Chapter 22 B-Side
B-Side
Catherine
Dust tickled Catherine’s nose as she stood in what would become her main teaching room.
From the next space over came the steady rhythm of Luis at work, the tap of his clipboard against his palm, numbers muttered around the pen between his teeth, the scrape of his boots as he paced out measurements.
After a moment, she let the sounds fade into the background, and she took a few steps forward.
The floorboards creaked under her, old wood complaining a little too loudly in the quiet of the empty room.
The walls were dingy, the off-white turning yellow at the corners where someone had clearly painted years ago and decided that was good enough.
Late afternoon sun slanted through the west-facing windows, with the kind of light this stretch of West Street always got, warm and still.
She walked to the wall and pressed her palm against it. She kept doing this, touching doorknobs, running her fingers along window frames, laying her hand flat on the kitchen counter in what would become the waiting area. Solid surfaces that didn't give way. A room that stayed put.
"Soundproofing runs the full perimeter," Luis said, appearing in the doorway with his pen moving. "My guys can start Monday, which puts you at mid-January for the full build-out." He looked up. "You want them to start Monday?"
"Please."
"Good." More pen movement. "Floor in the second room needs replacing. I'll get you a separate line item by the end of the week. Everything else is cosmetic: paint, fixtures, and a new lock on the street door." He made a note. "When's the Steinway moving in?"
Catherine's lip quirked. They'd had this conversation last week, but he was clearly three steps ahead in his head, working through things too quickly to keep track of what he'd already asked.
"When the floors are done."
He looked up. "Shit, I already asked you that, didn't I?"
"Last Tuesday," Catherine said. "At the closing."
"Right." He at least had the grace to look sheepish. "Let's hope I lay hardwood better than I remember conversations."
"That’s exactly what I was thinking," she said, smiling so he would know she was joking. Well, partly.
The corner of his mouth moved. He wrote something down. "And you still don't want any directories or advertisements outside?"
"No. Word of mouth only," She paused. "For now"
Luis looked up at her over the clipboard with the expression he'd been wearing since she'd first floated this idea over tea in Mary's kitchen five weeks ago.
She'd come home from her second therapy session feeling inspired and excited, two things she hadn't felt in a long time, and had apparently walked through Mary's door looking different enough that Luis had put down his coffee and paid attention before she'd said a word.
He'd questioned her exactly once, sitting on Mary's couch with his coffee going cold, and when she'd answered, he'd nodded, set his mug down, and asked when she wanted to start looking at spaces.
"Alright," he said, making a show of writing something down, though she was fairly certain he had just circled a number to look busy. A moment later, he retreated to the adjoining room, his boots picking up their measured pacing once more.
Catherine let out a quiet breath and turned her thoughts to the students already lined up.
Not the children she'd been teaching in her apartment, the curated roster of Upper East Side prodigies whose parents wanted the name Catherine Matthews on a résumé before their child turned ten.
Those families she had methodically let go of over the past month, each conversation more satisfying than the last. What she wanted were students like Noah.
Noah, who had finally convinced her to share half his Pop-Tart.
Noah, who had gotten emotional the first time he played through a full piece without stopping and then immediately asked if he could play it again.
Children who came to the piano because something in them needed it, not because someone had decided it looked good on a college application.
She'd told him about the studio last week and watched his face rearrange itself from polite interest into something much more alive.
She'd promised him he could come next week with her and Luis and write his name on the plasterboard before it got painted over. “To cement your place here”, she'd told him, which he'd taken extremely seriously and immediately announced he was going to practice his signature.
She was still thinking about his face when Luis reappeared and said, "I'm going to call my sign guy. Just wanted to check, you're sure on the name? B-Side Studios."
"Yes, I'm sure."
He glanced up. "Where'd that come from?"
"A mixtape."
He looked at her for a moment. "Listen, I'm going to ask only because Mary's going to ask me, and then she'll get annoyed at me if I don’t ask you." He paused. "Any significance to a certain short doctor?"
Catherine gave him a small smile. "Call her that to her face and see how short she is."
"I did once." He had the expression of a man recounting a cautionary tale. "She hid a package of mine in the stairwell for three days. Said she had “no idea how it got there.”
Catherine laughed, surprised by it. And then the laugh caught on something else because the image had arrived without warning, Theodora standing outside her door, the mail she’d held hostage tucked under one arm, the expression she wore when she was pretending to be innocent of something she was entirely guilty of.
The memory was sharp enough to sting and warm enough that she didn't want to set it down.
"Just tell Mary it's a music term," she said.
Luis looked at her the way he sometimes did, taking something in and deciding to leave it alone, which she had always found one of his better qualities.
"Right," he said, and capped his pen. "I gotta get going, need to be in Newark in an hour." He picked up his bag. "You free this weekend? Some friends from my cooking class are watching the Yankees at Riley's on East 66th. I'll warn you now, the wine list is not what you're used to."
"How bad?"
"They have a red and a white."
"Luis."
"Good company though." He shrugged, unapologetic. "And they do a decent burger."
Catherine considered it for a moment, then relented. “I’ll come for one drink before the game.”
He nodded like that was exactly what he'd expected her to say, clapped her shoulder once, and headed out, clipboard tucked under his arm. Luis through and through.
After the door clicked shut, Catherine found herself lingering in the empty room. The five-year lease was in her coat pocket, signed and folded. She pressed her palm flat against it, feeling the slight resistance of the paper.
Hers. Quietly, entirely, hers.
She turned off the lights and walked downstairs.
On the sidewalk, the early December air bit at her face, the wind off the river carrying that New York cold that ignored whatever coat you thought was suitable. Catherine pulled it tighter around herself and raised a hand for a cab. Thankfully, one pulled over almost immediately.
She got in, gave the driver her address, and decided to take the cab as a sign that the universe was on her side today.
Her phone buzzed.
She glanced at the screen.
Simon Wilkins.
The universe, it turned out, had a complicated relationship with follow-through.
She'd been letting his calls stack up for months, the voicemails accumulating with the persistence of a man who believed that volume was the same thing as leverage.
But the lease was in her pocket, and the studio had a name, and she was, for the first time in longer than she could remember, feeling brave.
"Simon."
"Catherine." The relief in his voice curdled almost immediately. "Do you have any idea how long I've been trying to reach you? Months, Catherine. Calls, emails, I even showed up at The Lenox, but the doorman turned me away."
"I wonder why. Since your last unexpected visit ended so well."
He exhaled through his nose, the sound of a man recalibrating. "Listen, I need you in tomorrow. Ten o'clock. The board has been on my back for weeks; they're pushing me to drop you, and I've been holding them off, but I can't keep doing that if you won't even pick up the phone."
She heard the lie in it, the slight over-explanation that Simon had never quite learned to smooth out. He'd always been better at charm than he was at deception.
When she stayed silent, his voice shifted, dropping into something lower.
More intimate. The version that had worked on her once, a long time ago, when she'd been younger and less able to identify the difference between flattery and calculation.
"Come on, Cat. I know you, and I know you want to get back out there.
You miss it. Let me help you do that. We get you back on stage, back where you belong, and everything goes back to how it was.
You and me, the way we used to be. That's what you actually want, isn't it? "
She looked out the window. A woman was walking a dog that had stopped and refused to move, sitting down on the pavement with the absolute conviction of a creature that had made its decision.
She understood the feeling.
She could placate Simon. Reassure him. Tell him she just needed more time.
But honestly, fuck that. And fuck him.
"You called my seizure a PR problem," she said. "In the hospital in London. I was in bed, terrified, and you were on the phone in the corner talking about damage limitation like I was an inconvenient liability."
"I was doing my job—"
"Without a single shred of humanity or decency.
" Catherine let that sit for a moment. "I stayed with you, with Ardent, after that because I think part of me was trying to hold onto my career as it was.
You were the last tie I had to that life.
But I'm done." When she spoke again, her voice was very calm and very final.
"I'm buying out the remaining two years on my contract.
My lawyer will contact yours this week. Don't contact me directly again.
If you do, my lawyer will handle it, and you really won't enjoy that conversation. "
"Catherine—"
"Goodbye, Simon."
She ended the call.
The cab moved through the traffic, and she sat with the phone in her hand and let the silence settle.
Decades of her life. The concerts, the contracts, the reviews, the rooms full of people who wanted something from her.
Simon's voice in her ear before every performance, telling her what was at stake.
All of it, done. She had expected it to feel like an amputation.
Instead, it felt like taking a full breath after holding it too long.
She put her phone away and let her gaze drift to the window.
Traffic idled at a red light. Late afternoon sun flashed against windshields and shopfront glass. Her eyes moved without purpose, tracing brick, glass, street signs—
—and settled on a lamppost directly across from the cab.
A white flyer had been stapled at eye level. She read the first line once. Then again.
The light was still red, and she was out of the car before the driver had finished his sentence, crossing the bike lane without looking and stopping in front of the lamppost with her heart in her throat.
The Eastside Mission Annual Gala
Celebrating 150 Years of Community.
We're looking for volunteers to help make this year's event our most special yet.
She read the date and time for the meeting. Saturday. Eleven in the morning.
And then, below that, in smaller text:
For more information, contact: Dr. Theo Brennan.
Followed by a phone number she knew by heart.
Catherine uncorked the flyer, staring at it in her hands.
She thought about putting it back. Her hand actually went up, fingers extended toward the lamppost, and then it didn't. Instead, she folded the flyer in half, then in half again, and slid it into the inside pocket of her coat, beside the lease.
She went back to the car. The driver was mumbling something she couldn’t decipher.
Catherine took out her phone and opened her calendar. She typed in the address and the time, set a reminder, and locked the screen.
Florence was going to have thoughts about this.
Florence always had thoughts, delivered in that considered way that made them impossible to dismiss and mildly infuriating to receive.
She would say something about the lamppost, about the hand that went up and then didn't put the flyer back, about what that said about the difference between what Catherine told herself she wanted and what she actually wanted.
And Catherine would sit in the armchair and feel the discomfort of being accurately read by someone she'd known for six weeks.
She found, to her mild surprise, that she didn’t mind unpacking it.
The car moved uptown through the traffic, stop and start, the city doing its slow accordion. She kept her hand resting over the inside pocket of her coat, feeling the folded leaflet and the folded lease together, the two most important things that had happened today.
She'd built something this afternoon. And then, on the way out, the city had left her something on a lamppost.
The universe, she thought, has a very poor sense of boundaries.
She was smiling when she thought it, and she turned her face toward the window where no one could see.