Page 50 of How To Not Need You

I'm halfway down the stairs when my phone starts ringing.

Luca.

Obviously.

I decline it.

The thing about parks in the afternoon is that they smell like childhood, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean grass and sunscreen and the funk of public playground equipment that’s been baked by the sun since about 1997.

Tilly is shrieking “higher, Liv, HIGHER!” from the swing I’m currently pushing. I give her another shove. Not too hard. I’m not trying to send a five-year-old into orbit, despite what her delighted screams might suggest. The swing arcs out, and her golden curls are bouncing in response, her missing front tooth on full display in a grin so wide it looks like almost painful.

“AGAIN!”

“You’re going to be sick,” I warn her.

“NO I’M NOT!”

“You absolutely are, and I’m not cleaning it up.”

“DAD WILL!”

Jake, sprawled on the faded picnic rug a few meters away with a coffee balanced on one knee, raises his mug in what I can only assume is salute to his own impending laundry disaster. He hasn’t moved in a while. Seemingly content to watch Tilly drag me around the playground. He looks far too relaxed for a man whose daughter has just volunteered him for vomit duty.

It’s annoying. It’s also, unfortunately, extremely attractive.

Tilly drags me to the sandpit next. Not asks. Drags. A small determined hand wrapped around my wrist, towing me across the playground.

“We’re building a castle.”

“We are?”

“Yes. You’re the architect.”

“I charge for my services.”

“You can have my juice box.”

I have been professionally out-negotiated by a child and am surprisingly OK with that. We crouch in the sand and Tilly digs with both hands, sending grit flying in every direction, most of it landing on my jeans. I don’t move out of the way, though. I just keep shaping the outer wall of what is, objectively, the ugliest sand castle in South Australia, and when Tilly looks up at me with blue eyes wide and serious and says “the turret needs to be pointier,” I make the turret pointier.

Then she disappears into the long grass at the edge of the playground and returns with a fistful of small yellow wildflowers, stems crushed in her small fist, and thrusts them at me.

“These are for you.”

I take them. “Thank you.”

“They match your earrings.” She points at the small gold hoops I’m wearing. She’s right. They do.

My chest feels really tight all of a sudden.

I choose not to think about it too closely.

Two minutes later, she’s climbing the monkey bars and her juice box is in my hand. She didn't ask me to hold it. She just handed it over and I took it without thinking.

Apparently I'm a juice-box-holding adult now.

Horrifying.

I put the juice box down as Tilly shouts for my attention, then realise that my hands are covered in grit. As I’m brushing the grit off I see them.