Page 52 of Two Hit Wonder

"It's a start."

For a moment, Iona thought she wouldn't answer. Then Maeve moved away from the window and sat down in the armchair across from her, folding her long limbs into the space like a heron settling onto a branch. "It was a way to deal with things I didn't know how to deal with," she said. "The fame. The money. Everyone wanting something from me all the time. The pressure of being the voice, the songwriter, the one they all looked at when things went wrong." She paused. "Other things."

"Other things?"

Maeve's gaze was steady. "Other things."

Iona didn't push. She'd learned, over years of failed relationships and difficult conversations, when to leave a door closed. Instead, she asked the question that had been sitting in her throat for fifteen years, the one she'd never let herself say out loud because saying it would mean admitting how much she'd wanted a different answer. "Then why did you leave?"

There was silence for a long minute. "Because I couldn't have that life and stop drinking at the same time." Maeve's voice was matter-of-fact. No self-pity, no drama. Just the truth, laid out like a hand of cards. "The band. The touring. Being surrounded by it all the time. Every venue had a bar. Every celebration had champagne. Every bad night had a whiskey cure. Every good night too, come to that. I had to get out or I was going to die. It was that simple."

"Okay," Iona said. And it was, mostly. She understood the logic of it, the necessity. What she didn't understand was everything else. The silence afterward. The years of nothing. And then there was the other thing. The one none of them mentioned.

She wanted to bring up the kiss. The way Maeve had looked at her that night, backstage at that terrible venue in Camden, both of them sweaty and high on the gig, and how Maeve had leaned in and pressed her mouth to Iona's like it was the most natural thing in the world. The way it had tasted how it was the end of something she hadn't known was beginning.

But she didn't. She couldn't. Some doors were too heavy to push open.

"Can I ask questions now?" Maeve said.

Iona swallowed and nodded. Her heart was beating too fast.

✽✽✽

Maeve watched Iona’s face in the lamplight and tried to remember how to breathe.

This was a mistake. Coming here was a mistake. She should have stayed in her hotel room, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the name written on that school form. Maureen Faith-Nixon. Maureen. Mo. The name had been rattling around in her skull all evening like a marble in a jar.

But she hadn't been able to stay still. She'd paced the room until the walls felt too close, and then she'd gone outside and walked until she found herself at Shepherd's office, asking for Iona's address like it was a perfectly normal thing to do at eight o'clock at night.

Shepherd had looked at her for a long moment before writing it down. He hadn't asked why. Maeve wasn't sure she could have told him. She wasn't even sure she knew. All she knew was that she needed to see Iona, needed to hear it from her own mouth, needed to understand what the hell any of this meant.

Needed to know that she’d been wrong. That Iona hadn’t forgotten.

"Why didn't you come after me?" The question came out rougher than she'd intended. "When I left. Why didn't you come looking?"

Iona's hands twisted in her lap. "It didn't seem right. Nothing seemed right. You were gone and I didn't know what that meant, whether you wanted to be found, whether I had any claim to…" She stopped. Swallowed. "Nothing seemed right."

It wasn't the answer Maeve wanted. But then, she wasn't sure what answer she wanted. She wasn't sure of anything right now except that she was sitting in Iona Faith's living room with a question burning a hole through her chest. She also thought that Iona wasn′t telling the truth, that she was holding something back.

"Did you think about me?"

Iona looked up. Her eyes were very blue in the low light. "Yes."

One word. Such a small word for something so large.

"And then there's Mo," Maeve said.

She watched Iona's face go through several expressions in quick succession: surprise, then wariness, then something that looked almost like fear. "What about Mo?"

"Her name."

The silence stretched out between them like a held breath.

"You know," Iona said finally. It wasn't a question.

"I saw a letter. From her school. It had her full name at the top."

Iona's laugh was shaky and didn't have any humor in it. "God. I always wondered how that conversation would go, and I never imagined it would be because of a bloody school letter. I always thought… At the beginning I thought you’d come back and I’d tell you and, I don’t know. And you’d be happy. Proud. Something."