Page 19 of Two Hit Wonder

She found Mo in the kitchen, slumped at the table with her phone in her hands, scrolling through something with the glazed expression of someone who wasn't really seeing what was on the screen.

"Hey," Iona said. "Good day at school?"

Mo shrugged without looking up.

"What did you have for lunch?"

Another shrug.

"Did you remember to hand in that history homework?"

Mo sighed. It was a sigh of such theatrical exhaustion, such profound teenage suffering, that Iona almost laughed. Almost. But there was something underneath it that stopped her. A brittleness that hadn't been there six months ago. She blew out a breath. Might as well get this over with. "Mo," she said, sitting down across from her. "What's going on with you?"

"Nothing."

"You've been acting different lately. Quiet. Is something happening at school?"

Mo finally looked up. Her eyes, so like Iona's, were flat and closed off. "I'm fine, Mum. Just tired."

"You seem more than tired. You seem upset."

"I'm not upset."

"Then why won't you talk to me?"

"Because there's nothing to talk about." Mo pushed back from the table, pocketing her phone. "Can I go to my room now, or do you need to interrogate me some more?"

Iona tried hard not to rise to the bait. "I'm not interrogating you. I'm asking how your day was. That's what parents do."

"Well, maybe I don't want to talk about my day. Did you ever think of that?"

"Mo."

"What?" Mo was already at the door, her whole body angled away like Iona was something dangerous. "I've got homework. I'll be in my room."

She left. A moment later, Iona heard her bedroom door close. Not a slam, which might have been easier to handle. Just a quiet, deliberate click that felt like a door closing on more than just a room.

Iona sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at nothing.

Her daughter was slipping away from her, and she didn't know why, other than the fact that she was fourteen and stroppy. Her oldest friends wanted something she couldn't deliver. And somewhere in Scotland, in a cottage surrounded by sheep, was the woman who'd kissed her once, fifteen years ago, and then vanished from her life like she'd never existed. And a sheep that bit.

What would it have been like, Iona wondered, if the band had never broken up? If Maeve had stayed? If that one kiss had turned into two, then three, then something that had a name and a shape?

She'd be a different person now. Maybe happier. Maybe not. Maybe she'd have made different mistakes instead of the ones she'd actually made: the too-quick marriage to Shepherd, the even-quicker marriage to Calinda, the years of drifting from one hobby to another, never quite finding the thing that made her feel like herself.

Or maybe she'd have made the same mistakes anyway. Maybe she'd have found different ways to fail.

But there’d be no Mo.

MO’S DOOR STAYED closed all evening. Iona made dinner for two and ate alone, leaving a plate covered in cling film on the counter for whenever Mo emerged. She didn't emerge. At eleven, Iona knocked gently, said goodnight through the door, and got a mumbled response that might have been "night" or might have been "go away."

She went to bed feeling like she was failing at everything, all at once.

In the dark, with the city noise filtering through the curtains, she thought about Maeve again. That stone cottage. That hostile sheep. Those green eyes.

Maybe Maeve was right to say no. Maybe some things were better left in the past.

But Iona couldn't shake the feeling that something had stirred in Scotland, something that had been sleeping for fifteen years. And now that it was awake, she wasn't sure she could put it back to sleep again.