Page 15 of Doc Rock
Mai stared up at Ford on the big screen as he moved. He wore jeans and a singlet, his corded muscles and tattoos on display. He had his leather straps wrapped around his arms, hiding the ink she caught glimpses of earlier.
She was glad he didn’t wear the leather trousers anymore. When they were kids, she hadn’t been able to stop staring at him in them, but when he still wore the same pants at twenty-seven, she would shake her head at the television and suggest he needed some more grown-up trousers.
Not that she had too much time over the years towatchtelevision. While he was on talk shows and playing in eighty-thousand-seat venues, she was studying and working eighty-hour weeks.
Her breath caught.
He had just been handedherguitar. The one she left behind all those years ago.
Tears sprang to her eyes, and one trickled down her cheek. Her hand flew up to mop at it before Janinenoticed.
Sheknewwhat he was going to play from the first chord. As their first hit,Summer Days, filled the arena and the crowd sang along, she mouthed the words. Words that shecouldstill remember singing for him one summer afternoon when they were kids.It wasthe song she wrote when she silently longed for Ford. The song they were working on when they had their first kiss.
Mai jumped when Janine clutched her arm.
“That’s my favourite song!”Janine squealed.“I’m so pleased I got tohearit live.”
“Mine too,” Mai agreed.
“What do you think happened to the girl?”Janine asked.
“Who?”Maiknewexactly who the nurse was talking about, but wasn’t about to say it.
“Sie. She was in the band before Ryan. They were madly in love, her and Ford. Then,poof, one day, she vanished. What do you think happened to her?”
Mai had read so many theories about her whereabouts over the years. Some claimed she was dead. Some that she moved abroad. Some creative ones said she was in witness protection—she didn’t evenknowif that was a thing in Australia.
“Maybe shejustwent and lived a normal life out of the spotlight,”Mai suggested.
“Pffffff,”Janine snorted.“Who would trade that?”She waved her hand at the stage, where Ford playedBefore The Dawn, another song they wrote together.“Who would trade him?”This time, she pointed directly at Ford.“For mundane lives like we have.”
“Me,”Mai whispered too quietly for Janine to catch over the noise of the crowd.“I don’tknow,”she said loud enough for the other woman tohear.
When Mai left the concert, her heart wrenched like it had when she left Ford sixteen years ago. To have been so close to him and not able to acknowledge him—and for him not toknowher—it broke something inside her.
At home, she stared at her guitar for a long time before she took it in her arms and began to play everything she had ever written with Midnight Thunder. Singing as her heart tore, until her voice was hoarse and her fingers bled.
When she finished, she laid the guitar down and gazed at the wall.
She missed Ford.
She missed music.
She missed performing—not in a stadium, she would never do that again—but she missed the small, intimate crowds.
Mai took a large slurp of coffee as she walked along the corridor to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, sighing with happiness as the caffeine hit her bloodstream.
She wasn’t concentrating on anything but getting to work when shehearda man’s voice call.
“Sie.”
Luckily, she didn’t break stride and kept walking to the door through which she worked, ignoring Donnie, who sat on a chair where relatives usually waited.
“Maisie,” he tried again.
This time, she was forced to stop as he used the name which was prominently written on her work badge.
She turned to face him, a puzzled expression on her face.
