Page 77 of Two Hit Wonder

Iona stared at her.

"It was her idea," Maeve added. "The slow drive. I just provided the vehicle."

"You hired a limo to pick up my daughter from school."

"It seemed like the thing to do."

"To impress some fourteen-year-olds."

"They were being little shits. She was upset."

Iona tried to be annoyed. She really did. But the image of Maeve, grumpy, antisocial Maeve, sitting in the back of a stretch limo while Mo waved regally at her stunned classmates, was too much. She started laughing and couldn't stop.

"It's not funny," Maeve said, but her mouth was twitching.

"It's extremely funny."

"She asked for help. I helped."

Iona kissed her, quick and fierce. "You're ridiculous. You know that, right? Absolutely ridiculous."

"I've been told."

They finished packing in comfortable silence. And Iona thought about Maeve and Mo in that limo, about the way Mo had grinned when she came home, and she hadn’t known it was possible to be any happier than she already had been.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The hotel room was too beige. Maeve had been staring at the walls for about an hour now and she still couldn't decide if they were meant to be calming or if someone had simply given up halfway through choosing a color. If beige was a color. Maybe it was just the absence of color.

The carpet was the same non-committal shade. The curtains. The bedspread. Even the stupid bridge painting had too much beige.

She was sitting cross-legged on the bed with her guitar, a notebook open beside her, working on something she had no intention of showing anyone.

And she was looking at beige to ground herself. She knew this song was something special and… and it became too much sometimes. She needed a breath.

The melody had been stuck in her head for weeks. She'd caught herself humming it while doing Iona's dishes, which was weird, and then again in the shower, which was less weird but still annoying. It wasn't finished. It might never be finished. But she kept picking at it anyway, like a scab she knew she shouldn't touch.

She played the chords again, softer this time, and tried a new line. Wrote it down. Crossed it out. Wrote something worse. Crossed that out too.

This was the problem with writing something that actually mattered. When she wrote for other people, she could be clever. Detached. She could craft a perfect pop hook about heartbreak without feeling a thing, because it wasn't her heartbreak. It was a product. A service. Words arranged in a pleasing order for someone else to sell.

This was different. This was hers, and it was terrible and brilliant or terribly brilliant, and she couldn't stop working on it.

She set the guitar aside and flopped back against the excessive number of decorative pillows. The ceiling was also beige. Of course it was.

She had a problem. For the first time in fifteen years, she was allowing herself to imagine a future.

It was a dangerous thing to do. She knew that. Futures had a way of not happening, especially when you wanted them too badly. But lying here in this aggressively neutral room, she couldn't help it. She thought about the cottage, about Glinna's chaos and Charity's sticky hugs and Eejit the sheep who still held a grudge. She thought about going back there eventually, but not alone. Not hiding.

She thought about Iona.

About weekends. About Iona driving up to Scotland in that ridiculous car of hers, complaining about the roads and the weather and the complete lack of decent coffee, and Maeve pretending to be annoyed about it. About waking up to someone else's breathing. About having a reason to cook something more complicated than toast.

She thought about touring. Actually touring, not just writing songs in a cottage and sending them off to be sung by strangers. Being on stage again. Being seen. It had terrified her for so long that she'd forgotten it could be anything else. But at the open mic in Manchester, and in rehearsals, she'd remembered. The high of it. The way a crowd could feel like a conversation. The way her voice could fill a room and mean something.

She wasn't anonymous anymore. She was Maeve Maureen MacDonnell again, and she was going to play Lakeside, and maybe that was alright. Maybe that was how things should be.

Her phone buzzed. Glinna's name on the screen.