Shep grinned, slow and cocky, a dimple flashing. “Only if you’ll let me.”
“Dangerous game you’re playing.” She gave him a droll grin and an arched brow that she hoped—despite her years—could still take a man’s breath away.
“This isn’t a game, Ellie,” he said earnestly. “Not to me.”
She let out a breath, slow and cautious. If she exhaled too hard, she might tip the balance, sending everything spilling over the edge. She’d been admired before. Flirted with, courted, loved even, but not like this. Not when she felt like an antique. A relic on tour.
“You better make it original,” she said lightly, brushing her fingers through Roxy’s ridiculous patch of hair.
“If it’s about you, it can’t be anything else.”
She swallowed. There were things she couldn’t say at her age, no matter how free she pretended to be.
“But you hardly know me.” Eleanor turned to the window. Her reflection caught her off guard again—silver hair mussed, wrinkles drawn like a topographical map of her life. She stared out instead, into the dark blur of trees and open road.
“I know enough.” Shep’s voice was lower now, quiet like the hush before a chorus. “I know the way you pretend not to like the attention. And I know how your eyes go soft when you think no one’s watching. Like you’re remembering something worth hurting over.”
“That’s not knowing someone,” she whispered. “That’s a good songwriter filling in blanks.”
He didn’t answer right away. And the seconds ticked by in heavy silence. “I know you think me flirting with you is some kind of joke. That when we hit Atlanta, I’ll wink and disappear.”
She opened her mouth to interrupt, to tell him it was fine, expected even.
“But I genuinely like you, Ellie,” he said before she could. “Not just Mama Lightning, the Dame of Rock and Roll.You.And I’m not afraid of the years between us. Only afraid you won’t let yourself be liked.”
What Shep said might be true.
Maybe it was the adrenaline from fleeing tear gas and baton-wielding cops. Maybe it was the high that came with writing a song that might actually mean something. Maybe it was just the hum of the highway and the illusion of freedom that comes from being neither here nor there but somewhere in between.
But Eleanor Bell had lived long enough to know you couldn’t count on maybes.
This would all end one day—tomorrow, next week, or next month. The songs, the stage, the laughter, the looks. One day, Shep would wake up, and the melody he’d write for her wouldn’t be sweet orflirtatious—it would be a ballad of what-ifs and nearlys. A sad song for a woman whose name he’d remember like a ghost note in a forgotten tune. A name she would have long forgotten in the endless sinkhole of dementia.
Still, she wasn’t ready to burst his bubble. Or her own.
Not yet.
Eleanor smiled, soft and small, letting the sorrow gather behind the lines of her smile. Without thinking, she reached out, her fingers brushing his cheek with a tenderness that surprised even her, and gave a playful tug at the unruly hair curling above his ear with just the slightest hint of silver starting.
He leaned in to her touch like a boy starved for mothering—or something else. And then he scooted closer, his thigh pressing warm and steady against hers, the heat of his body seeping into her always-cold bones like sunshine through a kitchen window in winter. Definitely something else.
In this quiet vulnerability, she leaned her head onto his shoulder, letting him bear some of the weight she wasn’t ready to voice. When she spoke, it was quiet but sure. “Write me a song I’ll remember.”
Shep smiled. His arm moved in rhythm as he scribbled in his notebook, the scratch of the pencil against paper steady, hypnotic. The van rumbled along the dark stretch of highway, rocking her gently.
And she drifted off.
But it wasn’t a peaceful sleep.
In her dreams, they were all there—Shep, her husband, even the man from so long ago, the one who gave her music before she ever knew what love really was. They all stood before her like a jury of ghosts, waiting for a final verdict. Each face was etched with an emotion she couldn’t fix but was responsible for. Longing, expectation, disappointment.
And she—Eleanor Bell, musician, mother, memory inmotion—looked them all in the eye and said, “I’m old enough now, I don’t have to choose. Not anymore. I’ve earned the right to live what’s left of my life the way I damn well please.”
And with that, she turned toward the music, toward the light, toward whatever came next.
Chapter Twenty-Three
After the havoc of the Denver festival—the tear gas, the panic, the push through the crowd—Leanne and Nora had returned to their motel room and collapsed in a heap of bruised exhaustion. The room smelled faintly of bleach and stale cigarette smoke. A Western,The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, was playing on the television, cowboys galloping across a dusty plain in search of justice or stolen gold—Leanne couldn’t remember which. Maybe both.
