Page 87 of Two Hit Wonder

The door slammed hard enough to rattle the pictures on the wall.

A moment later, music exploded through the flat. Something loud and angry and deliberately obnoxious, cranked up to a volume that was probably violating several noise ordinances.

Iona stood in the kitchen, shaking.

She shouldn't have done that. She shouldn't have yelled. Mo was fourteen, she was going through something, and yelling wasn't going to help. All she'd done was make everything worse. Again. Just like she always did. Just like she'd done with Maeve, keeping secrets that weren't hers to keep, and now Maeve was gone and Mo hated her and Shepherd was on the phone talking about united fronts like there was anything left to unite.

She made it to the sofa before her legs gave out.

The tears came without warning, hot and messy and unstoppable. She pressed her face into a cushion so Mo wouldn't hear, though Mo probably couldn't hear anything over that godawful music anyway. Her whole body shook with it. Weeks of stress and hope and fear, all of it pouring out at once in great ugly sobs that made her chest ache and her nose run and turned her into the kind of mess she'd spent her whole life trying not to be.

She shouldn't have yelled at Mo.

But for a minute there, Iona had thought her life was finally coming together. The band was working. Maeve was back. Mo had seemed, if not happy, at least less miserable. It had felt like all the pieces were finally falling into place after years of watching them scatter. Like maybe, just maybe, Iona was going to get to be happy.

Now all she could see was rubble.

She'd lost Maeve. She was losing Mo. She was probably going to lose Lakeside too, and Ellie was sick, and Cam was devastated, and the whole thing had been built on lies from the very beginning. Lies that Iona had been part of, even if she hadn't known all of them. She'd kept her own secrets. She'd made her own choices. And now everyone was paying for it.

The music pounded through the walls, relentless and accusatory.

Iona cried until she couldn't anymore, and then she just lay there, face pressed into the cushion, wondering how she was supposed to get up tomorrow and do it all again.

Chapter Thirty

Maeve stared at her phone for a full three minutes before she made the call. Then she stared at it for another thirty seconds, watching it ring, half hoping Ellie wouldn't answer and she could put this off for another day. Or week. Or decade.

Ellie finally answered on what felt like the fiftieth ring. "Maeve."

"Ellie." Maeve's voice came out rusty. She cleared her throat. "I'm calling to… I wanted to say…" God, she was bad at this. Fifteen years of isolation hadn't exactly honed her interpersonal skills. "Okay, let me try that again. I know it doesn’t help, but I wanted to say that I'm sorry. For how I reacted. When you told us about…" She couldn't even say it. The word stuck in her throat like a stone.

"The MS," Ellie said, because Ellie had always been the one to say the things no one else would.

"Yes. That." Maeve sat down heavily on the garden wall. "I made it about me. About the lie. And it wasn't. I mean, it kind of was, but it wasn't only that. You're sick. You're dealing with something massive, and I just…"

"Stormed off to Scotland?"

"I was going to say 'handled it badly,' but yes. That too."

There was a pause. Maeve could picture Ellie on the other end, probably sitting very straight in her kitchen, organizing her thoughts into neat little rows before she spoke. That was the thing about Ellie. She never said anything she hadn't already thought through twice.

"I should have told you from the beginning," Ellie said finally. "I know that. I just… I didn't know how. And then it got easier to keep not telling you, and then it was too late to tell you without it being a whole thing, and then…" She trailed off.

"And then it became a whole thing anyway."

"Spectacularly."

Maeve almost smiled. "If you're going to do something, do it properly. Isn't that what you always said?"

"I don't think this is what I meant." But there was something lighter in Ellie's voice now. Not forgiveness, exactly. Not yet. But something adjacent to it. "I'm sorry too, you know. For the manipulation. It wasn't fair to any of you."

"No," Maeve agreed. "It wasn't." She picked at a bit of lichen on the wall. "But I think I understand why you did it. Fear makes people do stupid things."

"Is that your professional opinion?"

"I'm something of an expert in fear-based stupidity, yes."

Another pause. Then Ellie said, "Shepherd's still fighting for the Lakeside slot. It's not dead yet. If we wanted to… if everyone wanted to…"