother.

The person who had taught her to play.

The person who had looked at repetition and seen devotion instead of defect.

The person whose name she had wanted somewhere inside hers because grief, even then, had seemed easier to survive if she could carry a part of her grandmother with her everywhere she went.

So she had become Anastasia Yelena Wolff.

Not by birth. 

Not by clean inheritance. 

By survival, the legal system, and choice.

The lawyer slid another document toward her and she signed again.

Anastasia Yelena Wolff.

This one felt different.

Not a change of name this time.

Not a salvage operation.

Not the paper trail of a child being rearranged to fit.

This was recognition.

Of something already true.

Ana looked at Susie’s signature on the page above hers.

Steady. Elegant. Completely itself.

A ridiculous amount of feeling moved through her chest, fast and sharp enough that she had to focus on the line spacing of the next document to stop it from showing on her face.

Irina had not been in her life since she was thirteen.

That fact had hardened into simplicity over the years. 

There was no active ache left in it most days. Just a long-settled absence. An old, ridiculously deep cut that had scarred because it had had no choice.

But Susie—

Susie had always been there.

Not in the biological sense. Not in the legal one, until now.

In the practical, miraculous one that mattered more.

Susie had been there in Switzerland. 

In kitchens. 

In hallways. In school pick-ups and teenage silences and the slow, careful rebuilding of a nervous system that learned, around her, that not every adult required pre-emptive self-erasure.

Susie had never once made a distinction between Ana and Jack that suggested blood was the more meaningful category.

Not in comfort. Not in rules. Not in pride. Not in patience. Not in love.

Jack had never been made more legitimate by the fact of being Susie’s by birth. Ana had never been made less so by arriving as a teenager, stranger, already half-grown and carrying too much old damage.

To Susie, she had simply been… hers.

Which was a terrifyingly powerful thing to be, if the person in question meant it properly.

The lawyer was still speaking.

“…and then the court will simply want to confirm consent on all sides, the continuity of the parental relationship, and the established family unit.”

Established family unit.

Ana almost laughed again.

What an absurdly bloodless phrase for something that had held so much pain and luck and stubbornness to build.

She signed the last page and put the pen down carefully.

Across the table, Toto was watching her in that too-attentive way of his that had sharpened recently, as if he had finally understood how much could be hidden in a still face and now mistrusted every calm expression she wore.

Ana met his gaze briefly.

There was too much in it.

Pride. Guilt. Love. The strange, reverent fragility of a man being allowed to remain in a story he sometimes clearly thought he deserved to be cut from.

She looked away first, not out of rejection, but because she could not manage the weight of it while lawyers were still discussing hearing dates and procedural expectations.

Susie, meanwhile, had gone very quiet in the chair beside her.

The lawyer gathered the signed papers into their folder with the small formal finality of someone who understood that human lives often reached him in the flattened form of paper long after the difficult parts had already been lived.

“We will be in touch with the proposed date,” he said. “But truly, I don’t anticipate any complications.”

No complications.

Perhaps, for once, the law might actually be the easiest part.

They stood. Hands were shaken. The folder disappeared into professional custody.

And as they stepped back into the bright Monaco air, Ana paused for one brief second on the pavement outside the office.

The sea was visible at the far end of the street. A car moved quietly past. Somewhere nearby, an expensive café machine hissed steam into another polished morning.

Susie touched her arm lightly.

“You all right, darling?”

Ana looked at her.

At the woman who had never made her prove she belonged before offering love. 

At the woman who had somehow turned maternal love into something both gentle and immovable.

At the woman the law was only now catching up to.

And because this morning had already contained enough honesty to make one more piece survivable, she said quietly: “Yes.” Then, after a beat: “I think so.”

Susie smiled.

Smiled with that warm, unstartled softness that had calmed Ana’s nervous system for years before she’d ever had language for why.

“Good,” she said.

Toto opened the car door for them.

The hearing still lay ahead. The formalities. The judge.

But the signatures existed now.

The names existed now.

And as Ana got into the car, she thought—not of Irina, not really, and not of Moscow either, though Yelena lived in the center of her name and always would.

She thought: They didn’t want me.

And then, just as clearly: She does.

Wolff Residence, Monaco - 9 October 2025

Susie did not start the fight downstairs.

That was the only restraint she allowed herself.

She made it through the end of lunch. Through coffee and departures and the slow unwinding of plates and glasses and voices. She smiled when required. 

She watched Ana carefully from across rooms and doorways and saw enough to know that her girl was holding together by force of habit and old discipline. Tired, yes. Frayed at the edges, yes. But upright. Functional. Still performing competence for everyone else’s comfort.

Fine.

Susie could wait.

But the anger sat in her all through the afternoon like a blade heated white.

They left, picked Jack up from school, got through homework and playtime and dinner. 

She did every ordinary thing the evening required of her while fury moved through her in clean, cold lines. 

By the time the house went quiet and Jack was asleep and she and Toto were finally alone in their bedroom with the door shut, Susie was no longer interested in being delicate about any of it.

She turned to her husband while he was taking off his watch.“You never told me.”

Toto froze.

Just for a second. But it was enough.

He looked up slowly.

He knew exactly what she meant.

Of course he did.

Susie folded her arms so tightly across her chest her shoulders hurt.

“The keyboard,” she said. Her voice was flat in a way it only became when fury had gone cold enough to sharpen. “The headphones.”

Toto sat down on the edge of the bed, the watch still in his hand. For a second he only looked at her.

She stood by the wardrobe with her arms folded so tightly across her chest it was the only thing stopping her from starting to pace.

“Yes,” he said.

Susie let out one short, incredulous laugh.

“Yes?”

That was all he had.

No explanation. No context. No I meant to tell you. No I didn’t know how. Just yes, like he was admitting he’d forgotten to buy milk and not withheld something grotesque and formative and unforgivable.

She took a step toward him.

“You never told me,” she repeated. “You let me sit there and hear about my daughter having a keyboard and headphones because she was inconvenient to the adults around her, and you said nothing.”

“I was ashamed of it.”

That checked her for about half a second.

Then the fury came back hotter.

“Good,” Susie snapped. “You should be.”

Toto looked at her then, and whatever he’d expected, it hadn’t been that. Not the speed of it. Not the lack of cushioning.

Susie took a step toward him.

“No, actually, let’s not pretend this is one of those things where you confess your shame and I’m meant to soften because at least you feel bad now. I am glad you’re ashamed. I honestly would be alarmed if you weren’t.”

Toto’s jaw tightened. “Susie—”

“No.”

The word cracked through the room hard enough that he stopped immediately.

“Do not Susie me. Not yet.”

She was pacing now, unable to hold still any longer, rage moving through her too fast for elegance.

“Ana was a child, Toto. A child. And you are telling me this now, after years, like it is one more sad historical detail in a very long list of sad historical details, when in fact it tells me something absolutely foundational about the atmosphere she was raised in.”

He looked down.

That made her angrier.

“Look at me.”

He did.

“What else,” she demanded.

A pause.

Then, carefully, “What?”

“What else didn’t she have? What else did you take from her to keep the peace?”

He frowned faintly.

Susie stared at him. “No. Don’t do that. Don’t pretend not to understand me.”

She took another step closer.

“What else was negotiable because she was so ‘mature’ and so ‘clever’ and so wonderfully self-contained that none of the adults around her felt obliged to remember she was still a little girl?” Her voice rose now, sharpened by disgust. “Did she have toys? Anything soft? Anything silly? Anything comforting? Or was she expected to arrive in Vienna at eight years old and behave like some tiny little self-managing adult with good posture and no needs?”

Toto flinched. 

“She was always very mature,” he said.

Susie stared at him in open, furious disbelief.

Then she laughed.

One short, sharp, utterly disbelieving laugh.

“She was eight years old!”

Toto looked away.

She took another step toward him.

“Eight, Toto.”

He said nothing.

“The same age as Jack,” Susie said, and now the anger was in every word. “The same age as our little boy. Eight years old and dropped into a foreign country with a father she didn’t know and a woman who could not stand the sight of her, and your defense is that Ana was mature?”

His face tightened.

“Susie—”

“No. No, absolutely not.” She pointed at him. “Do not do that thing where you try to make it smaller by sounding sad. I am not interested in sad. I am interested in what happened to my child in your house.”

He looked at the floor.

Susie had spent too many years watching men mistake shame for accountability. Feeling bad was not the same as having done right.

She stepped toward him again.

“What else? Since we are apparently doing this properly now. Since today is the day I find out my little girl was treated like a domestic inconvenience and you thought I didn’t need the full version.”

She took another step.

“Did she have toys?”

He said nothing.

“Dolls?”

Nothing.

“Stuffed animals?”

His silence was answer enough, but she was angry enough now that she wanted the answer spoken aloud. She wanted him to hear the shape of it in his own voice.

“Toto.”

He looked away.

“No,” he said quietly.

Susie just stared at him.

“No stuffed animals,” she repeated.

He shook his head once. 

“She had books,” he said weakly.

“Of course she had books.” Her voice was acid. “Of course she had books. Because God forbid the gifted little autistic girl be permitted something as frivolous as comfort. Wonderful. Marvellous. Splendid. So when she was frightened, she could cuddle Tolstoy.”

Something ugly and grief-stricken moved through her so fast she had to turn away from him or risk saying something so vicious it would scorch the room.

She crossed to the window and stood there with her back to him, arms wrapped around herself so tightly it hurt.

No stuffed animals.

No wolf until Jack gave her one as an adult because an eight-year-old child had managed to clock something that none of the grown-ups around Ana had thought worth noticing

And suddenly she could see it—horribly, vividly, unbearably clearly. Not just what had happened to Ana. What had been withheld. All the ordinary softness around childhood erased because no one had insisted hard enough that she was still entitled to it.

No rabbit dragged by one ear through a hard week.

No bear under one arm when the world became too loud.

No stupid comfort object to absorb fear privately so the adults could keep pretending she was “so mature.”

“She had books,” Toto repeated weakly. Then, after a beat, as though he hated himself for the explanation even while reaching for it, “And Benedict and Rosa had so much already. Benedict was four. Rosa was barely one, maybe two. The house was full of baby things, toddler things, noise, plastic, stuffed toys everywhere. And Anastasia…” He stopped.

Susie’s eyes narrowed. “Ana what.”

Toto rubbed a hand over his face.

“She never showed any interest in them,” he admitted. “Not in their toys. Not in the dolls, or the stuffed animals, or any of it. Benedict would be on the floor with cars and blocks and Rosa with whatever she was dragging around, and Ana would just… not go near them.”

Susie went very still.

“And you assumed,” she said.

Toto looked up.

Her voice had gone colder now, which was always the most dangerous version of her anger.

“You assumed she wasn’t interested.”

He said nothing.

She laughed again, but this time there was nothing sharp about it. Only disbelief. Pure, bitter disbelief.

“Of course you did.”

“Susie—”

“No, say it.”

He closed his eyes briefly.

“I assumed she wasn’t interested,” he said at last. “She never asked. She never reached for those things. She’d sit with a book instead, or line up pencils, or just… watch.” His jaw tightened. “ I told myself if she wanted something, she would say so.”

The silence after that felt poisonous.

Susie stared at him as though she no longer recognized the shape of his thinking.

“She was eight,” she said again, quieter now and somehow even more furious. “She was eight years old, newly arrived, grieving, autistic, outnumbered by a household that already belonged to other children, and you told yourself she would simply announce her needs if she wanted comfort?!”

Toto looked down.

Benedict at four with his cars and toy dinosaurs and little-boy chaos.

Rosa still a baby, surrounded by soft things and bright things and the shameless clutter that naturally collected around children everybody agreed were still children.

And Ana, already older, already strange, already trying to make herself legible and unobtrusive in a house that was not hers.

Of course she hadn’t picked up their toys.

Of course she hadn’t reached for Benedict’s things or Rosa’s things or inserted herself into their childish little ecosystem and said, I need one too.

She had been eight, yes—but she had also been the outsider. The older child. The foreign child. The child who already understood too much about being in the wrong place and making the wrong demands.

Behind her, Toto said helplessly, “She has the wolf now.”

Susie wheeled around.

“Now?”

Her voice rose on the word, sharp enough to cut.

“Now?” she repeated. “As an adult? Because our son—our child—saw something you should have seen 20 years ago? Because Jack had the emotional intelligence to recognize something the grown-ups in her life apparently did not!”

Toto looked away.

“I know.”

“No,” Susie said, voice rising again. “You know now. I am asking whether you knew then. Whether any of you looked at a child who had already lost so much and thought perhaps she might need something soft to hold.”

He didn’t answer.

And in that silence, Susie got her answer.

Her anger changed shape again.

It got worse.

Because now it wasn’t only about Stephanie, or old cruelty, or some abstract marital failure that could be narrated into sad inevitability. 

It was about absence. Neglect dressed as pragmatism. A little girl shaped around what wasn’t provided until she became the sort of child who stopped asking.

“She was eight,” Susie said. “The same age as Jack. Jack, who still crawls into our bed when he has a nightmare. Jack, who still lines his stuffed animals up in specific order because that makes his brain feel better. Jack, who still needs one extra story and a ridiculous amount of reassurance over the correct positioning of a stuffed capybara to fall asleep properly. Eight, Toto. Eight is still a baby.”

He looked down again.

And now she was beyond patience with that too.

“Do not sit there and let me do all the emotional labour of saying this out loud while you stare at the floor like remorse is somehow a contribution.”

That made him look up immediately.

Good.

Susie took a deep breath, the anger still scorching her insides. “Did Stephanie ever hurt her?”

The question landed like a weapon.

Toto went still.

Utterly still.

And Susie knew.

Before he answered, she knew.

Because if the answer had been no, it would already have been out of his mouth.

She took a step back as though the room itself had become contaminated.

“Toto.”

He closed his eyes once.

When he opened them again, he looked like a man bracing for impact he had deserved for a very long time.

“Once,” he said.

Susie stared at him.

No.

No, that was not a survivable answer.

“What.”

His voice had gone flat, almost clinical now, as though he had to drain all the life out of the memory to make himself capable of saying it aloud. 

“Anastasia was ten,” he said. “She was in the middle of a meltdown. Panic attack, really, but at that age the distinction was not always clear in practice. Stephanie thought she was being defiant. Or theatrical. I don’t know.” He swallowed. “She slapped her.”

Something in Susie’s body went white-hot.

For one second she couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Could barely breathe around the force of what she had just heard.

Then she was off.

Off the spot, across the room, then back again, pure violent motion because if she stood still she might actually scream.

“She what.”

He looked at her.

“She slapped her,” he repeated. “Across the face. In the middle of it.”

Susie put both hands over her face and then ripped them away again because she could not bear to muffle what came next.

“Oh, my God.” Her voice broke on the last word, not with softness but with fury so intense it had started to eat through language. “She was ten.”

“Yes.”

“She hit an autistic ten-year-old child in the face during a meltdown.”

“Yes.”

“And you are telling me this now?!”

He didn’t answer.

Susie laughed again, a furious, broken sound.

“Tell me you left her.”

Toto looked at her. “Not that day.”

Susie just stared at him in naked disbelief.

Not even anger for a second. Something cleaner and more devastating.

“Not that day.”

“I told myself it would never happen again—”

And there it was.

The excuse.

Not a justification, not exactly. Worse. The pathetic little scaffolding men built around moral failure once enough time had passed that they mistook explanation for absolution.

Susie cut him off so hard he stopped mid-breath.

“You told yourself.”

Each word came out like a slap of its own.

“You told yourself it would never happen again. How wonderful for you. How incredibly comforting that must have been to you.”

Toto’s face tightened.

“That was the first real fracture,” he said. “I screamed at her. I told her if she ever touched Anastasia again—”

“And yet you stayed.”

That landed.

He bowed his head.

And something in Susie went from fury to something even colder.

Because of course he had screamed. Of course he had finally found his line when violence became too visible to narrate into family stress or marital complexity. But then he had done what so many people did after children were hurt by someone inconveniently close to them: he had stayed, and therefore made the child stay inside the structure of that decision too.

“Ana was ten,” Susie said again, quieter now, which was somehow worse. “And the lesson she learned from that was what, exactly? That she could be hit when she was too overwhelmed to be convenient? That adults who loved her would set lines only after damage had already happened? That if she made herself small enough it might never happen again?”

Toto looked wrecked now.

Good.

She wanted him wrecked.

She wanted him to sit inside every ounce of it.

“You are telling me this now. Now.” Susie’s voice shook with sheer fury. “Years later. After I have loved her and watched her flinch from things she should never have had to flinch from and wondered how much of it was history and how much of it was temperament and all that time you knew someone had laid hands on her.”

“I didn’t know how to say it,” Toto said.

Susie laughed in disbelief.

“Oh, that is pathetic.”

He flinched.

“I mean that,” she said. “That is pathetic, Toto. You didn’t know how to say it? Ana was ten. She was ten, and an adult hit her, and your problem was that you didn’t know how to say it.”

He dragged a hand over his face again, shame written all over him now.

“That,” he said quietly, “was how Anastasia got diagnosed.”

Susie stopped moving.

“What.”

He looked up at her and kept going because at this point there was no dignity left in stopping halfway through horror.

“Afterwards she got worse. More frightened. More volatile in certain ways. She started bracing before ordinary changes. The panic got more frequent.” His mouth tightened. “I took her to a specialist because I thought the move had destabilized her more than I understood. Or that something neurological was becoming clearer. That was when they formally identified autism.”

Susie just looked at him.

It kept getting worse.

The violence. The aftermath. The fact that the adults had not even managed proper diagnostic clarity until trauma had forced their hand.

She crossed to the window because if she remained standing in front of him she genuinely did not trust what her mouth would do next.

Monaco glittered below, obscene in its beauty.

“Did you tell anyone?”

“No.”

Of course not.

“Did Ana?”

“I don’t think so.”

That made something in Susie snap.

“You don’t think so.”

Toto looked up, startled by the force in her voice.

“She was too far gone,” he said. “By the time I got there she was… not really present. Terrified. Dissociated, maybe. I don’t know the exact word. I’ve never believed she remembers the slap itself.”

And there it was.

The moment Susie was done.

Done with shame. Done with his sad face. Done with the careful, flattening language of male guilt trying to sound precise while still protecting itself from the full obscenity of what had happened.

She stepped toward him so fast he actually drew back.

“Did you ever think to ask her?”

Toto stared at her. And then, quietly: “No.”

Susie just looked at him.

No.

He had not asked.

Not once.

Not in all these years. Not after the diagnosis. Not after the divorce. Not after Switzerland. Ö Not after Ana had grown into the kind of woman who could discuss systems architecture, board governance, sensory overload, and Formula One political ecosystems with terrifying precision.

He had never asked her whether she remembered being hit.

Susie’s whole face changed. Not grief now. Fury.

Total. Clean. Absolute.

“You never asked her.”

That was it.

That was the moment Susie was done.

Not frustrated.  Not upset.  Done.

She let out one short, disbelieving breath.. “No,” she repeated.

Toto did not answer.

Because what was there to say.

Susie took one step toward him. “You never asked her.”

His face tightened. “Susie—”

“No.” Her voice cracked like a whip. “Do not ‘Susie’ me as if I am being unfair. You sat there and told me that you don’t think your daughter remembers being slapped across the face during a meltdown at ten years old, and when I ask whether you ever actually asked her if she remembers, the answer is no?”

He looked down.

That, somehow, made it worse.

Not because she wanted him defiant. Because he looked ashamed and passive and entirely too willing to accept the moral shape of what he had done only now that she had put language around it.

Susie folded her arms, but it did nothing to contain the force of her anger.

“So let me understand this properly,” she said. “You decided she didn’t remember. You built an entire comforting theory around that. And at no point did it occur to you to ask the only person in the world whose memory of it actually matters.”

Toto rubbed a hand over his face.

“I didn’t want to force—”

“Oh, don’t.”

The words came so fast and sharp they nearly cut him off the bed.

“Do not dress this up as delicacy. Do not. This is not you protecting her privacy. This is you protecting yourself from the answer.”

That landed.

She saw it land.

Good.

Because she was no longer interested in sparing him the clean edge of truth.

“You didn’t ask because if she said yes—if she said she remembered it, if she said she remembered your wife hitting her—you would have had to live with that in a way you clearly found inconvenient.”

“That isn’t fair,” Toto said quietly.

Susie stared at him. Then she laughed. Actually laughed.

A short, furious, unbelieving sound.

“Fair.”

She took another step toward him.

“You want to talk to me about fair?”

Her voice rose now—not theatrically, but because she was too angry to keep every syllable inside the neat civilized register she usually preferred.

“Was it fair that Ana was ten? Was it fair that Ana was autistic in a house with adults too lazy or too cruel to learn what that meant? Was it fair that she grew up being treated like an inconvenience, moved out of the living room and given a keyboard and headphones so nobody needed to hear her?! Was it fair that she didn’t even have a stuffed animal? Was it fair that she got hit and then nobody even bothered to ask her, years later, what she remembered of it?”

Toto flinched.

“Was it fair,” Susie went on, “that you decided for her what her own memory looked like because that version of events was easier for you to survive?”

The room was silent except for their breathing.

Toto looked wrecked.

Susie did not care.

Not enough.

He opened his mouth. “I thought—”

“Yes,” she snapped. “That is the problem, isn’t it. You thought. You inferred. You assumed. You built a theory. You did everything except ask the child who lived through it.”

“She was already so careful,” Toto said. “So guarded. I didn’t want to—”

“Didn’t want to what? Upset her?” Susie shot back. “She was already upset, Toto. She was a child who got hit for having a neurological response the adults around her found inconvenient. What exactly did you think one question from her father was going to do to worsen that?”

He had no answer.

Of course he had no answer.

Because there wasn’t one.

Susie’s voice dropped again, and somehow that was worse.

“You know what I think.”

Toto looked up.

“I think she remembered in exactly the way children often remember things they are not allowed to process properly,” Susie said. “In her body. In her reactions. In the way she learned to get small. To get quiet. To over-explain. To manage herself before anyone else decided her distress was intolerable.” She paused. “And you saw that. You saw all of it. And still you never asked.”

Toto shut his eyes.

For one second.

Then opened them again.

“No,” he said.

The admission was bare now. No defense left on it.

Susie nodded once.

“Yes. I know.”

She turned away from him then because she could not bear to look at him while she said the next part.

“Do you understand what that means?”

When he didn’t answer immediately, she did turn back.

“It means,” she said, “that for years you let yourself live beside a wound in your daughter and preferred your own theory of it to her voice.”

He looked like he’d been hit.

Good, some part of her thought viciously. Good.

“You keep talking about shame as though it is evidence of conscience,” she said. “It is not. Not by itself. Shame is easy. Shame sits there and suffers and still makes itself the center of the story.”

Toto’s whole face tightened.

She did not stop.

“Do you know what conscience would have been? Asking her. Sitting in front of your daughter and saying: I know something happened. I should have protected you better. What do you remember? What do you need from me now?”

His hands clasped tighter together.

“I know,” he said.

“No,” Susie said. “You are only beginning to know.”

That shut him up.

She crossed the room and stood directly in front of him now, forcing him to look up at her.

“You do not get to decide she doesn’t remember simply because you find the alternative unbearable.”

Toto said nothing.

“You ask.”

His voice, when it came, was almost inaudible. “Now?”

Susie stared at him in open disbelief.

“Not like an ambush,” she said. “Not like an interrogation. But yes, Toto. At some point, yes. You ask. If she lets you. If she wants to speak. If she doesn’t, then you respect that. But you do not carry on with this grotesque fiction that silence means absence.”

He looked down again.

“No,” he said.

“No,” Susie agreed. “It does not.”

For a moment the room was completely still.

Then she stepped back, folded her arms again, and said the thing that had been building inside her ever since he admitted the slap.

“She was ten. And every single adult around her failed the most basic test.”

Toto’s face changed.

Because he knew she meant him too.

Good.

She wanted him included in that sentence. Explicitly. Permanently.

“She needed one adult,” Susie said, quieter now but no less furious, “just one, to stop centering their own convenience long enough to really see what was happening to her.”

He looked like she had taken something out of him with her bare hands.

Again: good.

“And instead,” she said, “you all made her survive you.”

That broke whatever weak attempt at self-protection he still had left.

Not with tears. Not yet.

But with the complete collapse of posture, of defense, of any remaining illusion that his intentions had been enough to soften the actual damage.

Susie watched it happen and did not move to soothe him.

Not this time.

Not yet.

Because this was the part he had spent too many years outrunning: the point at which love, without courage, had simply not been sufficient.

After a long silence, Toto said, hoarsely, “I should have asked.”

“Yes,” Susie said. “You really should have.”

Another silence.

Then, because she was not done and he was going to hear all of it now, she added:

“And if she remembers nothing, then she still deserved to be asked.”

That made him look up.

Slowly.

Because yes.

That was the other indictment, wasn’t it.

The question itself had been owed, regardless of the answer.

Not because memory would solve anything.

Because dignity required it.

“She was entitled,” Susie said, “to one adult treating her experience as hers to describe. Not yours to infer.”

Toto nodded once.

“Did you stay because you thought one slap was survivable?”

His whole face changed.

“No.”

“Then why.”

He looked like he hated the answer before he gave it.

“Because I told myself it would never happen again. Because I was already trying to hold together a marriage, a house, three children’s lives, a job, everything. Because I wanted to believe that if I drew the line hard enough, the rest could still be saved.” He swallowed. “Because leaving means admitting that our marriage couldn’t be repaired.”

Susie stared at him.

“And meanwhile,” she said, every word sharpened to a point, “our daughter was the cost of your optimism.”

That hit exactly where it should.

He shut his eyes again. “Yes.”

She crossed back to him then—not because she had forgiven him, not because the anger had burned out, but because distance was no longer enough and she needed him to hear the next part from close range.

“She could have cut you off,” Susie said. “Do you understand that? She would have been entitled to. She would have been entirely justified. She could have built her entire adult life somewhere none of you were allowed near and I would have understood every second of it.”

Toto looked down.

“She could have built a life where you weren’t allowed near the centre of it. She could have decided, quite rationally, that she had given enough to people who failed her too early and too often.” Susie’s voice shook now, not from softness but from the scale of it. “She could have taken her intelligence and her fury and made herself unreachable.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And instead she built software for Jack.”

That undid him a little.

She saw it happen.

Not tears. Not yet.

But the structural collapse of a man who had finally run out of ways to narrate his failures as unfortunate choices made under pressure and was instead being forced to look directly at the child who had survived them.

“She built something kinder for our son,” Susie said, and now her voice was shaking, “instead of building walls so high none of you could ever reach her again.”

He looked like that might be the sentence that finally cut deepest.

Good.

It should.

“She is a goddamn miracle,” Susie said. “And she should never have had to be one.”

Ana was brilliant. Capable. Loving in ways most people did not even understand.

But none of that erased the fact that she had become extraordinary in part because ordinary care had failed her too often.

Susie looked at him for a long, merciless second.

“She should have been allowed to be ordinary,” Susie said. “Difficult sometimes, yes. Particular, yes. Brilliant, yes. But ordinary. Safe. Soft in places. Silly. Held. She should not have had to become extraordinary just to survive being under your roof.”

Toto bowed his head.

And when he finally spoke, his voice had gone raw.

“I know.”

Susie looked at him with furious, exhausted grief.

“You do not get to hide behind shame.”

He looked up.

“You were ashamed. Fine. Good. Be ashamed. But shame is only useful if it changes what happens next.” Her voice went low and lethal. “No more omissions. Not with me. Not about her. Not the big things, not the humiliations, not the ugly details you think make you look bad.”

He nodded once. “Yes.”

“And if she lets you in now,” Susie said, “don’t you dare waste it.”

Susie stood there for another moment, looking at him.

Not because she had anything left to say.

Because if she stayed much longer, she might say something she could not take back, and the thing about rage at this level was that it made honesty feel almost too easy.

Toto was still sitting on the edge of the bed, shoulders bowed now, hands clasped together hard enough that the knuckles had gone pale. He looked wrecked.

Good, some cold, furious part of her thought.

He should.

But beneath that, underneath all of it, there was still the much more inconvenient truth: Susie loved him.

That was what made this so unbearable.

If he had been only cruel, only careless, only monstrous, the emotion would have been simpler. Cleaner. She could have put him in a category and left him there. 

But Toto was none of those things in any neat, permanent sense. He was a man who had loved badly in some of the most important places. A man who had failed a child he should have protected. A man who could now see it and be shattered by it — and somehow that did not repair the failure, it only made the whole thing sadder.

Susie pressed her lips together and exhaled slowly through her nose.

When she spoke, her voice had changed.

The anger was still there, absolutely. But it had burned down just enough to reveal the exhaustion beneath it.

“Okay,” she said.

Toto looked up.

That one word made him tense, as though he did not trust anything gentler than fury anymore.

Susie folded her arms across herself, less in anger now than in self-containment.

“Okay,” she repeated. “I love you.”

His whole face changed.

Not because the words surprised him.

Because they were still there.

Because after everything he had just admitted, after everything she had just said, she was still giving him that truth and neither of them had the luxury of pretending it didn’t matter.

But she did not let him speak.

She lifted one hand slightly, cutting him off before he could ruin it with apology.

“I love you,” she said again, more firmly, “but I really cannot deal with you tonight.”

That landed too.

Cleanly.

He stared at her.

Not defensive. Not offended. Just tired enough, ashamed enough, and honest enough to understand exactly what she meant.

Susie shook her head once, small and sharp.

“I can’t sit beside you and comfort you,” she said. “Not tonight. I can’t do the thing where I make this bearable for you. I can’t hold your hand through your guilt. You can have it. You should have it. I am not the person who is going to make it softer this evening.”

Toto swallowed.

“I know,” he said quietly.

She believed him.

That was the problem with him, in the end. He rarely lied when it mattered most. He simply arrived at the truth far too late and expected the timing not to count against him as much as it did.

Susie looked toward the door for a second, then back at him.

“So I’m going to sleep in the guest bedroom.”

He flinched.

Not dramatically. Not with protest.

Just a small, involuntary reaction that told her he had not expected that particular consequence, even if he understood it instantly.

“Susie—”

“No.”

Her voice wasn’t sharp this time. Just final.

“I’m not leaving because I don’t love you. I’m leaving because I do, and right now that makes this worse, not better.”

That one seemed to hit deeper than the anger had.

His eyes dropped to his hands.

“I don’t want to look at you tonight and have to manage two things at once,” she said. “My fury at what happened to Ana, and my grief for you that you let it happen and have had to live beside it ever since. I’m too angry for the second thing. And I’m not willing to betray the first.”

The room went very still.

Outside, Monaco glittered on in expensive indifference. Inside, the air felt stale with too much truth finally spoken aloud.

Toto nodded once.

Not because he liked it.

Because he understood.

“Okay,” he said.

And there was something almost unbearable in how quiet he sounded.

Not asking her to stay.

Not asking her to soothe him.

Just taking it.

Susie closed her eyes for a second.

Because this, too, was part of loving someone: knowing when staying in the room would only force you into a tenderness they had not earned from you that night.

When she opened them again, he was still sitting there exactly as he had been, a man hollowed out by his own admissions, too decent to argue, too ashamed to defend, too late in every way that mattered.

She hated that she could still see the man she loved inside that silhouette.

She hated that love did not evaporate just because disappointment became righteous enough to deserve it.

“I am not saying this to punish you,” she said, quieter now.

Toto looked up.

“I know.”

“I’m saying it because I need the space.”

Another nod.

“Yes.”

Susie studied him for one more second, then moved to the wardrobe and pulled out what she would need for the night with the brisk, efficient movements of a woman refusing to let herself hesitate now that the decision had been made.

A change of clothes. Her toothbrush. The small bottle of hand cream she always kept in the drawer. Practical things. Ordinary things. The domestic choreography of temporary distance.

Behind her, Toto did not move.

That made it worse somehow.

If he had argued, she could have fought him. If he had become defensive, she could have sharpened herself against it. But this — this quiet acceptance, this exhausted understanding — left only the actual ache of it.

She turned back toward him with her things in her hand.

He was still on the edge of the bed, still bent slightly forward.

For a second Susie almost went back to him.

Almost.

Then she thought of Ana at ten.

Of the slap.

Of the fact that he had never even asked.

And the impulse died where it should.

At the door, she stopped.

Toto looked up immediately.

There was too much in his face. Shame, obviously. Love, still. Grief. The deep, useless weariness of a man who had finally stopped narrating himself as well-intentioned and started seeing the scale of the harm.

Susie held his gaze.

“I do love you,” she said one last time, because she wanted that on the record, because she would not let distance be misread as absence. “But tonight I cannot be your wife first.”

His throat moved once.

“I understand.”

She believed him.

Then, after a beat, he added, very quietly, “I’m sorry.”

Susie’s expression tightened.

Not because she doubted it.

Because it was true and still not enough.

“I know,” she said.

And then she opened the door and left him there.

The guest bedroom was cool and impersonal in the way all well-prepared guest rooms were. Beautiful, comfortable, faintly anonymous. Susie set her things down on the bedside table and stood in the middle of the room for a moment, breathing.

The house was silent around her.

Jack asleep.

Toto alone with the full, unsoftened weight of himself.

Susie sat down on the edge of the bed and let the anger settle around the grief instead of the other way around.

She loved her husband.

She was still furious with him.

Both things were true.

Neither cancelled the other.

***

Text Messages: Lewis Hamilton & Nico Rosberg

Lewis:Quick question.

Lewis:Have you seen Ana’s engagement ring yet?

Nico:No?

Lewis:That’s such a shame.

Nico:Lewis.

Lewis:I have.

Nico:Of course you have.

Lewis:In person.

Nico:I dislike you already and I don’t even know what it looks like yet.

Lewis:Massive. Star sapphire. Deep blue. Completely unreasonable in the best possible way.

Nico:A star sapphire?

Lewis:Yes.

Nico:Well. That is annoyingly tasteful.

Lewis:I know. I saw it first.

Nico:You are behaving like a twelve-year-old.

Lewis:And yet I still saw it first.

Nico:Why exactly were you in a position to see it first?

Lewis:Because, Nico, I was invited to the housewarming.

Nico:You are joking.

Lewis:No.

Nico:I was not invited?

Lewis:Apparently not.

Nico:This is deeply offensive.

Lewis:I agree. To you.

Nico:Lewis.

Lewis:What?

Nico:Did you text me purely to tell me that you were invited to Max Verstappen’s house and I was not, and that you have seen Ana’s engagement ring before me?

Lewis:Not purely.

Nico:There’s more?

Lewis:Obviously.

Lewis:I’m helping her choose a wedding dress.

Nico:You are what.

Lewis:Helping her choose a wedding dress.

Nico:Why are you saying this so casually.

Lewis:Because I’m calm.

Nico:I am not.

Lewis:That sounds like a personal issue.

Nico:You’ve seen the ring. You were invited to the housewarming. And now you are helping pick the wedding dress.

Lewis:Yes.

Lewis:It’s really not my fault that I’m useful.

Nico:I hate everything about this conversation.

Lewis:No, you hate that I am currently more informed than you are.

Nico:Lewis.

Lewis:Nico.

Nico:Did Ana actually ask you?

Lewis:Yes.

Nico:That is… actually very logical.

Lewis:Thank you.

Nico:I resent how logical it is.

Lewis:Same.

Nico:You are not to put her in anything ridiculous.

Lewis:Do you take me for an amateur?

Nico:Sometimes.

Lewis:Hurtful.

Nico:Deserved.

Lewis:Relax. We’re going to Paris on Monday. I’m eliminating stupidity.

Nico:That is a deeply threatening sentence when applied to wedding fashion.

Lewis:That’s why it will work.

Nico:Send me a picture of the ring.

Lewis:No.

Nico:Lewis.

Lewis:I need to hold this over your head for at least another 24 hours.

Nico:I hope you have to wear a hideous beige suit for the wedding.

Lewis:I’ll fix that too. 

***

Text Messages: Dr. Anastasia “Ana” Wolff & Nico Rosberg

Nico:I need to register a formal complaint.

Ana:against whom

Nico:Lewis.

Ana:that narrows it down very little

Nico:He texted me specifically to tell me that he has seen your engagement ring and I have not.

Ana:that does sound like him

Nico:He also informed me that he was invited to the housewarming and I was not.

Ana:Nico

Nico:And then, as if that were not enough, he told me he is helping you choose a wedding dress.

Ana:yes

Nico:“yes” is a cruel response when I am suffering

Ana:you are not suffering you are being dramatic

Nico:Both can be true.

Ana:for what it’s worth he is being annoying on purpose

Nico:That does not make it better. That makes it more Lewis.

Nico:Also, I am lightly offended that you didn’t tell me you were engaged.

Ana:Nico the grid knows some of Brackley knows but I haven’t even told Susie’s parents yet

Nico:Oh.

Nico:Well.

Nico:That is actually quite reassuring.

Ana:i thought it might be

Nico:So I am not uniquely under-briefed.

Ana:no you are in a large and distinguished category

Nico:Excellent. I feel much better now.

Ana:good

Nico:I still reserve the right to be mildly hurt.

Ana:that seems fair

Nico:Thank you.

Ana:while I have you can you look over the photobook I made for Roscoe?

Nico:No.

Ana:no?

Nico:Lewis doesn’t deserve that. He is mean to me.

Ana:Nico

Nico:I’m serious. Why should I contribute to a sentimental gift for a man who weaponized your ring against me?

Ana:because you loved Roscoe more than you dislike Lewis?

Nico:That is manipulative.

Ana:also that housewarming was literally for the current grid

Nico:You did not have to phrase it like that.

Ana:it is the truth

Nico:Yes, Anastasia, I know I am not currently on the grid. You don’t need to hit me with my retirement.

Ana:you texted me to complain about a lunch invitation I felt context was necessary

Nico:I texted you to complain about Lewis. The lunch was secondary.

Ana:sure

Nico:I’m choosing to interpret that as affectionate skepticism.

Ana:that is your right

Nico:Fine. Send me the photobook.

Ana:thank you

Nico:If it is bad, I will say so.

Ana:that is why I asked you

Nico:And for the record, I am happy for you.

Ana:thank you

Nico:Truly.

Ana:i know

Nico:Also, if Lewis puts you in something absurd, tell me immediately and I’ll stage an intervention.

Ana:he said his goal was to eliminate stupidity

Nico:That is both reassuring and ominous.

Ana:yes

Nico:Send the Roscoe draft.

Ana:doing it now

Nico:And Ana?

Ana:what

Nico:Tell Max I hope he knows how lucky he is. 

***

Text Messages: Dr. Anastasia “Ana” Wolff & Susie Wolff

Ana:The lunch was less socially catastrophic than projected.

Susie:High praise.

Ana:I am trying to be generous.

Susie:How are you?

Ana:Tired. But home.

Susie:That helps.

Ana:Yes.

Ana:You are coming on Monday, right?

Susie:To Paris?

Ana:Yes. For the dress appointment.I want you there.

Susie: Of course, I’ll be there. Like I would ever miss my daughter picking out a wedding dress. 

Susie:And for the record,  I fully intend to prevent Lewis from putting you in anything ridiculous.

Susie:Get some sleep tonight if you can.

Ana:I will try.

Susie:That’s all I’m asking.

Ana:Goodnight. I love you.

Susie:Goodnight, sweetheart. Love you too. 

SET AFTER:

Rockstar - Brendon Park meets his match against PTMC's fiery new attending.

Pussy Wagon - A spilled drink leads you to see a different side of your nemesis Park The Shark.

The First Time (NSFW) - Fireworks aren't the only explosive thing happening at Jesse's Fourth of July party.

A Loaded Gun (NSFW) - Hate sex has never been so fucking hot...

The Game - Brendon finds himself breaking his own rules when it comes to you.

Pittfest -Brendon comforts you when you fall apart after the events of Pittfest.

Is He Prettier Than Me? - Brandon gets curious when he learns you have other plans.

The Drawer - Brendon realises your relationship may be shifting when he discovers he has a drawer at your place.

Scrunchies - Scrunchies… they’re the downfall of Brendon Park.

Love Games (NSFW) - Brendon and you love to play games, especially with each other.

An Exquisite Form of Torture (NSFW) - Brendon continues to turn up the heat as he holds you captive.

THAT Guy - Brendon is forced to face up to his feelings for you when he finds out your meeting up with an ex.

Seven Days - Seven days is far too long to go without you...

Save It - A thirty six hour shift leads to another admission about your relationship with Brendon.

Doctor Dick - Brendon's day takes a turn when Whitaker gives him some critical information.

A Manipulative Fuck - You and Brendon discuss what happened with your ex.

The Call (NSFW) - Brendon decides to put a stop to David's calls once and for all.

The One That Hates The Ravens - David's attempt at revenge backfires spectacularly.

The Lovin Spoonful - You wake up to an unexpected surprise.

Delete, Block, Rinse, Repeat - A series of cryptic messages force Brendon to confront a secret he's been keeping for almost a decade.

His Father's Son - Brendon reflects on the past as he debates taking that first sip of whiskey.

The Cost of Dignity - Brendon's greatest secret comes with a cost.

A Kiss For Luck - Brendon struggles to navigate working at the hospital after the release of THAT video.

The Craziest Fucking Thing - You take matters into your own hands after receiving bad news from Brendon.

Ride Or Die - You wake up to the sound of an angry blender after Brendon discovers what happened with Rowena.

Diamonds (NSFW) - A bet leads to naughty shenanigans in a five star restaurant.

The Call Out - Brendon's focus on wedding planning is disrupted when he's called out to the scene of a multi-car pile up.

Good Hands - Abbot reminds Brendon you're in good hands as they proceed with the amputation.

Flayed - Brendon's world crashes down as he learns the truth about the accident.

Ten Things I Love About You - Brendon discovers a pink envelope in the pocket of the jacket you were wearing at the time of the accident.

The Parent Trap - Brendon faces your parents, leading to a surprise revelation.

Sledgehammer - Brendon struggles to cope in the aftermath of everything that's happened.

Et Tu Marianne? - Your mother throws Brendon under the bus after you wake up from surgery.

The Fucking Patient - Abbot has some harsh words for Brendon regarding your care.

Chemistry - You and Brendon finally have a moment alone to talk.

A Serial Absconder - Your habit of disappearing leads to a healing journey Brendon doesn't expect.

The shorts have always been a problem.

When you’re recovering from a below the knee amputation, they’re a staple. They grant easy access to the wound site and are more comfortable when it comes to swelling management because they aren’t as confining as regular pants.

For Brendon they are absolute torture.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the cycling shorts, cute pjs, or those ones you wear to physio they unlock something in Brendon that makes him fucking feral. They have done ever since that first night at Jesse’s.

Although his libido has taken a hit over the past three weeks. It’s back with a vengeance now as he watches you do a quad set on the bed in preparation for your official sign off later this afternoon.

Up and down.

Up and down.

Each motion of your leg gives him a flash of those panties underneath, the rainbow ones he’s tugged off with his teeth many a time. His cock swells underneath his scrubs, throbbing as he tries to count your reps and focus on anything other than what’s going on underneath those shorts.

“What’s getting you all hot and bothered over there?” You tease as you ease your bandaged limb back down onto the mattress before letting out a long exhale. He thought he was doing a good job of hiding his arousal but it appears he can’t escape your eagle eye.

“It’s the shorts.” He admits, gesturing towards the forest green gym shorts you’re wearing. “They’ve always done a little something for me.”

“Oh.” You say, propping yourself up on your elbows, your gaze lowering to the defined shape of his dick amongst the navy-blue fabric of his scrubs. “Are you…”

“Dripping.” He finishes, clearing his throat as he tries to disguise his treacherous cock within the clever folds of the fabric. “I have blue balls constantly.”

You huff out a laugh, and he pouts at your revelry at his misfortune. “The fact you’re so mean to me only makes it worse.” He tells you, his cock pulsing as that sound sends electricity crackling through his body. “It’s a glutton for punishment.”

“No, it’s not that… although that is a little funny.” You say hauling yourself up into a sitting position. You hand runs through your hair, pushing it back away from your features. “I’m just relieved that little Brendon’s taking an interest.”

He understands that you’re building a new relationship with your body, that you might not feel as attractive as you once did. Reclaiming that sense of self, it’s one of the hardest parts of being an amputee.

“Well he’s currently trying to battle his way out of my scrubs right now.” Brendon points at the tent he’s pitching. “And I thought we agreed it was above average.”

“I think we need to check again like that time we were roleplaying slutty professor.” You drawl out the words as you shift onto the edge of the bed, your good knee hooked over the edge. “Remember how much you liked the sting of the riding crop when you were being a naughty boy.”

His teeth sinking into his lower lip to stifle the groan that tears from his chest. He vividly recalls that night, the sight of you in a leather pencil skirt and glasses, the bite of the crop on his thighs because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself.

“Christ, you’re going to make me come in my pants with this shit.” He mutters, raising his eyes to the water stained ceiling and trying to think of anything other than you edging the fuck out of him while wearing a pair of lace gloves.  

Arthroscopies, fracture repairs. He tries to run through each of the procedures in his head to make his dick stop its rampant torment.

“Brendon.” You interrupt him his thoughts. “Come here.”

You’re using that tone again, the deviant sexy one from that night. He obeys on impulse, his feet finding their way to you, taking up residence in front of you. His dick twitches against the inside of his scrubs as you toy with the drawstrings.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to…”

“I know.” You run your hand up the length of his cock through his scrubs and he spits out a curse, his hips arching on their own accord as you fondle him. “I actually miss this part a lot and just because I’m out of action until my doctor signs off doesn’t mean you can’t get any action.”

“Rae…” He breathes but then the cold air hits his dick as his scrubs are drawn down, your warm fingers wrapping around his cock.

“Oh baby, you really did miss me didn’t you.” You smirk as you run your palm over the tip of his dick, smearing the drops of pre-cum over it before you pump him lightly. “You’re practically leaking all over my hand.”

Fuck this feels good, your hand gliding up and down his cock, squeezing his dick the way you know he likes it.

“When you’re ready…” His words come between ragged pants, his chest heaving as a lightning storm starts to crackle under his skin, his lower back starting to tingle. “I’m going to bury my face between your thighs and tongue fuck you the life out of you.”

“Brendon.” You tut, that wicked smile crossing your features as he thrusts into your grasp, chasing his release. “You think I don’t lie here thinking about that, that I don’t get wet imagining you touching me.”

“Are you wet now Rae?” His voice is a rasp, his entire body trembling with ecstasy as you hold him right there on the precipice. “Please baby, let me taste you.”

Your hand delves underneath the waistband of your shorts, your fingers coming out glistening. He moans at the sight before you press them to his lips, smearing your taste across them. He opens his mouth, your flavour bursting on his tongue as you press down it. His hips piston into your fist, his moans muffled as the rapture surges up in him like thunder, crashing through his nerve endings, stealing away his breath until he’s erupting all over that pilled Ravens t-shirt, his white-hot streaks of cum spattering across the letters on your tits.

“Fuck.” He mutters as he stares down at the mess he’s left. “That’s the best the Ravens have ever looked.”

“You’re such a fucking asshole.” You say fondly, stripping the shirt off from your body and tossing it into your dirty laundry bag. His gaze strays down to your sports bra, to those perfect tits pushed together.

“Next time, I’m going to come right here.” He murmurs, his fingertips trailing along your cleavage. “After I take my time giving you all the love that you deserve.”

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both of the young men looked to robby— who did nothing to ease the growing nerves— as he nodded in confirmation. 

“she’s right.”

“b-but the patient is a teen. and—” “teens still need physicians. especially ones who specialize in their age group of medical care.” it was said matter of factly to ogilvies excuse. a poor one. because even a med student should know that. everyone knows that. “and seeing the extent of the injury, and the type it is, ortho needs to get in on this. it’s standard procedure.” robby explains lightly. still obvious in his tone of voice. but not demeaning.

ogilvie stays quiet. a crease between his eyebrows. almost as if he's slowly dissecting what was just said. whitaker paled next to him. “oh boy.”

—

"let's just let them assess the patient and uh— unless asked directly, just" whitaker motioned with his hands "try to keep to yourself." it was said carefully. unsure if it was more for himself than ogilvie. even if being aware of med students eagerness.

and off the side, tablet in grasp, robby laughed under breath.

they were still fresh. one more than the other. easy to spot and easier to kill. figuratively speaking. and while he finds humor in it now, the attending knows what it's like to have been bit by the shark and his wife. never has he admitted to it, but its happened once or twice in his career.

both exceptional and outstanding physicians, you guys were also extremely brutal. you more so than your husband.

robby was known to be hard. he was known to be honest. but your honesty couldn’t compare. your voice never raised. it never fell. it was collected. too collected for someone who was about to chew someone else out. he’d experienced it himself. and after that, he was careful on where to dip his toes.

“dr.park.” 

you’d come in first, and not long after, your husband did. your eyes briefly panning over the room before landing on familiar ones.

“doctor.”

ogilvie stilled at the address. remembering just why you referred to him as that.

“I see you’ll be joining us?”

the student glanced over to whitaker. the advice from earlier apparent. he looked back to you, then to brendon— who was staring expectantly above his lashes— as if looking to the man would help the ms in answering his wife. james couldn’t tell what was worse. your stare. or brendons.

“she’s talking to you, genius.” park says it drily. the students brain catching up as he slowly nods. “I uh, yes.” you make a face of faux approval.

“okay then. feel free to interrupt during the assessment.”

your teeth already sinking in and he hasn’t even done anything. yet. robby pursed his lips at the penetration of your words. knowing what you meant, seeing as he was there for the first time.

“why don’t you go ahead and begin the presentation.” your head motioning for him speak. and albeit the initial impression he made with you, you were being genuine, even if your words came off as a bait.

“a tibial eminence fracture?” brendons brows raised as ogilvie finished.

“that’s what I heard.” you murmured from the patients side. “rare.” sending the kid a warm smile, a subtle hand squeeze— all before turning your body around. the switch was startling. if someone saw, they didn’t say anything. and they wouldn’t want to.

“xray?” you glanced up in expectancy.

robby pulls out the screen. brendon nodding when he sees it. “clean break.”

“anesthetics?” you asked, attention still on the patient. robby listing off the meds.

yours and brendons eyes find each others. surgery. a silent agreement. his head nodding as your gloves come off. “I’ll prep the OR.”

your eyes rolling at the announcement that you were waiting to deliver to the patient before brendon did. your eyes catching wet ones as the kid looks to you for assurance. trying to lift the weight of the situation, you make a face, hand waving back to where your husband walked out.

“he never listens.” you prop up the gurney rails to get him ready. “our boys do better.” the corner of his mouth perking up from one side as he wipes his nose. his hand grasping yours. squeezing like earlier if not tighter.

“do you guys know each other?”

the question has you smiling. exposed. out in the open. even if there were others still in trauma. the innocence of it causing your front to break. you glance to where brendon left. but before you could answer—

“they’re married.”

and just like that, you were back. giving one last squeeze to the kids hand as they wheeled him out. your head turning to ogilvie who stared wide eyed.

SET AFTER:

Rockstar - Brendon Park meets his match against PTMC's fiery new attending.

Pussy Wagon - A spilled drink leads you to see a different side of your nemesis Park The Shark.

The First Time (NSFW) - Fireworks aren't the only explosive thing happening at Jesse's Fourth of July party.

A Loaded Gun (NSFW) - Hate sex has never been so fucking hot...

The Game - Brendon finds himself breaking his own rules when it comes to you.

Pittfest -Brendon comforts you when you fall apart after the events of Pittfest.

Is He Prettier Than Me? - Brandon gets curious when he learns you have other plans.

The Drawer - Brendon realises your relationship may be shifting when he discovers he has a drawer at your place.

Scrunchies - Scrunchies… they’re the downfall of Brendon Park.

Love Games (NSFW) - Brendon and you love to play games, especially with each other.

An Exquisite Form of Torture (NSFW) - Brendon continues to turn up the heat as he holds you captive.

THAT Guy - Brendon is forced to face up to his feelings for you when he finds out your meeting up with an ex.

Seven Days - Seven days is far too long to go without you...

Save It - A thirty six hour shift leads to another admission about your relationship with Brendon.

Doctor Dick - Brendon's day takes a turn when Whitaker gives him some critical information.

A Manipulative Fuck - You and Brendon discuss what happened with your ex.

The Call (NSFW) - Brendon decides to put a stop to David's calls once and for all.

The One That Hates The Ravens - David's attempt at revenge backfires spectacularly.

The Lovin Spoonful - You wake up to an unexpected surprise.

Delete, Block, Rinse, Repeat - A series of cryptic messages force Brendon to confront a secret he's been keeping for almost a decade.

His Father's Son - Brendon reflects on the past as he debates taking that first sip of whiskey.

The Cost of Dignity - Brendon's greatest secret comes with a cost.

A Kiss For Luck - Brendon struggles to navigate working at the hospital after the release of THAT video.

The Craziest Fucking Thing - You take matters into your own hands after receiving bad news from Brendon.

Ride Or Die - You wake up to the sound of an angry blender after Brendon discovers what happened with Rowena.

Diamonds (NSFW) - A bet leads to naughty shenanigans in a five star restaurant.

The Call Out - Brendon's focus on wedding planning is disrupted when he's called out to the scene of a multi-car pile up.

Good Hands - Abbot reminds Brendon you're in good hands as they proceed with the amputation.

Flayed - Brendon's world crashes down as he learns the truth about the accident.

Ten Things I Love About You - Brendon discovers a pink envelope in the pocket of the jacket you were wearing at the time of the accident.

The Parent Trap - Brendon faces your parents, leading to a surprise revelation.

Sledgehammer - Brendon struggles to cope in the aftermath of everything that's happened.

Et Tu Marianne? - Your mother throws Brendon under the bus after you wake up from surgery.

The Fucking Patient - Abbot has some harsh words for Brendon regarding your care.

Chemistry - You and Brendon finally have a moment alone to talk.

A Serial Absconder - Your habit of disappearing leads to a healing journey Brendon doesn't expect.

The shorts have always been a problem.

When you’re recovering from a below the knee amputation, they’re a staple. They grant easy access to the wound site and are more comfortable when it comes to swelling management because they aren’t as confining as regular pants.

For Brendon they are absolute torture.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the cycling shorts, cute pjs, or those ones you wear to physio they unlock something in Brendon that makes him fucking feral. They have done ever since that first night at Jesse’s.

Although his libido has taken a hit over the past three weeks. It’s back with a vengeance now as he watches you do a quad set on the bed in preparation for your official sign off later this afternoon.

Up and down.

Up and down.

Each motion of your leg gives him a flash of those panties underneath, the rainbow ones he’s tugged off with his teeth many a time. His cock swells underneath his scrubs, throbbing as he tries to count your reps and focus on anything other than what’s going on underneath those shorts.

“What’s getting you all hot and bothered over there?” You tease as you ease your bandaged limb back down onto the mattress before letting out a long exhale. He thought he was doing a good job of hiding his arousal but it appears he can’t escape your eagle eye.

“It’s the shorts.” He admits, gesturing towards the forest green gym shorts you’re wearing. “They’ve always done a little something for me.”

“Oh.” You say, propping yourself up on your elbows, your gaze lowering to the defined shape of his dick amongst the navy-blue fabric of his scrubs. “Are you…”

“Dripping.” He finishes, clearing his throat as he tries to disguise his treacherous cock within the clever folds of the fabric. “I have blue balls constantly.”

You huff out a laugh, and he pouts at your revelry at his misfortune. “The fact you’re so mean to me only makes it worse.” He tells you, his cock pulsing as that sound sends electricity crackling through his body. “It’s a glutton for punishment.”

“No, it’s not that… although that is a little funny.” You say hauling yourself up into a sitting position. You hand runs through your hair, pushing it back away from your features. “I’m just relieved that little Brendon’s taking an interest.”

He understands that you’re building a new relationship with your body, that you might not feel as attractive as you once did. Reclaiming that sense of self, it’s one of the hardest parts of being an amputee.

“Well he’s currently trying to battle his way out of my scrubs right now.” Brendon points at the tent he’s pitching. “And I thought we agreed it was above average.”

“I think we need to check again like that time we were roleplaying slutty professor.” You drawl out the words as you shift onto the edge of the bed, your good knee hooked over the edge. “Remember how much you liked the sting of the riding crop when you were being a naughty boy.”

His teeth sinking into his lower lip to stifle the groan that tears from his chest. He vividly recalls that night, the sight of you in a leather pencil skirt and glasses, the bite of the crop on his thighs because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself.

“Christ, you’re going to make me come in my pants with this shit.” He mutters, raising his eyes to the water stained ceiling and trying to think of anything other than you edging the fuck out of him while wearing a pair of lace gloves.  

Arthroscopies, fracture repairs. He tries to run through each of the procedures in his head to make his dick stop its rampant torment.

“Brendon.” You interrupt him his thoughts. “Come here.”

You’re using that tone again, the deviant sexy one from that night. He obeys on impulse, his feet finding their way to you, taking up residence in front of you. His dick twitches against the inside of his scrubs as you toy with the drawstrings.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to…”

“I know.” You run your hand up the length of his cock through his scrubs and he spits out a curse, his hips arching on their own accord as you fondle him. “I actually miss this part a lot and just because I’m out of action until my doctor signs off doesn’t mean you can’t get any action.”

“Rae…” He breathes but then the cold air hits his dick as his scrubs are drawn down, your warm fingers wrapping around his cock.

“Oh baby, you really did miss me didn’t you.” You smirk as you run your palm over the tip of his dick, smearing the drops of pre-cum over it before you pump him lightly. “You’re practically leaking all over my hand.”

Fuck this feels good, your hand gliding up and down his cock, squeezing his dick the way you know he likes it.

“When you’re ready…” His words come between ragged pants, his chest heaving as a lightning storm starts to crackle under his skin, his lower back starting to tingle. “I’m going to bury my face between your thighs and tongue fuck you the life out of you.”

“Brendon.” You tut, that wicked smile crossing your features as he thrusts into your grasp, chasing his release. “You think I don’t lie here thinking about that, that I don’t get wet imagining you touching me.”

“Are you wet now Rae?” His voice is a rasp, his entire body trembling with ecstasy as you hold him right there on the precipice. “Please baby, let me taste you.”

Your hand delves underneath the waistband of your shorts, your fingers coming out glistening. He moans at the sight before you press them to his lips, smearing your taste across them. He opens his mouth, your flavour bursting on his tongue as you press down it. His hips piston into your fist, his moans muffled as the rapture surges up in him like thunder, crashing through his nerve endings, stealing away his breath until he’s erupting all over that pilled Ravens t-shirt, his white-hot streaks of cum spattering across the letters on your tits.

“Fuck.” He mutters as he stares down at the mess he’s left. “That’s the best the Ravens have ever looked.”

“You’re such a fucking asshole.” You say fondly, stripping the shirt off from your body and tossing it into your dirty laundry bag. His gaze strays down to your sports bra, to those perfect tits pushed together.

“Next time, I’m going to come right here.” He murmurs, his fingertips trailing along your cleavage. “After I take my time giving you all the love that you deserve.”

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Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025

Alexandra Saint Mleux knew enough about art to ruin her own peace. That was the actual problem.

Anyone else might have walked into Max Verstappen and Ana Wolff’s house and simply thought: beautiful. 

Impeccable, even.

Light everywhere. Cream stone. Hardwood floors. Glass. Space. Money handled by someone with restraint instead of vulgarity.

The sort of place that made people instinctively stand up straighter and check whether their shoes were too loud for the floor.

Alexandra walked in, glanced down the hallway, and nearly had a cardiac event.

Because on the wall, paired with criminal casualness beneath two discreet brass lights, hung a Lee Krasner.

Not Lee Krasner-inspired. Not a print. Not a polite contemporary abstraction that vaguely nodded toward mid-century American modernism.

A Lee Krasner.

She actually stopped walking.

Charles, behind her, nearly crashed  into her shoulder.

“What?” he asked.

Alexandra didn’t answer at first.

She was staring.

The hallway was quiet. Beautifully proportioned. The painting sat there in all its controlled ferocity—gesture, emotion, color —and beside it, another work arranged with enough confidence to suggest whoever had placed them knew exactly what they were doing and feared no one’s opinion.

Alexandra turned very slowly toward Charles. “Do not touch anything.”

Charles looked offended. “Alex.”

She looked back at the wall.

“I need you to understand,” she said, in the careful tone of a woman trying not to shout in somebody else’s entrance hall, “that if that is what I think it is, then I am unwell.”

Charles followed her gaze, looked at the paintings, then back at her. “They’re paintings.”

Alexandra closed her eyes briefly.

Of course he would say that. Of course the man raised in Monaco around money and objects and beautifully terrifying interiors would see a hallway full of world-class art and deliver the sentence they’re paintings with complete sincerity.

She turned to him again. “I hate you a little.”

“No, you don’t.”

“No,” she admitted. “But I need you to stop being illiterate about art history for one minute.”

That got the corner of his mouth.

He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Is it real?”

Alexandra looked back at the Krasner.

Then toward the living room beyond the hall, where she could already see another frame catching the light from the windows.

She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she lied.

She absolutely knew.

Or rather, she knew enough to be deeply unsettled by how real all of it felt.

The surface. The framing. 

The absence of that terrible, overexplained performance wealthy people often draped around art when they wanted the room to know they had purchased prestige.

This wasn’t prestige.

This was taste.

Which, frankly, was more dangerous.

And then she made the mistake of looking into the living room.

The world stopped again.

Because there, in the soft Monaco light, hung something water-soft and luminous and unmistakable.

Alexandra took one involuntary step forward.

No. No, surely not.

She moved into the room like someone approaching a religious vision she did not trust not to evaporate under scrutiny.

Charles, now fully invested only because her level of alarm had clearly upgraded the matter beyond decorative interest, followed more quietly.

Alexandra stopped just inside the sitting room and stared.

It was a Monet.

Not Monet-adjacent. Not a print. 

Not some pale decorative landscape chosen by a rich man who wanted his house to look expensive in a noncommittal French way.

A Monet.

Her heart actually kicked. “No,” she whispered.

“Is that bad?” Charles asked.

She turned and looked at him with the kind of pity one reserved for men who were good at many things and hopelessly under-equipped for the particular emergency currently unfolding.

“It is not bad,” she said. “It is, however, slightly insane. That’s a Monet.”

The living room around them was all light and polished restraint. A massive grand piano sat near the windows.

 Flowers had been arranged with just enough asymmetry to suggest intelligence rather than Pinterest. The Monet held the wall with that impossible softness only geniuses were able to produce.

Alexandra moved closer.

Close enough now to see what mattered.

Not the name. The surface.

She stared at the paint handling, the atmosphere, the way the image dissolved and cohered at once depending on distance.

Not a print.

Dear God.

She actually put one hand lightly against her own sternum.

Charles noticed immediately. “You’re having a moment.”

“I’m having several.”

He came to stand beside her, hands very firmly to himself, which she appreciated.

“You think it’s real?”

Alexandra let out a breath that bordered on laughter and hysteria at once.

“I think,” she said, “that if this is fake, then whoever faked it deserves a state funeral and a building in their name.”

That made Charles laugh.

At the far end of the room, near the terrace doors, Max was standing.

Not in the wheelchair. Not seated. Not absent.

Standing.

Crutches under his arms, weight still managed carefully, body held with that very specific economy of movement people acquired when pain was still present and simply not being invited to dominate the room.

He looked thinner than before. Sharper somehow. A little worn at the edges.

But alive.

Here.

Alexandra felt Charles stop beside her before she even turned to look at him properly.

This, she thought at once, was the real shock.

Because this was the first time Charles had seen Max in person since Baku. Not statements, surgeries, updates, and the endless, ugly churn of media language.

Max.

In the flesh.

The boy he had known since they were children. 

The man he had raced for nearly all of his life. 

The constant presence against whom so many seasons had been measured. 

Rival, nuisance, benchmark, history. 

Familiar in the way only a handful of people ever really were.

Alexandra knew before Charles said a word that this was hitting somewhere deeper than he would ever say out loud.

She saw it in the stillness.

You could follow every update, every medical bulletin, every court development, every ugly piece of aftermath.

And still not be prepared for the first real sight of someone after survival had passed through them and left its evidence behind.

Max looked over then and saw them.

His expression shifted almost immediately into something dry and familiar, which Alexandra suspected was its own mercy.

“Alexandra, Charles,” he said.

His voice was steady. A little rougher than she remembered. Still unmistakably his.

“Max,” she said, before she could decide whether sounding normal was possible.

Beside her, Charles moved first.

There was no performance in it. No elaborate choreography. Just a very brief, very human hesitation as he took in the crutches, the altered balance of him, the fact that Max was here at all — and then Charles crossed the room.

“Hi,” he said, and his voice had gone quieter than usual.

Max looked at him for half a second.

Then Charles did the thing Alexandra knew he had not planned, the thing instinct overrode pride for: he leaned in and hugged Max. Careful, brief, real.

One arm around his shoulders. One hand landing lightly against his back, avoiding the obvious injuries without making a show of it.

Alexandra watched Max freeze for the smallest beat in surprise before he returned it awkwardly but without hesitation, one-armed and careful.

When they pulled apart, Charles looked at him properly.

“Good to see you,” he said.

Simple. True. Not enough for everything the sentence needed to carry, but maybe that was why it worked.

Max’s mouth moved slightly. “You too.”

Alexandra, still only half in the real world because the other half of her remained spiritually fused to the Monet, looked between them and felt the awkwardness begin to dissolve into something gentler. 

Daniel Ricciardo appeared from somewhere near the kitchen with a drink in one hand. “Ah,” he said, seeing Alexandra’s face. “You found the art.”

Alexandra looked at him. “I found a Monet.”

Daniel nodded. “Yes. That seems to be affecting people.”

“That seems to be affecting people?” she repeated.

He grinned. “The gallery man almost died yesterday, apparently.”

Max looked faintly unrepentant. “I picked it because it was pretty.”

Alexandra turned toward him so fast Charles actually smiled. “You what.”

Max lifted one shoulder. “It was pretty. Ana likes it. That was enough.”

There was a beat.

Then Alexandra laughed, because what else was there to do.

Of course.

Of course Max Verstappen had accidentally bought a Monet with the same brutal simplicity he probably used to choose race gloves or kitchen knives or sunglasses.

Not because of provenance or history or mythology.

Because it was beautiful.

Which, infuriatingly, was not the worst reason she had ever heard.

She looked around the room again—the Monet, the piano, the air of money disciplined by actual taste—and then back at Max.

“Ana chose the rest, didn’t she?”

At that, something in his face softened by a fraction.

“Yes,” he said.

Alexandra nodded once, deeply vindicated. “Yes,” she said. “I thought so.”

***

Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025

By the time the first of them arrived, Max had already decided this was a terrible idea.

Not because he didn’t want them there.

That was the problem.

He did.

Which was precisely why the whole thing felt vaguely dangerous.

It had been nearly a month.

Nearly a month since Baku. Since the wall. Since the hospital.

Since the surreal, flattened unreality of being spoken about more often than spoken to. Since seeing people in fragments—on screens, in messages, in clipped little updates relayed through phones and lawyers and doctors and the endless administrative violence that followed disaster.

And now they were coming here.

To the house.

To him.

Not as names in a group chat. Not as grainy photos from the paddock. Not as his colleagues in race suits and media pens and controlled public environments.

As themselves.

Max stood in the entry hall and watched Ana move through the final ten minutes before arrival with the calm authority of someone who had already planned this down to weather contingencies and serving utensils.

The dining table had been extended. Flowers had appeared in strategic places. Something citrusy and expensive-smelling had happened to the kitchen. The cats had been bribed into temporary tolerance.

“You’re frowning,” Ana said, not looking up from where she was rearranging a bowl of peaches that, in Max’s opinion, had already been perfectly acceptable two minutes earlier.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

He shifted his weight slightly against the crutch and looked toward the front windows.

“I just think,” he said, “that inviting nineteen idiots into my house immediately after almost dying was maybe not my best decision.”

Ana glanced at him then. One quick, sharp look that saw far too much.

“You invited them.”

“Yes.”

“So clearly some part of you wanted them here.”

That was the problem too.

He did.

He wanted the noise. The normality. The ridiculousness of drivers occupying a room and immediately turning it into organised chaos. He wanted proof that life had continued enough to become annoying again.

He also, inconveniently, did not want to be looked at like someone who had survived something.

He wanted them to walk in and see him.

Not the crash.

Not the aftermath.

Just him.

The doorbell rang.

Max went still.

Ana did not comment on that. Another one of the many reasons he was marrying her.

Nikolai got there first, opening the front door with the same expression he wore for everything from mail deliveries to possible assassination attempts.

The next person through the door was Alex Albon.

Max had not realized until that second how much of him had been braced for some version of awkwardness—for the little pause, the shift in expression, the carefulness people sometimes got when they were trying too hard not to look shocked.

Alex took one look at him and immediately crossed the space between them like the intervening weeks had been an administrative inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.

“Mate.”

And then he hugged him.

Not delicately.

Not like he was going to break.

Just carefully enough not to be stupid about the injuries, one arm around his shoulders, solid and warm and familiar.

Max let out a breath he had not known he’d been holding and hugged him back one-armed.

“Hi,” Max said into his shoulder.

Alex pulled back just enough to look at him properly. His face did that strange thing people’s faces had been doing lately when relief arrived too quickly to hide. “You look like shit.”

Max snorted. “There he is.”

“That’s a compliment,” Alex said. “You’re upright.”

“Mostly.”

That made Alex grin, and the room became easier immediately.

Behind him came Carlos, who slowed for half a beat on entry—not enough that anyone who didn’t know him would have noticed, only enough that Max did.

Carlos looked at the crutch. At the thinner lines of him. At the fact of him being here at all.

Then he stepped forward and hugged him too.

Brief. Firm. No drama.

“Good to see you,” Carlos said.

“You too.”

Carlos drew back, one hand still on his shoulder for a second longer than necessary.

“You scared everyone.”

Max looked at him. “That sounds like a them problem.”

“That,” Carlos said dryly, “is very reassuringly you.”

Good, then.

That was what Max wanted. That tone. That normality. Not pity. Not reverence. Just his friends recalibrating in real time from hospital updates back into insults.

Pierre was next, and Pierre did not even pretend to be normal about it.

He walked in, looked at Max once, muttered something French and emotional under his breath, and then pulled him into a hug hard enough that Max had to brace with the crutch.

“Easy,” Max said into his shoulder.

“No,” Pierre said. “Absolutely not.”

That made Max laugh despite himself, which was unfortunate, because laughing still pulled at places he would have preferred not to feel.

When Pierre stepped back his eyes were suspiciously bright in the sunlight.

He solved that by immediately reaching up and messing up Max’s hair.

Max recoiled half a step in outrage.

“Don’t.”

Pierre grinned, unrepentant. “Had to make sure you were real.”

Max raised the crutch by a threatening inch. “I’ll hit you with this.”

“You won’t.”

“I literally will.”

Pierre looked delighted. “Excellent. Much better.”

By then the arrivals had started to stack.

Oscar came in quieter, but no less sincere, and his hug was one of those brief, heavy things that said more than the sentence after it.

“Good to see you.”

“Yeah.”

Lando, who had somehow managed to arrive carrying a palm tree as tall as he was, ruined every possibility of a dignified greeting on entry.

Not because he meant to.

Because he was Lando.

He came through the doorway already half hidden behind a ridiculous explosion of leaves, nearly clipped the frame, said “shit” with feeling, corrected the angle, and then reappeared behind the plant with the expression of a man convinced he was doing something both generous and hilarious.

“A housewarming gift,” he announced.

Everyone in the hall stared at him.

The palm was absurd. It looked like something that belonged in the lobby of a tropical hotel trying too hard.

Max stared at it.

Then at Lando.

Then back at the palm.

“What the fuck is that?”

“It’s a plant.”

“I can see that.”

“It’s festive.”

“It’s bigger than you.”

From somewhere behind Max, Ana said, in a tone of careful neutrality, “It is certainly alive.”

Max squinted at him. “How did you even get that here.”

“Commitment.”

“It’s horrible.”

“It’s majestic,” Lando corrected.

And then, because apparently the laws of the universe had decided this situation was not yet humiliating enough, Toto walked in from the terrace, took in the scene once, and without a word lifted the entire ridiculous palm and carried it out of the middle of the hallway like a man who had accepted that this was his life now.

Lando watched him go. “That’s not where I would put it.”

“No,” Toto said over his shoulder. “And yet here we are.”

That got the first full, helpless laugh out of Max all day.

And after that, it became easier.

Yuki came in at speed and stopped just short of launching himself bodily at Max, clearly remembering at the last possible second. He settled for gripping his shoulder hard and saying, with complete bluntness, “You look less dead.”

“Thank you,” Max said.

“That was a compliment.”

“I know.”

Liam and Isack followed, both pretending a level of casualness neither of them actually felt. Ollie hugged him with the peculiar earnestness of someone still young enough not to be embarrassed by relief. 

Esteban clapped him on the shoulder and immediately apologized when Max nearly folded himself in half. 

Gabriel looked vaguely like he had walked into an alternate reality and was trying not to show it.

Kimi came in with the strange, steady seriousness he had when something mattered to him more than he wanted it to show. He hugged Max too—brief, careful, real—and when he stepped back, Max reached out and ruffled his hair before he could stop himself.

Kimi looked mildly affronted.

Fernando arrived next and made the mistake of smiling too knowingly at him.

He hugged Max first—properly, briefly, firmly—and then, when he pulled back, reached up with all the confidence of a man who had won championships and therefore feared too little.

He touched Max’s hair once.

Max lifted the crutch immediately.

Fernando took one step backward.

“Do not.”

“You were going to.”

“I was not.”

“You absolutely were.”

Fernando looked deeply unconvincing. “There is no proof.”

Lando, from somewhere near the drinks table, said, “I’d like the record to show he absolutely was.”

Max pointed the crutch at Fernando like a weapon. “I will hit you.”

Fernando, instead of looking deterred, looked pleased. “Good. You’re fine.”

That sentence landed more cleanly than it should have.

The rest of them kept arriving in waves.

Nico, who had known too much of the ugly logistics from too close a distance not to look at Max for one extra second before pulling him into a clasp that was almost a hug and then becoming decisively German about the emotional implications.

Lance, awkward for exactly one second and then normal. Franco, still visibly delighted and slightly shocked that he had somehow ended up here among all these people and that Max was standing in front of him rather than trapped forever in headlines and hospital notes.

And through all of it Max stood there, leaned on the crutches, took the handshakes and the claps and the hugs and the terrible jokes and the worried looks quickly disguised as insults, and felt something in himself settling every time one of them got close enough to make it real.

Not because they treated him like he had never nearly died.

Because they didn’t.

They treated him like he had, and had come back, and was still himself enough to threaten them with mobility aids if they became irritating.

That, in its own ridiculous way, was love.

By the time everyone had arrived, the house was loud.

Not paddock loud. Not race-weekend loud.

Friend loud.

Driver loud.

Too many voices in too many corners, all slightly overlapping, all turning the polished restraint of Maison Étoiles into something messier and warmer and more alive.

The palm had been relocated to the terrace by Toto, where it stood in the sun looking no less absurd.

The cats had accepted that resistance was futile and melted strategically into the crowd.

And Max, standing in the middle of it all with his crutch under one arm and Charles saying something dry at his shoulder, thought that this — this exact noise, this physical proof of people showing up — was what he had wanted when he invited them.

Not sympathy.

Not spectacle.

Just this.

A room full of colleagues and competitors and idiots and friends, all of whom had come to see him with their own eyes and make sure he was still here.

He was.

And when Pierre came past him again on the way to the terrace and, with the deliberate self-destruction of a man who had learned nothing, reached out to mess up his hair a second time, Max swung the crutch up immediately and Pierre barely dodged in time.

“Jesus Christ,” Pierre laughed.

“I warned you.”

“You did.”

“You’re all so annoying.”

Oscar, from behind them, lifted a glass. “Good,” he said. “That means he’s definitely fine.”

***

Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025

Lily Zneimer had expected the lunch to be strange.

She had not expected it to be… this.

Not the house itself, although that was certainly part of it. 

The house was beautiful in a way that felt less like wealth and more like someone had taken all the sharpest edges of good taste and made them look effortless. It was open and bright and somehow both enormous and intimate, with the sea flashing beyond the terrace and enough art on the walls to make Alexandra go slightly silent in the first ten minutes, which Lily had not previously believed possible.

No, what Lily had not expected was the feeling of the whole thing.

She’d expected Max Verstappen’s housewarming to feel … controlled. Cool. A little forbidding, maybe. 

The sort of place where the chairs looked expensive and nobody quite relaxed because the owner himself looked as though he might bite if someone spilled something on the wrong surface.

Instead it felt lived in.

Not casual, exactly.

 Nothing about the house was casual. The flowers were too perfectly placed for that. The piano in the sitting room looked like it should have its own diplomatic passport. 

The food had appeared in calm, elegant waves that suggested at least three people more competent than any Formula One driver had been involved in the planning.

But it felt inhabited.

That was the strange part.

Like somebody had not only designed a beautiful life here, but had actually settled into it.

Lily stood near the terrace with a glass in her hand and watched the whole thing unfold in layers.

Drivers everywhere, of course. That was unavoidable. 

Lando already laughing too loudly at something Daniel was saying. Oscar looking more relaxed than she’d seen him in weeks.

Lewis impossibly elegant even while standing in sunlight with a plate in one hand. Carlos in conversation with Alex and Pierre.

Kimi hovering close enough to Valtteri and Max to look accidental and not accidental at all.

And then there were the women.

Alexandra, somehow making understated look editorial.

Rebecca looking like she’d stepped out of a campaign for quietly expensive happiness.

Kika warm and easy and even prettier the longer one looked at her.

Flavy laughing with Alicia near the drinks table.

Isabella and Alex’s Lily deep in a conversation that had already become more intense than the lunch probably required.

Lily herself had spent an embarrassing amount of time that morning trying to work out what one wore to a lunch hosted by Max Verstappen and his girlfriend, who was also, apparently, an engineer, software founder, mystery person and possible genius.

Which brought her, unfortunately, to Ana.

Lily had told the group chat she was intimidated, which had been true. She had not mentioned that she was also, in a quiet and deeply unhelpful way, a little bit in awe.

Only slightly, she told herself now. Only a normal amount.

Ana stood near the kitchen island in a cream knit and a dark skirt. She wasn’t glittery or loud or socially effortless in the way some women at paddock events were. She didn’t fill the room by trying to own it.

And yet Lily kept noticing when she moved.

It wasn’t even beauty, though yes, fine, she was beautiful—cold at first glance and then increasingly not, once you watched the way her face changed around the people she trusted. 

It was more that she seemed to occupy herself with total precision. Nothing wasted. Nothing added for effect. Like she had no instinct at all for decoration in her own behavior and therefore came across as even more striking because of it.

Also, Lily thought as she took another sip of champagne and tried not to stare, she ran software companies on the side.

For fun.

That still refused to settle into anything resembling normal.

Oscar appeared beside her, touching two fingers lightly to the small of her back in passing.

“You okay?”

Lily looked up at him.

“Yes,” she said. Then, lowering her voice just enough that nobody else would hear: “I am trying very hard not to fangirl at your friend’s girlfriend.”

Oscar actually laughed. “That’s so specific.”

Still, Lily watched.

And what she saw was not what she had expected at all.

She had expected Max and Ana to feel dramatic together, somehow. Tense. Hyper-private. 

Something all intensity and steel and secrecy, maybe. The sort of pairing that looked powerful from a distance and exhausting up close.

Instead they kept drifting toward each other with the ease of people who had long ago stopped noticing they were doing it.

That was what startled her.

Not grand gestures. Not performative touching. Not the sort of possessiveness or theatrical chemistry people usually expected. It was smaller than that, and somehow much more intimate.

Max was sitting by the terrace doors talking to Alex and Carlos when Ana crossed behind him carrying a plate toward the kitchen. He didn’t even turn fully, just reached a hand back without looking, fingers brushing briefly against her hip as she passed.

She leaned slightly into the touch without breaking stride.

That was it.

That was all.

And Lily, watching it from across the room, felt something in her brain rearrange.

Oh, she thought. Oh, this is not what I expected at all.

Because that wasn’t drama. That was fluency.

The sort of physical shorthand people had when they belonged to each other so completely that contact no longer needed ceremony.

A few minutes later, Max said something dry to Daniel that made half the room laugh and Ana, from across the island, didn’t laugh at all—just looked up, met his eyes, and gave him one small, deeply entertained look that landed harder than anyone else’s reaction.

Max visibly softened.

Not much. Only enough for someone paying attention to notice.

Lily noticed.

And then, because apparently the lunch intended to keep surprising her, she noticed the same thing between Ana and Toto.

That relationship, too, was not what she’d expected.

From the outside, from the internet, from fragments and stories and the broad mythology of paddock power, Lily might have imagined distance. Formality. Something a little difficult and expensive and unsentimental.

Instead, what existed between them looked… gentle.  But deliberate gentleness, as if both of them had learned that the other was made of more breakable things than either had wanted to admit.

Toto checked on her without hovering. Ana answered him without bristling. Once, when someone across the table dragged Toto into another conversation, his hand brushed briefly over Ana’s shoulder as he passed behind her, and she didn’t flinch or go rigid or perform indifference. She simply tipped her head a fraction toward the touch and kept speaking to Lewis.

Again: not big. Again: somehow enormous.

And Susie—

Lily had not expected that either.

If Max and Ana were fluent, and Ana and Toto were careful, then Ana and Susie were something else altogether.

Steady.

That was it.

Steady in a way that made Lily’s chest ache a little unexpectedly when she saw it.

Ana around most people remained self-contained, precise, a little watchful under the surface even when she was being polite.

Around Susie, something different happened. Not that she became more animated exactly. More that her whole body seemed to downgrade its alert level by several degrees.

She stood closer. Turned toward her more easily. Didn’t pre-edit every expression before it arrived.

At one point Susie said something low in her ear while they were both reaching for glasses, and Ana made a face—a real one, quick and unguarded and almost adolescent in its offense—that lasted less than a second before disappearing.

Susie only smiled.

Lily stared into her drink.

This, she thought, was actually kind of devastating.

Because whatever strange constellation of people and losses and repaired things had created the atmosphere of this lunch, it was clearly built on more tenderness than the outside world had any idea existed.

Oscar leaned in close enough to murmur, “You’re doing the observing thing again.”

Lily looked up. “What observing thing.”

“The one where you go quiet because you’re building a whole internal thesis.”

She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

Then said, quietly, “I just didn’t think it would feel like this.”

Oscar’s expression shifted, because for all his own dryness, he was sometimes unnervingly good at hearing the real sentence underneath the easy one.

“Like what.”

Lily looked across the room again.

At Max, now listening the attention face he wore when someone else had the floor, except his attention kept pulling back to Ana whether he meant it to or not.

At Ana, who had just tipped her face up toward Susie’s with that rare, brief softness again.

At Toto speaking to Lewis near the windows, one eye still somehow on his daughter. 

At the whole impossible house holding them all.

“Warm,” Lily said finally.

Oscar followed her gaze.

Then nodded once.

“Yeah,” he said.

Complicated. Elegant. Slightly terrifying. But warm.

Lily took another sip of champagne and told herself, sternly, that she was absolutely not going to become emotionally invested in Max Verstappen’s domestic life because that would be ridiculous.

Then Ana looked up at something Daniel said, and Max looked at Ana looking, and the whole stupid room seemed briefly strung together by invisible threads of affection and history and difficult people being loved properly anyway.

Lily sighed into her glass.

This, she thought, was a disaster.

Because she liked her.

Not in the “acceptable hostess” sense.

Not in the “Oscar’s friend’s girlfriend seems nice” sense.

No.

She liked her in the much more inconvenient sense of recognizing, with no usable defense against it, that Ana Wolff was not only intimidatingly competent and slightly fascinating, but also—deeply annoyingly—someone Lily might have liked even without any of the mythology around her.

Which meant, naturally, that she would now spend the rest of lunch trying not to seem too impressed.

This did not go especially well.

Especially not when Ana, passing close enough to the terrace table where Lily was standing with Rebecca and Kika, paused just long enough to ask, very evenly, “Is anyone allergic to hazelnut, or are we safe?”

Lily, caught completely off guard by being directly addressed by the woman she had been privately theorizing about for the past forty minutes, blinked and answered too quickly. “No. I mean— not me. We’re safe. I think.”

Ana nodded once. “Good.”

***

Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025

Ana had not intended to be cornered by six very beautiful women before she’d even finished a full glass of water.

In fairness, cornered was too dramatic a word.

Observed, perhaps.

No—that also sounded hostile, and it wasn’t. Not really. 

The women gathered near the terrace table had the unmistakable air of people trying very hard to be normal while all collectively noticing the same thing at once and deciding, with admirable restraint, not to lunge verbally for it.

Ana had joined them because it had seemed less deranged than continuing to orbit the edges of her own lunch like a guest. Susie had made some subtle movement of the eyes that translated, in maternal language, to go on, darling, they won’t bite. Max had been trapped by Daniel and Charles. Toto was speaking to Lewis and Valtteri in the corner of the terrace with the posture of a man pretending he was not also monitoring the whole emotional ecosystem.

So Ana had done the reasonable thing.

She had walked toward the women.

And now, here she was, standing with a glass of sparkling water in one hand while Rebecca Donaldson, Alexandra Saint Mleux, Lily Zneimer, Kika Gomes, Lily Muni He, and Flavy Barla all looked, with varying levels of discipline, at her left hand.

Ana followed their gaze down.

The ring caught the Monaco light with the kind of flagrant confidence only a star sapphire of that size could manage. She had once again forgotten it was there.

That, apparently, had been a tactical error.

There was a brief silence.

Not awkward. Not exactly.

More the silence of several people realizing at once that they had not, in fact, been misreading the jewel and that the implications were now alive in the room with them.

It was Rebecca who spoke first, because of course it was.

Her tone was perfectly warm. Perfectly controlled. Only the slightest amount of delighted disbelief threaded through it.

“That,” she said, looking at Ana’s hand, “is not a subtle ring.”

Ana looked down at it again, as if perhaps it might have shrunk in the last four seconds out of courtesy.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

Lily Zneimer made a tiny sound that was almost a laugh and almost panic.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Alexandra, who had the sort of face that remained elegant even while clearly experiencing multiple revelations per minute, looked from the ring to Ana and back again. “You’re engaged`.”

It was not quite a question.

Ana looked at her. “Yes.”

Flavy’s hand actually flew to her chest.

Kika blinked.

Lily stared.

Rebecca smiled in that helplessly amused way people did when reality abruptly became much more interesting than expected.

And Lily Zneimer, apparently representing the collective emotional honesty of the group, said, “To Max?”

Ana turned her head slowly toward her.

Lily flushed immediately. “Sorry. That was an insane thing to say. Obviously to Max. I just meant—”

“No,” Ana said, and the corner of her mouth moved faintly. “It’s all right. Yes. To Max.”

That, somehow, made it worse.

Or better, perhaps, depending on one’s appetite for social shock.

Because there was something about hearing it plainly stated that made the whole thing rearrange itself into a more incredible shape. Not just big ring. Not just mystery relationship. Not just internet speculation sharpened into gossip.

For one brief second Ana considered the room from outside herself and understood what it must look like: Toto Wolff’s daughter, Max Verstappen’s fiancée, standing on a Monaco terrace as though none of this was remotely unusual and wearing a sapphire so large it looked less like jewelry and more like a diplomatic incident.

That was objectively a little funny.

“I’m sorry,” Rebecca said, smiling now in earnest, “but how long has this been going on?”

Ana took a sip of water first.

That bought her perhaps three seconds of delay. “A while.”

Lily Z made an offended noise. “A while is evil.”

Alexandra’s eyes narrowed with the calm focus of someone assembling a museum-level puzzle. “A while,” she repeated.

Ana looked at the sea instead of directly at six women who all wanted precision and absolutely deserved it and were not going to get it because she was still herself.

“Yes.”

Kika, who had been quiet longest, finally said, “Did everyone else know?”

That one, at least, made Ana glance across the terrace toward the drivers.

Max was laughing at something Daniel had said, head tipped back, one hand braced against the crutch, entirely too relaxed for a man whose private life had just detonated silently among the women five metres away. Half the drivers looked normal. The other half looked normal in the suspicious paddock sense that usually meant privately informed.

“Not everyone,” Ana said.

Lily Muni’s eyebrows went up. “Some of them don’t know?”

“Correct.”

Flavy looked delighted by this.

“Oh, that’s phenomenal.”

Ana was not sure phenomenal was the word she would have chosen, but she let it pass.

Rebecca tilted her head. “And they’re finding out… when, exactly?”

Ana looked at the ring again.

Then back at Rebecca.

“I imagine now.”

That got actual laughter.

Unfortunately, that was when Lily Zneimer looked at the ring with the frank attention of a woman who had reached the point where social restraint could no longer compete with reality.

“I need to say this,” Lily said. “That ring is enormous.”

Ana glanced down again. “Yes.”

“That’s not a judgment,” Lily said quickly. “That’s just observable fact. It’s like—”

“A minor celestial body?” Alexandra supplied.

Ana looked at her sharply. “That is almost word for word what one of my friends said.”

Rebecca laughed outright.

Kika leaned closer—not enough to invade, just enough to properly see the stone. “What is it?”

“It’s a star sapphire. A sapphire with an asterism.” Ana explained. “Max knows I like stars.”

There was a very brief silence in which all of them absorbed both the answer and the extremely Ana specificity of it.

Of course it was not a diamond. Of course it was a star sapphire.

Of course Max Verstappen had somehow managed to choose something dramatic, obscure, and impossibly personal enough to make sense only after you knew who Ana actually was.

Lily Muni said, softly, “It’s beautiful.”

Ana looked at her and nodded once. “Thank you.”

Flavy, still staring, said, “I’m sorry, but I genuinely don’t know how you’re just standing here acting like this is normal.”

Ana considered that. “It has been on my hand for some days now,” she said. “The shock has diminished.”

Rebecca smiled. “For you, perhaps.”

That was fair.

The funniest part, Ana thought, was that they were all clearly trying to behave correctly. Nobody had gone sharp or territorial or catty, as adolescent memory had always trained her to half expect in groups of women she did not know well.

 They were just… astonished. And perhaps a little impressed. And looking at the ring in the way all humans, regardless of gender or upbringing or personal dignity, tended to look at very beautiful objects that clearly came attached to an absurd story.

Lily Z, who had apparently given up on subtlety as a workable strategy, asked, “Did he just casually produce that?”

Ana felt the ghost of that night move through her ribs—the candlelight, Max’s face, the impossible sincerity of him, the fact that he had somehow managed to make something extravagant feel devastatingly precise.

“No,” she said quietly. “Not casually. He spent a year designing it.”

Because that answer told them more than the words themselves. That whatever this was between her and Max, it was not spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Not just wealth. Not just surprise. It belonged to a real history.

And because Ana had no desire to let the conversation become too earnest before lunch had even properly begun, she added,

Across the terrace, Daniel had finally clocked the energy shift and was now looking between the women and Max with the specific expression of a man who knew something entertaining was happening and wanted in.

Ana saw him open his mouth.

Max, following his line of sight, turned.

He looked toward the group.

Toward Ana.

Toward the ring.

Toward the expressions on all the women’s faces.

And, in one quick beat, understood exactly what had happened.

His face changed at once.

Not panic. Something much more Max.

A kind of resigned amusement paired with the immediate instinct to move closer to Ana whether she needed rescuing or not.

***

Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025

The drivers figured it out in the worst possible way: all at once, in public, and with just enough delay between realization and reaction for the embarrassment to become communal.

It started with Daniel.

Of course it did.

He was leaning against the terrace railing with a drink in hand, halfway through telling a story that was already 40% exaggeration and improving with every retelling, when he noticed that half the women had gone visibly strange near the drinks table and that Max was moving toward them with the expression of a man who knew exactly why.

Daniel stopped mid-sentence.

Looked at the women. Looked at Max. Looked at Ana.

Then, with the delighted horror of a man watching a secret combust in real time, said, far too loudly,

“Oh no.”

That got everyone’s attention.

Lando turned first. “What.”

Daniel pointed.

Not helpfully. Just generally, as though the whole scene itself was the point.

Charles followed Daniel’s line of vision toward the women’s little cluster, where Alexandra was still looking at Ana’s hand with the sort of alarm normally reserved for museum fires.

Max reached Ana just as Lando squinted, leaned sideways around Carlos for a better view, and said: “Why is everyone looking at Ana like that.”

Then he saw the ring.

There was a pause.

Lando blinked once.

Then twice.

Then, with the clarity of a man receiving devastating information at top speed, said, “No.”

Pierre looked over. “What no.”

Lando pointed now too, equally unhelpfully. “That.”

Carlos frowned. “That what.”

“The ring.”

And then the contagion spread.

One by one, like some ridiculous synchronized social failure, the drivers turned toward Ana.

Saw her hand. Saw the sapphire.

Saw Max sitting there with exactly the wrong amount of resignation in his face.

And understood.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Alex said.

Oscar closed his eyes briefly. “Right.”

Yuki’s entire face lit up with violent interest. “WAIT.”

Esteban actually laughed. “No way.”

Franco, who had not been present for enough of the private ecosystem to have any defense against this, just stared. “What is happening.”

Valtteri, from beside Kimi, went very still in the way of a man who already knew more than most and was now watching the rest of the class catch up.

Kimi, meanwhile, looked personally delighted. Just delighted that the ring had now become general knowledge and the day could therefore improve.

Lewis, traitorously, did not help at all.

He lifted his glass, looked directly at the drivers, and said, with serene malice, “Yes. I saw it first.”

“Oh my God,” Oscar muttered.

Daniel was nearly crying with happiness now.

“I cannot believe,” Lando said, looking between Max and Ana and the ring and then back at Max again, “that you just had this sitting here. At lunch. Casually.”

“It’s not casual,” Max said.

“That is not helping your case!”

Charles stepped forward then, eyes fixed on the ring with a kind of offended awe.

“Mon dieu.”

Alexandra, beside him, murmured, “Yes, that was my reaction too.”

Charles looked from the sapphire to Max and then at Ana, who, to her credit, was standing in the middle of this with the sort of cool self-possession normally associated with diplomatic immunity.

“You’re engaged,” Charles said.

Ana nodded once. “Yes.”

The drivers collectively lost the ability to be normal.

Lando made a sound like a kettle beginning to fail.

Yuki said, “How long.”

Oscar said, at the exact same time, “Since when.”

Pierre added, “And nobody thought to mention this?”

“Some people knew,” Lewis said pleasantly.

This caused immediate new outrage.

“What do you mean some people?” Lando demanded.

Lewis looked entirely too satisfied with himself.

Kimi lifted one hand. “I knew.”

Valtteri, without visible shame, said, “So did I.” He gave the slightest shrug. “I assumed we weren’t doing public disclosure until told otherwise.”

“That is a crazy sentence,” Alex said.

Franco looked scandalized. “How many people knew?!”

Daniel pointed to himself. “I did.”

Lando rounded on him. “You said girlfriend on a public stream!”

“Yes,” Daniel said. “I wasn’t going to announce it for them, duh.”

Charles was still staring at the ring.

Then, finally, he looked at Max with the kind of weary offense only a man raised among dramatic gestures and expensive standards could produce. “You have made the rest of us look bad.”

That got real laughter.

Even Ana’s mouth twitched.

Max frowned at him. “That’s not my problem.”

“It is now,” Charles said. “Do you understand what this does to expectations?”

Carlos laughed into his drink.

Oscar, now fully invested in the practical consequences rather than the shock, pointed at the ring. “No, because actually he’s right. That’s a stupidly high standard.”

Alex nodded. “It’s a generational problem.”

Lando looked betrayed on behalf of all future men. “This is catastrophic.”

Yuki, still staring at the ring, said, “That thing has its own gravitational pull.”

“That,” Daniel said, “is true.”

Ana glanced down at the sapphire as though she might apologize to the room for the administrative inconvenience of its existence.

Instead she said, very evenly, “It is a star sapphire.”

That made half the men go quiet again, because of course it was not just large and beautiful and ruinous to comparison. It was also specific. Personal. Thoughtful. Which somehow made Max look even more annoyingly competent.

Charles put a hand to his chest. “See?”

Max looked unimpressed. “What.”

“It’s not even just big,” Charles said. “It’s thoughtful. That’s worse.”

Carlos laughed harder.

Lando looked at Oscar with deep dismay. “We’re cooked.”

By now the terrace had split neatly into two energies: the women, who were fascinated and amused and adapting far faster than the men; and the drivers, who had instantly turned Ana’s engagement ring into a referendum on masculine competence.

Pierre looked at Max. “You really just sat on this information.”

Max shrugged one shoulder. “Yes.”

Esteban laughed. “Insane behaviour.”

“Correct behaviour,” Lewis said.

“No,” Lando said, still deeply distressed, “because we all came to lunch and he was just here. Like this. Already engaged. With this ring. In this house. While the rest of us were eating olives.”

Daniel looked at him. “You are being very emotional about someone else’s jewelry.”

Charles had not moved on.

He was still looking at Max with narrowed, personally aggrieved eyes.

“I’m serious,” he said. “You’ve made the rest of us look bad.”

Max, who had already won four world championships and apparently now intended to win the engagement olympics too, said, “Again. Not my problem.”

“It is my problem when I have to exist in society after this!”

Carlos patted Charles once on the shoulder. “You’ll survive.”

Charles looked unconvinced.

Alex, beside them, said, “To be fair, though, mate, it is a very good ring.”

“Thank you,” Max said.

And then, because enough time had passed for congratulations to override collective grievance, the mood shifted.

Lewis stepped forward first, clasped Max on the shoulder, and said, with more warmth than mockery for once, “Seriously. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Max said.

Lewis turned to Ana next, kissed her cheek, and added, “You too. It’s beautiful.”

Ana inclined her head. “Thank you.”

Oscar followed, quieter but no less sincere. “Congrats, both of you.”

Ana smiled faintly. “Thank you.”

Lando came next, still offended but now willing to be gracious about it. “I am happy for you,” he said, pointing at Max, “while also being furious about the ring.”

“That sounds like a you problem,” Max said.

“Yes,” Lando replied. “But also congratulations.”

Daniel hugged Max lightly, “About time, honestly.”

Yuki, still absolutely fascinated, grinned and said, “Congratulations. Also I want to look at the ring again later.”

Carlos offered Ana a warm smile, then shook Max’s hand with mock solemnity. “Congratulations. You did very well. Annoyingly well, but very well.”

Charles, still offended on behalf of every future fiancé on the grid, finally sighed and said, “Fine. Beautiful ring. Terrible for the rest of us. Congratulations anyway.”

“Thank you,” Ana said.

Kimi, who looked absurdly pleased by the whole thing, said, “I’m just glad it’s finally public enough that I don’t have to pretend not to know.”

Valtteri lifted his glass. “Congratulations. And condolences to every jeweller now being asked to do better.”

That got another round of laughter.

Franco, who was still mentally catching up, shook his head. “I feel like I missed six seasons of a show and got thrown into the finale.”

“You did,” Daniel said.

Then Alex, because he was practical enough to move quickly from scandal to logistics, asked, “So. Wedding. Are we talking actual plans or just ring first, panic later?”

That got everybody’s attention again.

Several faces turned toward Max and Ana at once.

Max and Ana looked at each other.

There was a pause.

Then Max said, “We know when.”

Oscar narrowed his eyes. “That sounds like you know one thing.”

Ana, with total composure, said, “Correct.”

“When?” Pierre asked.

Max answered, “Sometime before next season.”

Silence.

Then Lando said, “That is not a plan. You know nothing else, do you?”

Ana folded her arms lightly. “We know that it will happen before next season.”

“That is literally the same sentence in a different coat,” Oscar said.

Lewis put a hand over his eyes. “You have no venue.”

“No,” Ana said.

“No guest list,” Alex guessed.

“No.”

“No schedule,” Pierre added.

“No.”

Charles blinked. “You are planning a wedding in… what, three months? Four?”

“Approximately,” Ana said.

“And you know nothing else.”

Max looked mildly defensive. “We know we want it private.”

“That,” Carlos said, “is at least two things.”

“Thank you,” Ana said.

Lando looked between them in disbelief. “You two are the most planning-obsessed people I know and somehow when it comes to marriage your strategy is just… before Melbourne, probably?”

“That is unfair,” Max said.

Ana considered it. “It is also accurate.”

Even Max laughed at that.

Daniel spread his hands. “This is my favourite possible development. The two most terrifyingly organized people on earth have become emotionally useless about their own wedding.”

“We are not emotionally useless,” Ana said.

Oscar raised an eyebrow. “You have a timeframe and no known location.”

“That is not ideal,” Ana admitted.

Lewis looked at her. “Monday. Paris. We begin with the dress. One piece at a time.”

That made half the drivers stare again.

“You already have dress infrastructure?” Alex asked.

“Of course she does,” Daniel said.

Max, still somehow losing control of his own event in stages, muttered, “Apparently.”

Ana glanced at him. “You asked if I was happy. I am.”

That softened him immediately, which did not go unnoticed by anyone.

Lando made a scandalized face. “Oh, disgusting. Right. Fine. I support this. But I want updates.”

“No,” Max said.

“Yes,” Yuki said.

“Definitely yes,” Pierre added.

Charles pointed at them both. “And when you choose the date, tell people with enough time to emotionally recover.”

Carlos nodded. “Especially if Charles now feels he has to outdo a star sapphire.”

“I do,” Charles said grimly.

Alexandra laughed. “You do not.”

“I absolutely do.”

By then the whole houxr had settled into the easier warmth that came after shock: congratulations properly given, teasing redistributed, the secret now fully public and somehow less fragile for having survived contact with the grid.

Max looked around once — at the drivers, at the women, at Ana standing beside him with the ring catching the light like it had always belonged there — and thought, with the weary acceptance of a man whose life would apparently never again be private in any normal sense, that this could have gone worse.

Then Daniel lifted his glass and said, “To the engaged idiots.”

Lando pointed. “Affectionately.”

“Debatable,” Charles said.

Lewis raised his own glass. “To Max and Ana.”

Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025

Dr. Chirac’s office had been cool, quiet, tastefully under-lit, and still Ana had somehow managed to sweat through a suit she ordinarily wore to make men in technical meetings regret underestimating her.

She hated therapy. Possibly would always hate it.

Not Dr. Chirac specifically. Dr. Chirac was, irritatingly, actually competent. 

Calm. Unshowy. Entirely too good at letting silence exist without trying to aggressively improve it. 

If Ana had been forced at gunpoint to rank therapists she’d endured, Dr. Chirac would probably have come out well above average.

(But that was not the point.) 

The point was that therapy offices still made her nervous system behave as though it had been cornered by people with clipboards and insufficient pattern recognition. 

Ana had spent so much of her childhood and adolescence being sent to adults who claimed to specialize in understanding children like her and then, within fifteen minutes, had proven they were mostly interested in understanding children who arrived in more legible packaging.

She had learned to mask in therapy before she had learned to do much else consistently.

Sit correctly. Answer carefully. Make eye contact on a schedule. Appear insightful but not evasive. Distressed but not inaccessible. Bright, but never in a way that made the therapist feel stupid.

By the end of any session, she usually felt less helped than observed.

Today had been better than most.

Which, unhelpfully, had made it even more exhausting.

Toto killed the engine and glanced toward her.

Ana had already unfastened her seatbelt.

“I need to get changed,” she said.

That made him blink once, clearly thrown by the immediacy of it. “What.”

“I sweated through half this suit in that office,” she said, hand already on the door handle. “If I have to greet twenty Formula One drivers and assorted women in wool-blend tailoring that now feels like punishment, I may commit an act of social violence.”

That got the faintest twitch at the corner of her father’s mouth.

Max was in the hall before she had properly crossed it, looking warm and thankfully alive.

Ana kissed him once because she needed to and because it reset certain internal systems more effectively than breathing exercises ever had, and then said, with all the grace she could still manufacture, “I need to get changed. Immediately.”

Max’s eyes flicked briefly over her face, then to the line of her jacket collar.

“Bad?”

“Therapy is a ridiculous activity,” she said flatly. “And my suit now feels like a personal insult.”

That also got the faintest twitch at the corner of Max’s mouth. “Fair.”

Susie, who was in the sitting room and apparently already entirely at home in the middle of the pre-lunch chaos, looked up from whatever she had been arranging and said, “Go. Before you start trying to peel your own skin off.”

Ana turned her head toward her. “That is not funny.”

“It wasn’t a joke.”

Which, infuriatingly, was true.

Ana made her way upstairs with the particular speed of someone maintaining the last of her self-control through sheer self discipline. She had made it into the bedroom and just started tugging open the wardrobe when she heard the soft, familiar sound of Susie following her in and closing the door behind them.

Of course.

Ana looked at her and immediately, instinctively, felt her shoulders drop by a fraction.

It was one of the more absurdly consistent facts of her life that Susie could calm her nervous system simply by being in the room. 

Not by doing anything in particular. Just by existing there with her particular combination of steadiness, intelligence, and complete lack of interest in making Ana feel like an unsolved problem.

It had been that way for years.

Susie had never acted as though Ana was broken. Or difficult. Or a girl who needed to be translated into something more broadly acceptable before being allowed full personhood.

Susie had just... taken her as she was.

Which, Ana thought privately, had probably saved more of her than anyone ever properly acknowledged.

“I need five minutes,” Ana said.

Susie took one look at her face, the suit, the shoes, the particular tension in the line of her jaw, and said, “You need twenty.”

“Five is more realistic.”

“Fine. I’ll help.”

Ana did not bother objecting.

Instead, she peeled off the suit jacket first with a visible shudder of relief.

“I hate therapy,” she muttered.

Susie leaned against the dressing table, arms folded, watching her.

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

Ana glanced at her, one eyebrow lifting. “Do you?”

“Yes,” Susie said simply. “Every therapist you talked to when you were younger seemed to make you more exhausted, not less.”

That stopped her for a second.

Because yes. Exactly.

Ana dropped the jacket over a chair and reached for the fastening of her blouse.

“They never helped,” she said, more quietly now. “Not really.”

Susie said nothing.

Ana unbuttoned the blouse with quick, irritated fingers. “They all wanted some version of me that was easier to read. Softer. More spontaneous. Less…” She made a small, vague gesture. “Built. I spent more time in therapy offices masking than doing anything else.”

Ana stepped out of the blouse and reached immediately for the first soft thing available, pausing only when Susie said, with deceptive casualness, “I didn’t know about the keyboard.”

Ana’s hands stilled over the shelf.

For one second she considered pretending not to know what she meant. But Susie was not Toto and not Dr. Chirac and not a person before whom evasion felt especially useful.

So she only said, “Max told you.”

“Yes.”

Ana closed her eyes briefly.

Not because she minded Max telling Susie.

She didn’t. 

“I didn’t know,” Susie said again, and there was something different in her voice now. Not pity. Never that. Anger, perhaps, though carefully controlled. “I knew about your grandmother. I knew about the piano in Switzerland. I knew about the Yamaha in Brackley. But not about the keyboard.”

Ana looked down at the shelf for a second longer before picking up a dressing gown, made out of a faded knit soft enough not to start a fight with her skin.

“I assumed.”

“That I knew?”

“That Toto must have mentioned it sometime.”

Susie stared at her for a second.“Toto never told me.”

There was something so nakedly offended in the sentence that Ana almost smiled.

Almost.

Instead she pulled the dressing gown on and said, with more tired honesty than she might have managed under better circumstances, “It was long before you came into our lifes. ”

“That is not the point.”

“No.”

“It is also not a defense.”

“No.”

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Then Susie said, “You know I would have done something.”

Ana glanced at her.

The immediate answer was yes. Of course she knew that. If Susie had known, there would have been a conversation. Possibly several. Possibly sharp enough to leave marks on the furniture. Susie was not a woman who responded well to children being made smaller for the convenience of adults who should have known better.

Still, Ana only said, “Yes.”

Susie watched her for another second. Then, gentler, “I never wanted you to feel wrong in our house.”

That landed somewhere deep and quiet.

“I know,” she said.

And she did know.

She had known it in Switzerland in a hundred tiny ways nobody else would have noticed.

 In the fact that Susie did not flinch when she repeated things. In the way she asked before moving objects that Ana used often. In the way she learned quickly which fabrics made Ana go rigid and never mocked it. In the fact that she could sit in companionable silence for an hour and never once weaponize the silence against Ana.

Susie had never treated her quirks as moral failings.

Never looked at her with that exhausted adult expression that said Why must you be so much work?.

Susie had always just accepted that Ana was as she was and built around that with competence and kindness, which was perhaps the most radical form of love Ana had ever encountered as a teenager.

Ana belted the dressing gown and exhaled slowly as the fabric settled right against her skin.

Better.

Not good. Better.

She sat down on the edge of the bed to take off the trousers next, too tired to preserve dignity for its own sake.

Susie came and sat beside her, not too close, just near enough that Ana could feel the steadiness of her there without having to negotiate touch she had not asked for.

“That should never have happened,” Susie said.

Ana looked at her.

The fury in Susie was always most alarming when it arrived this quietly. Not theatrical. Just cold, clear, and already looking for where to go.

Ana’s mouth moved once.

“I know that more now,” she said.

Susie reached over and brushed one knuckle lightly against the back of Ana’s hand. “You were never wrong for taking up space.”

There it was.

The sentence that still had the power to catch somewhere under Ana’s ribs no matter how many times she tried to out-think it.

She looked down at their hands.

Then said, because truth felt marginally less dangerous with Susie than with almost anyone else in the world, “Being near you always made it easier.”

Susie turned her head slightly. “What did?”

“Everything.”

That made Susie still.

Ana stared at the carpet because looking directly at her would make the sentence harder to continue.

“You never made me feel broken,” she said. “Or wrong. Or too much.” Her fingers folded into the bedspread. “You just… accepted me. Even when I was odd in ways other people found alarming.”

Susie’s face softened all the way then, which was rare enough that Ana usually preferred not to provoke it accidentally.

“Oh, darling,” she said.

Ana made a face. “Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You are becoming emotional at me.”

Susie smiled faintly. “Only because you’ve just said something very lovely and deeply unfair to spring on me while you’re half-undressed and furious at your clothing.”

That got a reluctant breath of laughter out of her.

Which was dangerous too, because laughter loosened things.

Downstairs, Daniel laughed, the sound carrying up the stairwell like proof that lunch and social performance and the rest of the day were continuing whether or not she felt adequately reconstructed.

Susie looked toward the door, then back at her.

“Also,” she said, as if only just remembering, though the timing was too careful to be accidental, “tomorrow morning we’re having a meeting with the lawyers.”

Ana blinked.

“What?”

“About the adoption paperwork.”

The room seemed to go very still.

Not outwardly. Nothing moved. The light remained the same. Daniel was still laughing downstairs. The house had not altered.

But internally something shifted so abruptly that for a second Ana could do nothing except stand there and absorb the sentence.

“You’re serious,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“We already have a meeting?”

“Yes,” Susie said, and now her voice had gone gentler. “We do.”

Ana stared at her.

It was one thing to know, abstractly, that they were moving toward it. That the conversation in Monaco, the quiet yes in the kitchen, the changed shape of things between her and Susie had been leading somewhere real.

It was another to hear lawyers and tomorrow morning in the same sentence.

“It’s just the first meeting,” Susie said. “Paperwork. Structure. Next steps. No one is springing a courtroom on you at breakfast.”

That pulled the faintest shift at the corner of Ana’s mouth.

“The lawyers will walk us through the paperwork tomorrow,” Susie said. “What Monaco requires, what timing looks like, whether anything needs to be done in parallel.” She paused. “And then we do it properly.”

Ana swallowed once. “Okay.”

The word felt much too small for the thing it was attached to.

She could feel the emotional weight of it arriving in different places at once: relief first, then disbelief, then something deeper and harder to name. Something that made her chest feel too full in a way she distrusted instinctively.

Susie leaned in and kissed her forehead, quick and without ceremony.

A door opened. Something clinking on the terrace. The lunch beginning to assemble itself whether she was emotionally prepared for it or not.

“I am not looking forward to today,” Ana said weakly.

“The lunch?” Susie asked softly. 

“The women,” Ana said.

Susie’s eyebrows lifted. “The women.”

“I don’t really think I have much in common with them.”

That, at least, made Susie smile.

“You all love racing drivers,” she said. “That seems a fairly solid starting point.”

Ana stared at her.

“That is not a personality trait.”

“No,” Susie agreed. “But it is a shared poor decision.”

Ana made another face, which only widened Susie’s smile.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” Susie stood then and walked over to the wardrobe, calmly beginning to move hangers aside. “You do not need to have identical hobbies to survive one lunch.”

Ana folded her arms. “That has historically not gone especially well for me.”

Susie paused and looked at her properly.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. But historically, a great many people have been idiots. That means the sample size may have been flawed.”

That was annoyingly sound reasoning.

Ana disliked that.

Susie pulled out one dress, looked at it, rejected it immediately, and moved on.

“You also do not have to perform femininity in whatever way you think they might prefer,” she added.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good.”

“I was going to perform tolerable civility and then probably hide behind a serving dish.”

“That,” Susie said, “may still become necessary. But we can at least dress you appropriately beforehand.”

She held up a shirt.

Ana looked at it. “Too stiff.”

Susie nodded and put it back.

Another.

“Scratchy collar.”

Back again.

Another.

“Wrong seam.”

By the sixth rejection Susie had gone from amused to faintly appalled.

She stood in front of the wardrobe with two fingers hooked through a line of hangers and looked at the contents as if the entire concept of Ana’s closet had become a personal insult.

“Ana.”

“What?”

“We really need to go shopping one of these days.”

Ana looked blank. “Why?”

“Because,” Susie said with admirable restraint, “half of your wardrobe is threadbare.”

“It is not.”

“It absolutely is.”

Ana glanced toward the shelf in question.

There were, perhaps, signs of use.

That was maybe because Ana wore things until they became unwearable, then kept wearing them for another month if the fabric remained tolerable and the holes were not in socially inappropriate locations.

“It’s fine,” Ana said.

“This is threadbare.”

“It is soft.”

“This has a hole.”

“It is near the hem. That’s a structurally irrelevant location.”

“This cardigan is practically translucent.”

“It’s comfortable.”

Susie turned and looked at her.

Ana lifted one shoulder. “It takes a very long time to find things that don’t feel wrong.”

That, at least, made Susie’s face soften again.

“I know,” she said. “But some of these garments have given their lives in service. We must let them go.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Susie gestured toward the wardrobe. “You wear things until they die.”

“It is fiscally responsible.”

Susie lifted another cardigan sleeve between two fingers with the expression of a woman examining battlefield remains. “This,” Susie said, “is not a garment. This is a survivor.”

Ana, to her irritation, laughed.

Susie looked back at her, one eyebrow raised. “We are going shopping.”

“I hate shopping.”

“I know.”

“There are lights.”

“Yes.”

“People.”

“Yes.”

“Music.”

“Yes.”

“Bad textures.”

Susie dropped the cardigan back into place. “And I will manage all of that. You will just point at what doesn’t make you want to commit violence.”

“That is not a persuasive pitch.”

“It doesn’t need to be persuasive. It’s already decided.”  Susie said firmly. “And until I can drag you into a proper shopping expedition with fabric standards and time and patience, you are wearing this.”

She pulled out a soft ivory knit top and a navy skirt that skimmed rather than clung, both elegant enough for lunch and comfortable enough not to destroy the rest of Ana’s day..

Ana narrowed her eyes. “That is acceptable.”

“Glowing endorsement.”

“It means the outfit won’t make me want to peel my skin off before the starters arrive.”

“Excellent,” Susie said. “A ringing success.”

Ana took both pieces from her and disappeared into the bathroom to change.

When she came back out a minute later, Susie was waiting with the kind of expression that suggested she had not only selected correctly, but knew it.

The outfit was simple, clean, soft enough not to start a war, structured enough that Ana still looked like herself and not like someone’s frightened cousin at a corporate lunch. Susie handed her a pair of loafers without comment.

Ana accepted them.

Then stood there for a moment in the quiet, feeling the strange aftermath of therapy still buzzing low in her nervous system, the house full below them, the women she did not know waiting somewhere in the near future, and Susie in front of her—steady, lovely, infuriatingly right.

“You really never made me feel wrong,” Ana said again, more quietly this time.

Susie stepped closer and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ears. “Good,” she said. “Because you were never wrong. Only particular.”

Ana exhaled.

That word.

Particular.

So much kinder than broken. So much more accurate than difficult.

Downstairs, Daniel’s laugh once again carried up the stairwell like evidence that the day was continuing regardless of anyone’s psychological preferences.

Susie looked toward the door, then back at her. “Ready?”

Ana thought about saying no.

Thought about saying absolutely not. Thought about saying she would rather take apart a gearbox with her bare hands than make elegant conversation with the romantic attachments of Formula One drivers in her own living room.

Instead she said, with all the dignity available to her, “Manageably.”

Susie smiled.

“Close enough.”

And then, because she was Susie and therefore emotionally incapable of leaving the room without one final tactical correction, she reached out, smoothed Ana’s hair once behind her ear, and said:

“Also, if any of them are stupid, come and stand next to me. I’ll bite.”

That got a real laugh out of her.

***

Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025

Toto knew something was wrong the moment Max said, with far too much calm: “Susie is probably going to have words for you later.”

They were in the kitchen. Ana had gone upstairs with Susie to change, the house already carrying that pre-event hum of flowers and glass and a buffet for 30 people laid on in the living room.

Max, however, was leaning on crutches near the kitchen island with the expression of a man who had decided he was morally obligated to hand over a live grenade before someone else stepped on it by accident.

Toto paused. “That sounds ominous.”

Max looked at him. “It is.”

Toto waited.

Because if there was one thing he had learned about Max Verstappen, it was that when he bothered with conversational preamble, the content underneath was usually either very serious or very annoying. Often both.

“What did you do?” Toto asked.

That got him a flat look. “I didn’t do anything.”

Toto’s eyebrows lifted.

Max made a small, impatient gesture with his free hand. “Well. I asked questions.”

“That is usually when trouble begins.”

There was a beat. Then Max said, with the bluntness of a man who saw no point in cushioning obvious stupidity: “A keyboard, really?”

Toto stilled. Not visibly, perhaps. Not to most people.

“In Vienna,” Max said. “When she was living with you and Stephanie.” His mouth flattened slightly. “Her playing annoyed Stephanie, so you got her a keyboard with headphones for her room?”

The sentence landed with surgical precision.

No raised voice. No accusation in tone. Nothing theatrical.

Which made it worse.

Toto stood very still in the hallway and felt, with sickening clarity, the exact moment the consequences of an old practical decision returned wearing the face of his future son-in-law.

“I see,” he said at last.

Max looked almost offended by the understatement.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

Because he did.

Too well, now.

Max shifted his weight on the crutches.

“She told me about Moscow,” he said. “And her grandmother. Irina sold the first piano because the playing annoyed her.”

Toto shut his eyes briefly. Only briefly.

When he opened them, Max was still looking at him with that deeply unhelpful directness of his, the kind that made evasion feel stupid before it even formed.

“Yes,” Toto said quietly. “I know about Moscow.”

Max’s face did something sharp and fleeting.

“Did you know what the keyboard taught her? ”

There it was.

Not the object. Not the headphones. Not even Stephanie, though there was enough blame there for several lifetimes.

The feeling of it.

Toto exhaled slowly.

“No,” he said.

The honesty of it cost him.

Because no, he had not known. Not then. Not in the way that mattered.

He had known the apartment was tense. Had known Stephanie was unhappy. Had known Ana’s repetitions, her scales, her devotion to practice, had become one more source of domestic friction in a home already too brittle to absorb any strain gracefully.

And he had done what he had so often done in those years: solved the immediate problem.

A keyboard. Headphones. Privacy. Peace.

Practical. Efficient. 

Catastrophically incomplete.

“She said,” Max went on, and now there was something colder under the words, not hostility exactly but protective anger sharpened into coherence, “that she was fine with less.”

That one hit hardest.

Not because it was unfair.

Because it wasn’t.

Toto looked away for a second, toward the staircase Ana had just climbed, as though the sight of it might somehow rearrange the past into something less ugly.

Instead he saw only the child she had been overlaid against the house he stood in now: small, watchful, newly arrived in a country not hers, trying to assess how much of herself could safely occupy a room that belonged to other people first.

And he had given her a keyboard and headphones.

Christ.

“I was trying to keep the peace,” Toto said.

Max gave a short, humorless breath through his nose. “Yeah.”

Not agreement. Recognition. And, worse, judgment that Toto had no particular grounds to contest.

Toto rubbed once at his mouth. “I know how that sounds.”

Max looked at him.

“No,” he said. “I think you know how it ended.”

That was fair. Devastatingly fair.

Toto looked back at Max.

“How bad? ”

Max’s jaw moved once. He did not pretend not to understand the question. “She cried,” he said simply.

Toto closed his eyes again.

Not for long. Long enough.

When he opened them, Max was still there, still solid and difficult and apparently constitutionally incapable of softening a truth that no longer deserved softening.

“And Susie knows now,” Max added. That, more than anything, explained the warning.

Toto almost smiled.

Not because anything was funny.

Of course Susie knew by now. And of course the reckoning had merely been deferred until a later, more private hour.

“She didn’t know,” he said quietly. He never told her. Had never dared to tell her. 

Max watched him for a second longer, then said, with renewed offense on Ana’s behalf and perhaps a little on his own: “But also—really? A keyboard with headphones?”

Toto actually let out a short breath that might have become a laugh in another universe.

There was no humor in this one.

Because heard aloud now—stripped of circumstance, context, adult justification—it sounded exactly as bad as it was.

A child displaced from a shared room because her music annoyed someone. A keyboard with headphones offered in place of space. Containment instead of belonging.

Max’s grip adjusted on the crutch.

“She learned to make herself smaller around it,” he said. “That’s the part that’s…” He stopped. Started again, rougher now. “That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.”

Toto looked at him.

And because there was no use pretending with Max, not now, he said the only true thing available.

“Neither can I.”

That quieted something between them.

Not resolved. Not forgiven. Just acknowledged.

Max looked toward the stairs then, where Susie and Ana still hadn’t reappeared, and muttered, “Anyway. I thought you should know before she gets to you.”

That, Toto thought, was almost considerate in the most Verstappen way imaginable: no comfort, no padding, just clear threat assessment before impact.

“Thank you,” he said dryly.

Max glanced back at him. “I’m not being nice.”

“I know.”

“I’m being practical.”

“Yes,” Toto said. “I know.”

That got the faintest twitch at one corner of Max’s mouth.

Good.

Not because Toto particularly needed Max to find him bearable in this moment, but because the alternative—open hostility in the kitchen while Ana changed upstairs and Susie sharpened herself into marital consequence—would have improved nobody’s afternoon.

Toto looked once more toward the stairs.

Then back at Max.

“The Bösendorfer,” he said after a moment. “was that also a mistake?”

Max considered that.

“No.”

Toto waited.

Then Max said, more quietly than before, “It hit everything at once. That’s what broke her open. But no.” He shook his head once. “No. Not a mistake.”

Something in Toto’s chest eased and tightened at the same time.

The gift was right. The nerve it touched was old. Those were not contradictory facts.

“She played this morning,” Max added after a beat.

Toto looked up sharply.

“She did?”

“Rachmaninoff. At dawn. Very Russian. Very dramatic.” Max’s expression altered by a fraction, not enough to call it softness, enough to mean it. “She was incredible.”

And there it was.

The part Toto had not gotten to see.

He stood there for a second with that image in his mind and let himself be glad of it before guilt rushed back in to reassert its rights.

Then he looked at Max properly.

“You’re angry.”

Max gave him a look that suggested the sentence was insultingly unnecessary.

“Yes.” Max’s mouth flattened again. “Not just at you. At all of it.”

Toto nodded once. Then, because honesty had apparently become compulsory across multiple households today, said: “She should have had better.”

Max’s face did not change.

But something in his posture did.

A small easing. Not absolution. Not even close. Just the recognition that Toto was not going to stand here and defend the indefensible because time had passed and practical reasons had once existed.

“Yes,” Max said. “She should have.”

And just then Susie appeared at the top of the stairs.

One look at her face told Toto that yes, Max’s warning had been entirely warranted. She did not look explosive. Susie almost never did. She looked much worse than that: controlled, beautiful, and absolutely certain of the subject of their later conversation.

Ana was beside her in dark blue and cream, composed again, though more delicate around the edges than she would have liked anyone to notice.

Susie’s eyes flicked from Max to Toto.

And in that one elegant glance, Toto read the whole thing.

Later. Privately. No escape.

Max, traitor to the end, shifted slightly on the crutches and said under his breath, “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

Toto did not look at him.

Wise, probably.

Instead he straightened, looked up toward his daughter, and prepared to get through lunch before his wife dismantled him with the kind of marital precision that never raised its voice and somehow made that much, much worse.

***

Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025

Lewis Hamilton was the first person to arrive, which surprised nobody and pleased himself immensely.

Ana heard the front door open from the sitting room and already knew it would be him before Nikolai even said his name. 

There was a particular quality to Lewis’s entrances—not loud, not clumsy, not even dramatic in the obvious sense. 

Just precise. Intentional. Like he had already decided what kind of effect he was going to have on a room and saw no reason not to achieve it.

He stepped into their home in cream knitwear, dark trousers, sunglasses, and the expression of a man whose priorities were deeply ordered and entirely his own.

He saw Ana immediately.

Not Max. Not Susie. Not the piano. Not the flowers. Ana.

And more specifically—

Her left hand. “Oh, thank God,” he said, walking straight toward her. “You’re wearing it.”

Ana, who had once again forgotten she was wearing the ring at all, blinked once and looked down at her own hand as though surprised to find the sapphire still there.

“Yes,” she said. “That does tend to be how engagement rings work.”

Lewis ignored that. He took her hand in both of his and lifted it toward the light with a seriousness that might have been absurd if it hadn’t suited him so perfectly.

“I haven’t seen it properly yet,” he said. “And I need to see it first.”

Ana tilted her head. “Why?”

Lewis looked up at her over the ring, entirely sincere. “So I have something to hold over Nico’s head.”

That startled a real laugh out of her.

Across the room, Max made a sound of exhausted recognition, like a man who had already accepted that whatever social order he had hoped for today had already dissolved.

Susie, standing by the drinks table with the kind of elegant calm that suggested she had already survived three small disasters before noon, turned her head and smiled.

Lewis was still inspecting the ring.

“Well,” he said. “That is offensive.”

Ana frowned faintly. “Offensive.”

“It is enormous,” Lewis said. “And very beautiful. Which means I now need at least twelve minutes alone with Nico at the next possible opportunity so I can mention that I saw it before he did.”

Max, from somewhere behind her, muttered, “That is such a weird priority.”

Lewis finally let go of Ana’s hand and looked at him. “No. It is a very important priority.”

Ana folded her arms loosely, one shoulder settling against the edge of the piano as she watched them both.

“Right,” he said, turning back to Ana with the expression of a man resuming the actual business of the day. “Monday. Paris. Eleven o’clock.”

Ana stared at him.

Lewis stared back.

Around them, Susie’s eyebrows lifted. Daniel, already halfway through a drink he had almost certainly not been explicitly offered, looked delighted. Max narrowed his eyes.

“What’s Monday?” Max asked.

Lewis answered without looking away from Ana.

“For you? Nothing. We are going wedding dress shopping.”

Susie blinked. “You asked Lewis for help?”

Ana looked at her, faintly puzzled by the surprise in her tone. “Yes,” she said. “That was logical.”

Lewis smiled immediately, pleased by the evidence of good judgment. “Exactly.”

Susie repeated, “Logical.”

“Yes,” Ana said. “Lewis understands construction, silhouette, quality, and aesthetics. He has strong opinions, good taste, and no patience for anything ugly or pointless. That seemed efficient.”

Toto made a small choking sound into his glass.

Max put a hand over his mouth and looked suspiciously like he was trying not to laugh.

Susie recovered first.

“That,” she said, “is an extremely Ana reason to ask Lewis Hamilton to help choose a wedding dress.”

Ana still did not entirely understand what the alternative was meant to be.

“Would you have preferred I ask someone indecisive?”

Lewis placed one hand briefly over his chest, visibly moved.“Thank you,” he said. “That is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.”

Max looked between them.“You already made an appointment?”

Lewis turned to him. “Yes.”

“You did that without asking me.”

Lewis removed his sunglasses slowly and with enough elegance that the gesture felt faintly disciplinary.

“Max,” he said, “with affection, your involvement in this is not required. Quite frankly, I don’t trust your taste.”

Daniel doubled over laughing.

Susie looked away, shoulders moving once.

Ana, to her credit, limited herself to the smallest shift at the corner of her mouth.

Lewis turned back to her as if resuming the actual business of the afternoon.

“I called in a few favours,” he said. “Fabric first, shape after. You are not going to be put in anything that makes you look like a haunted napkin.”

Ana nodded once.

“That seems reasonable.”

“Good.”

Susie was still looking at the two of them with a kind of dazed warmth, as though watching a plan she had not anticipated assemble itself perfectly in front of her.

“You really did ask Lewis.”

Ana tilted her head. “Yes.”

Something in Susie’s face softened further.

“That was logical,” she said again.

Ana heard the change in her tone and, because she knew herself too well not to account for the emotional truth beneath the practical one, added, “I also did not want to spend six months looking at dresses I hated.”

Lewis looked triumphant.

“There,” he said. “You see. She understands the stakes.”

Max, leaning on his crutch by the terrace doors, shook his head once in the resigned way he had when life had become too strange to resist and therefore had to be accepted as-is.

Ana glanced at him.

He caught the look and, to his credit, only asked, “Are you happy with that?”

Not why Lewis. Not why didn’t you tell me. Just that.

Ana looked at Lewis, at Susie, at the room slowly filling around her, at the ring still catching the light on her hand.