Chapter Sixteen
Shepherd was smiling when he walked in, which was immediately suspicious. Shepherd didn't smile unless he was delivering bad news gently or had secured something worth a genuinely indecent amount of money. Not that Iona would mind an indecent amount of money.
"Ladies," he said, setting his briefcase down with more care than usual. "I have news."
"Good news or bad news?" Cam asked. She was halfway through a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, her drumsticks tucked under one arm.
Shepherd grinned wider. "That rather depends on how you feel about the Lakeside Festival."
The room went very quiet.
Iona felt her heart beat too hard, her stomach shrink, sweat begin to collect.
Lakeside was the festival. The one everyone watched, the one that made careers, the one where headliners became legends and support acts became headliners.
She'd watched it on television every year since the band had split, eating ice cream and feeling sorry for herself and pretending she didn't miss it. She and Mo made a weekend of it.
"What about Lakeside?" Ellie asked carefully.
"Main stage. Saturday afternoon slot. Just before the evening headliners." Shepherd looked ready to split his own face with pride by now.
Cam slowly put her crisps down.
"You're joking," Iona heard herself say. Did her voice really sound like that?
"I am not." Shepherd's smile widened. "I called in approximately fifteen years' worth of favors, but it's done. The Stage Girls are playing Lakeside."
For a moment, nobody moved. Then Cam let out a shriek that probably violated several noise ordinances and launched herself at Shepherd, who caught her with the practiced ease of a man who had known Cam for two decades.
"Main stage!" Cam was yelling. "Main bloody stage! Shepherd, I could kiss you!"
"Please don't."
Ellie was laughing, actually laughing, her whole face transformed. She hugged Iona, then Cam, then Shepherd, which was so unlike her usual composure that Iona felt tears prick at her eyes.
And then… and then Maeve was there.
Maeve, who hadn’t said a word, Maeve who had to be terrified of all of this, Maeve who had been the one to dream, who had been the one that used to push them.
Maeve was there, and her arms were wrapped around Iona, and Iona felt herself being hoisted into the air and spun around and then put down, but the arms were still there, the body was still there, the… the heat was still there.
Heat flooded through her. Her skin felt too tight.
Her pulse was doing something ridiculous.
She was suddenly, acutely aware of exactly where Maeve's hands were, the pressure of her arms, the faint scent of something clean and green, like rain on grass. The pulsing. Oh god. She’d forgotten her body could do that.
This was not good.
This was, in fact, very bad.
She was not attracted to Maeve. She refused to be attracted to Maeve. She had been attracted to Maeve once, fifteen years ago, and look how that had turned out. Two marriages, neither of them to the right person, and a permanent ache in her chest that she'd learned to ignore.
Carefully, she extricated herself from Maeve, who went on to crush Cam and then Ellie into bear hugs.
Iona excused herself to get water from the little fridge in the corner, mostly so she could turn her back and get her face under control. She poured herself a glass with hands that were only slightly unsteady and tried to think unsexy thoughts.
The problem was that Maeve had always been her type. Tall, intense, terrifying. Red hair and green eyes and a voice that could make you believe in anything.
She remembered Maeve when she was only Mo’s age.
Before the band, before any of it really.
Gangly and awkward and absolutely obsessed with The X-Files.
She'd had a poster of Gillian Anderson on her bedroom wall and had talked about her with the kind of fervent devotion usually reserved for religious figures.
Maeve had declared, with complete conviction, that Gillian Anderson was the most beautiful woman who had ever lived.
"She's a genius," Maeve had said, at fourteen, with complete sincerity. "And she's got the best bone structure I've ever seen."
Iona had teased her about it mercilessly. "Just admit you fancy her."
"I don't fancy her. I admire her craft."
"You fancy her craft?"
"Shut up."
The memory made Iona smile despite herself.
Teenage Maeve, before everything got complicated, blushing furiously at the suggestion that her interest in Dana Scully might be anything other than professional appreciation.
She'd worn her hair the same way for a month after one episode, trying to recreate whatever Gillian Anderson had done with hers.
It hadn't worked. Maeve's red curls had their own ideas about things.
And Iona looked nothing like Gillian Anderson.
She was short where Gillian Anderson was poised, round where Gillian Anderson was elegant, dark-haired instead of auburn.
If Maeve's type was cool, untouchable redheads with cheekbones you could cut glass on, then Iona was approximately the opposite of that.
Which was fine. Good, even. It meant she could stop being ridiculous about a hug that had lasted approximately three seconds and probably meant nothing.
"Iona." Shepherd's voice cut through her spiraling. "Can I borrow you for a minute?"
She followed him into the corridor, which was marginally less grim now that someone had replaced the flickering light bulb.
The carpet was still sticky, though. Some things never changed.
She took a breath, then another, somewhat startled to find that she still knew how to breathe like a normal person.
"This is big," Shepherd said. "You understand that, right?"
"I understand."
"Iona." He leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "I've put my reputation on this. My name. Fifteen years of contacts and favors, all called in for one festival slot. If this goes wrong, it's not just the band that suffers."
She felt a prickle of defensiveness. "We've been rehearsing. We played Manchester."
"Manchester was a warm-up. Lakeside is a hundred thousand people and live television coverage." He paused. "I'm worried about Maeve."
There it was. The thing he'd been building toward.
"Maeve is fine."
"Maeve hasn't performed on a stage that size in fifteen years. Maeve has a history. If she falls apart up there, you all do, and I'm the one who vouched for you."
"She won't fall apart."
"You sound very certain."
"I am." Iona met his eyes. "She's different now. She's been sober for years. She's worked hard. She's not the same person who…"
Who broke my heart. Who left without saying goodbye. Who I apparently still have inconvenient feelings about despite my best efforts. Not things she could say in front of her ex-husband.
"…who she was," Iona finished.
Shepherd studied her for a long moment. "Do you know what you're doing?" he asked quietly.
"With the band?"
"With all of it."
Iona wanted to say yes. Wanted to sound confident and certain and like a woman who had her life together. But this was Shepherd. He’d know if she was lying. He always did. So instead, she said, "I'm figuring it out."
He nodded slowly. "Alright. Fair enough. Just… be careful. Please. For Mo's sake, if nothing else."
WHEN THEY RETURNED to the rehearsal room, Cam was attempting to teach Ellie some kind of victory dance that involved a lot of hip movement. Ellie was tolerating it with the patient resignation of someone who had been friends with Cam for too long to be surprised by anything.
"Right," Maeve announced. "We need to get on with things, don’t we? Double rehearsals from here on out. Time to buckle down and all that."
"Actually…" Ellie stepped back from Cam's attempted choreography. "I, um, need to take the boys to get new school shoes. They've got massive feet suddenly, I don't know what I'm feeding them."
Iona thought for a second of Mo. Tried to imagine suggesting a shopping trip, the two of them, mother and daughter, looking at clothes or books or anything really.
The face Mo would make. The elaborate sigh.
The "I'd rather literally die" delivered with maximum teenage contempt.
The way she'd find an excuse to stay in her room instead, headphones on, door closed, the distance between them growing wider every day.
They used to be so close. Mo used to want to do everything with her, used to climb into her bed on Sunday mornings and demand pancakes, used to hold her hand in public without embarrassment. Now Iona felt like she was losing her, inch by inch, and she didn't know how to stop it.
Ellie left, Shepherd walking her out.
"You alright?" Maeve had appeared beside her. Iona hadn't heard her approach.
"Fine. Just… thinking."
"Later," Cam said, phone already in her hand, typing away as she left without looking at them.
Maeve's hand closed around Iona's arm. It wasn't a grip, exactly. More like a question. Iona looked up and found Maeve watching her with an expression she couldn't quite read.
"Ellie," Maeve said. "What's going on with her?"
"What do you mean?"
"She's lying. About the shoes. Which is a weird thing to lie about.
" Maeve's voice was low. "Couldn't you tell?
She had the same face she used to make when she lied about her homework.
Guilt and defiance, all mixed up. She'd hand in some half-finished thing and swear she'd done it properly, and then the teacher would call her parents. "
Iona felt something cool settle in her stomach. She had noticed something, hadn't she? The way Ellie had been lately. Just… not quite Ellie. "I'm sure it's nothing," she said.
"You don't sound sure."
"It's probably…" She cast around for something plausible. Something that would make the worry go away. "An affair? Maybe she's sneaking off to meet someone."
Maeve's eyebrows rose. "Ellie. Sensible, responsible, devoted-to-her-husband Ellie. Having an affair."
Iona puffed out a breath. She had a point. "People surprise you."
"Not like that, they don't."
Iona didn't have a response to that. Maeve was right. Ellie having an affair was about as likely as Cam taking up crochet.
"Something's off," Maeve said. "I don't know what. But something."
They were standing very close. Iona could see the faint down on Maeve’s cheeks.
For one wild, breathless second, Iona thought Maeve was going to kiss her.
Maeve's gaze dropped to Iona's mouth. Her grip on Iona's arm tightened, just slightly.
The air between them felt charged, electric, like the moment before a storm breaks.
Then Cam's voice cut through. "Oi! Someone’s clamped my car."
Maeve stepped back. "Shouldn’t have parked it on a double yellow then," Maeve called back, and her voice was perfectly steady, as if nothing had happened. As if Iona had imagined the whole thing.