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“It’s no problem. We’ll take the van.”
I looked past him at Noah, who wasn’t paying attention to us. He was trying to figure out how the next step of the Lego set went, but the instructions were too complicated. I drew Callum away a few steps further down the hall and slipped my hands around his waist. “Hey,” I said quietly. “Stay here and do this Lego set with your kid. It’s a five-mile drive. I will be fine.”
Callum’s eye twitched. I got the sense that even though he was looking at me, he wasn’t seeing me. “It’s raining, Quinn.”
I stayed quiet for a minute. I didn’t have to ask if it was raining the day Emma got in her accident. The answer etched into the tight lines around his mouth, the slash between his eyebrows. “I’ll be fine,” I repeated. I gave him a quick kiss and then scanned his eyes. I needed to see recognition in them. Proof he knew that I was me, Quinn Collins, and not the ghost of his past.
Slowly, Callum’s gaze cleared and he nodded. I kissed him again and hurried out of the house. I didn’t want to miss the brief interlude in the storm.
Callum’s paranoia made me overly cautious. I drove so slowly and carefully that it took me fifteen minutes to do the five miles. I nearly missed the window of relative calm, but I managed to get under the overhang with my guitar and my bag of decorations before the sky cracked in half and the rain came down with renewed fury.
I watched it appreciatively for a moment. No matter where I was, rain made things feel better. It wrapped windows in a cozy gray blanket. It lulled me into long naps. It left the world feeling shiny and new. I walked into Jimmy’s with a contented smile on my face.
“Nice raincoat,” Renee said, surprising me. I looked up at the stage and saw she’d already set up her keyboard. She was standing behind it like a solo act, her fingers poised over the keys.
“Thanks, it’s your brothers.” I set down my guitar and struggled out of the wet plastic coat. “What are you doing here so early?”
“It’s been a while. I wanted to get the feel back.”
When I walked over, Renee stuck her hand out to help me up. I rolled my shoulders back and walked from one side of the stageto the other, reminding my feet how many steps they could take. “I know what you mean.”
Renee snorted. Her head was bent over the keys, her long dark hair falling on either side of her face, cloaking her expression.
“What? I do.”
She looked up, exasperated. “Because it’s been what, a month since you performed to a sold-out crowd?” She tried to make it sound like gentle teasing, but Renee was not one who gently teased. She got the intonation wrong. It all landed too heavily. The curtain whipped back, and I saw the pain again.
“I’m sorry, Renee,” I said, stopping and turning abruptly so that we were face to face, only a couple feet between us. “I’m so sorry about how it all went down.”
She rolled her eyes upward and scrubbed her hands down her face. “Shit. No.I’msorry, Quinn. I don’t mean to be an asshole. I’m having trouble with that right now.
“Why? Is it something to do withThe Belles?” My heart clutched when she nodded reluctantly. Maybe she didn’t really want to resurrect our old teenage band. Maybe Renee had grown up more than I thought and moved on further than I’d realized. MaybeIwas the only one who needed it so badly.
“Look, we don’t have to–” my throat closed up around my voice, making it thin and reedy and insincere. “Not if you don’t want to. I know you’re a teacher now, and–” I trailed off, unable to find any other way to say it was okay. This was the best I could do. This was my entirely inadequate way of returning the grace she’d given me when she let me go seven years ago. I would let her go too, if that was what she wanted. But I desperately wanted her beside me on this stage, and I couldn’t disguise that.
“Quinn, the problem is that I want it too much.”
Relief and confusion chased each other around in my chest. I wasn’t following.
Renee sighed heavily and began playing a mindless tune on the keyboard with one hand while she looked for the words. “I think,” she began haltingly, “that in order to tell you that yeah, it was okay, to go ahead and do it, I had to create this reality whereThe Belleswasn’t important to me. And now that we’re going to maybe record together again–”
“We’redefinitelygoing to record together again.” I would will it into being, just like I’d willed my first album to succeed.
“–that reality is slipping,” Renee continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. “And now I’m mad, even though I wasn’t mad before. I was sad, but in that reality… it was okay.”
I nodded. I didn’t entirely get it, but I thought that Renee was telling me she basically had to cut off her own arm in order to let her dream go, and now that it was within reach, her arm was growing back, and it hurt like hell. I verbalized that for her, and she rolled her eyes again. “Yes, Quinn. That’s exactly it. Thanks for overwriting my own thoughts.”
Now that was a familiar squabble–competing over the best way to write the lyrics. Something in my chest eased. “So we’re doing this, right?”
“We’re doing this.”
I grinned and spun back around, doing a full lap of the stage, relief making my heart beat fast. Renee went back to practicing while I got my guitar set up on the stage, made sure it was in tune, and then began hanging up the posters we’d bought.Glossy images of the dead and beautiful artists who had never seen a day past twenty-seven. As I hung each poster, I stared into the artist’s eyes. Had they known when this picture was taken that they didn’t have much time left? Some looked like they did. Some looked naively happy. It broke my heart. Brilliance came with a heavy price. When I was younger, I romanticized it. Now, I was grateful not to have whatever all-consuming fire that had burned inside them, too bright and hot to sustain them for long. I would rather be twenty-eight than immortal.
Unexpectedly, Noah’s face popped into my head. My fingers stilled on the edges of Janis Joplin as I saw him, laughing over a cartoon, his small mouth pursed with concentration as he bent his small body over his guitar. The way he looked exactly like his father sometimes, and then at other times exactly like Emma. I wanted to see him grow up. Not just in pictures, but I wanted to be there.
Thunderstruck, I stared into Janis’s eyes. Did I want to be amom?
“Hey, you okay over there?” Renee’s voice broke my trance. I heard the heavy thud as she jumped from the stage, then the sound of her footsteps coming over. “You’ve been staring at Janis for like, a really long time now.” She waved a hand between me and the poster. I turned to her, my tongue feeling too big for my mouth. “Renee, I think I’m in love with Callum.”
