Twenty-One
Piper sings like no one’s listening.
She’s been at it since we left the motel. Somewhere in the middle of Dreams, she decided that self-consciousness was for people who weren’t currently fugitive brides and that I wasn’t present enough to matter.
By The Chain, she’s fully committed. One hand is curled on her knee, the other wrapped around her coffee cup. Her head is tilted back against the seat, eyes fixed on the morning road through the windshield.
She has a good voice.
We’re an hour away from the last stop, heading south on the 101. The hills are on the left, and the Pacific is somewhere to the right beyond the headlands, flashing blue between gaps in the land. The morning is clear, and the road is straight.
Piper is winding down as the track fades, reaching forward to turn the volume down a notch.
“So,” she starts. “My notebook. The one I’ve been using to catalog all the mess currently residing in my head? It’s in the trunk.”
“Okay.”
“Do you mind being my confessional for a minute?”
I give her a sidelong glance before answering. “Sure.”
“You won’t judge me?”
I look back at the asphalt. “I ran away with you. We’re past judgment.”
I feel the weight of whatever is coming organize itself in the cabin. I keep my hands steady on the wheel and give myself a silent order: Whatever she says, do not react. Don’t make her feel bad for saying it. She doesn’t need my feelings right now.
She pulls her knee up onto the seat and takes a breath. “Ezra didn’t like Fleetwood Mac.”
I stare at the road.
What. The. Fuck.
I hear it. I process it. I run the data back through my head.
“He didn’t like Fleetwood Mac?” I repeat slowly because I’m not sure I heard right.
She throws her hands up. “I know.”
“What the fuck?”
“He said they were overrated.”
Something happens in my chest cavity that I don’t have a name for.
Overrated.
“Piper,” I say.
“I know.”
“You listened to Rumours on repeat for six weeks when you were eighteen.”
“I know.”
“After the breakup with—what was his name?”
“Chad,” she says.
“Of course it was Chad.” I shake my head. “Six weeks of Fleetwood Mac and enough ice cream to sink a ship, if I recall correctly.”
“Noah has a big mouth.”
“How does a person who wanted to marry you not like Fleetwood Mac?”
She puts her head in her hands. “I know. Okay, I know. This distance—just being away from it all—I keep seeing these things I excused. Things I filed away and told myself weren’t a big deal.
” She exhales against her palms. “It wasn’t just the music.
He didn’t like music playing too loud in general. ”
I turn and look at her.
“At all,” she clarifies.
“Jesus Christ.”
“In the car. At home. If I were practicing. He preferred quiet.”
I face forward. I don’t say anything because what I want to say would probably be a felony in several states.
The man told a violinist he preferred quiet. He sat across from a woman whose entire identity is built around sound and told her it was too much. And she lowered the volume. Of course she did. She’s been turning herself down for years.
“I’m not judging,” I finally say.
“You’re doing the jaw thing.”
“I don’t have a jaw thing.”
“You’ve always had a jaw thing.” She sits up straight. “You do it when you’re angry about something but won’t say it.”
I consciously relax my jaw before I speak, choosing my words carefully. “Fleetwood Mac are a fundamental requirement. Non-negotiable. You either understand what they did, or you’ve made a life choice I don’t respect.”
“Thank you,” she says. “That’s all I wanted.”
“Buckingham was already gone by the time of that tour, but the catalogue alone—”
“The guitar work on The Chain,” she says.
“Right.”
“The bass line going into the chorus.”
“That bass line,” I agree. “Might be one of the most recognizable four notes ever put on tape.”
“It is. Technically, it is. I looked it up once. There’s data on it.”
I feel the corner of my mouth twitch. “You looked up data on it?”
“I was bored and curious. There are musicologists who’ve written entire papers on cultural recognition in opening bass lines, and The Chain is consistently in the top five.
” She’s animated now, talking with her hands.
“The production quality on Rumours is also criminally underrated as a topic.” She shifts in her seat and turns toward me.
She’s in her element. “It was recorded during what was objectively a relationship implosion between multiple band members at the same time, and yet the sound design is pristine. They managed to capture something that was falling apart emotionally and make it technically immaculate.”
“The tension is in the record.”
“It’s in the record,” she says, pointing at me.
“You can feel it. Go Your Own Way is Buckingham directly processing his breakup with Nicks in real time, and she had to sing backing vocals on it. Backing vocals. On a song written about her. And she did it because she’s a professional and because the song needed her voice.
” She stops just as a flush creeps up her face.
The energy in the car changes. “Sorry,” she murmurs.
“Don’t be.”
“I went on a bit.”
I glance at her. “Don’t apologize for that.”
I’ve been observing it happen over the last few minutes—the change that occurs in her when she gets into music.
The way she sits differently. The way her hands move unconsciously, keeping rhythm against her knee.
The precision in her voice, the facts she remembers, the genuine passion for something she cares about that much.
That's just how she is with music. It’s always been that way. Since she was a kid, she'd play melodies she’d heard once on a keyboard she wasn’t supposed to touch because it belonged to Noah.
I’ve been seeing that version of her come and go throughout the whole trip. Brief flashes of her real self when she’s not trying to control it. In the coffee shop. At the fair with the penguin. Last night on the wall.
And now this.
She’s the most animated I’ve seen her. It shouldn’t take this much to get her here.
“Nicks and Buckingham got back together briefly after the tour,” she says after a while, quieter now. “Did you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
“It didn’t last, but they tried. She said later that she never stopped loving him. She just couldn’t be around him.”
“Sounds complicated.”
She hums her agreement.
The music keeps playing, softer now, the song Sara filling the space between what we’re saying and what we’re not. I reach forward and turn it up.
Piper sinks back into her seat. We let Fleetwood Mac fill the space. It’s the least they deserve.