Ford
When he pulled up, a kid, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, greeted him to valet park his car. He remembered being that age; he thought he was an adult, but looking at this boy, he knew how far away he had actually been.
When he climbed out of his car, he could hear music. As he followed the path around the side of the house, the music became clearer.
Weird. He had never heard this version of Summer Days before. He didn’t even know that Sie had recorded it. Her voice was so good that he always wondered why she never wanted to sing. He'd offered her lead vocals on so many songs, but she always declined.
It didn’t sound like a recording—but it was definitely Sie’s voice. He would recognise it anywhere, even after all these years.
His heart began to pound, and his legs moved faster.
The music was live, he was sure of it.
He couldn’t see the singer as she had a crowd of people watching her, hiding her from view. Skirting around them, he listened to Sie sing Summer Days, the song they had written so long ago. The song he sang for her at every Midnight Thunder concert.
When he could finally see the singer, he froze.
He had been expecting long dark hair and a young girl dressed in black.
Instead, a woman sat on a high stool, with curly blonde hair, pink glasses and a deep pink dress that fitted her perfectly through the bodice and flared into a skirt below the guitar on her lap.
It was her, though. He knew that voice.
Sie was sitting in front of him.
She sang their song with her eyes closed, and she sounded as if her heart was breaking. When she finished playing, she slowly opened her eyes and smiled at the crowd of people surrounding her.
Then her blue eyes locked with his, and she froze.
There was no question in his mind anymore. This was Sie. This was the woman he'd searched for and obsessed about for the last sixteen years. If he hadn’t heard her sing, he would have walked past her and never known it was Sie.
He examined her face, reeling. He'd met her before. She was the blonde doctor from the concert—the one who hadn’t given her name but had felt so right when she stumbled into his arms.
“Sie?” Ford croaked, stepping towards her.
Her eyes widened and flicked around nervously.
Was she looking for an escape route? Was she going to run again?
She couldn’t. He needed to talk to her.
Stepping forward, he cleared his throat and said louder, “Sie?”
A couple of people in the small group murmured, their eyes going from him to her, who was now white as a ghost.
She didn’t answer him, but more importantly, she didn’t run.
“Sie?” he tried again.
He hadn’t realised he was beside Clara until she spoke.
“That’s Mai. You said you met her at your concert. I was telling her she should have been a musician because she’s incredible. We’re so lucky she offered to play for us.”
Ford nodded. He agreed. Sie was the most talented songwriter he had ever known, played guitar like it was an extension of her arms and was a fantastic singer. Midnight Thunder had only lasted so long because of all the songs she left behind.
“Right, yes.” Ford’s mind was whirling, and he was barely able to string words together.
“Yeah. That’s Hel over there.” Clara stood on tiptoes and pointed at a woman with red hair, holding hands with a man who looked like he might be part bear. “The one who proposed to Frost.”
Ford was hardly listening, merely nodding along as she spoke, and pointed out the people she’d told him about. His eyes were fixed on Sie, who was gazing straight back at him.
The woman he had searched for, Maisie Harrington, Sie.
He found out after she vanished that the name he knew her by wasn’t even her legal name. There was no trace of a Maisie Harrington anywhere.
Well, at least Maisie seemed to be her real name, even if Harrington wasn’t.
“She sounds like she could have been a member of Midnight Thunder. You originally had a girl in your group, didn’t you? What was her name?” Clara asked.
“Sie,” Ford muttered.
“Oh, I… um… didn’t you just…” Clara’s words trailed off, and her eyes went wide.
“Sie?” Ford repeated, stepping forward until he was right in front of Sie.
He’d imagined so many times what he would say if he ever found her. He never gave up looking, even after sixteen years, as she had taken a piece of his heart, and he had to find her, or it would never be complete again.
He leaned toward her. Behind her glasses, she had pale blue eyes, whereas Sie had violet eyes. For a moment, he doubted himself.
Was this really her?
“Ford,” Sie replied, her trepidation obvious.
When she spoke, his doubts evaporated.
“Can we talk?” Ford wasn’t aware of anyone else. Only her.
“Yes,” Sie said, her voice more mature than the one he remembered.
The person he'd lost had been barely an adult, and this woman was thirty-eight years old, the same age as him. He couldn’t believe that after sixteen years of looking, he had finally found her.
“Is everything okay?” Clara stepped between them just as Ford reached to take hold of Sie’s hand, and he dropped his clenched fist to his side.
He needed to touch her, to check she was real.
“Yes.” Sie drew her gaze away from his to reassure her friend. But, like him, she couldn’t look away for long, and soon her eyes were back on him. “We haven’t seen each other in a while. There's a lot to catch up on.”
“You’re sure?” Clara asked uncertainly.
This time, Sie smiled, and Ford’s heart skipped a beat.
Stop it. She had left him. His treacherous heart shouldn’t be responding like this.
“Yes. It’s fine. Ford, shall we?” She didn’t wait for his answer, merely walked away from him.
“Sie.” He rushed to catch up, falling into step beside her, not noticing that they were still among the other guests when he hissed, “Where the hell have you been?”
Sie kept walking. “Let’s not make a scene here. My friends are having a lovely party.”
“You think I’ll make a scene?” Ford’s voice rose. How could she be so calm?
“You already are,” Sie said evenly.
He glared at her.
How was she so unaffected by seeing him?
Had she forgotten everything they shared?
Had he meant nothing to her?
Is that how she'd left him so easily?
“As you can imagine, I was pretty surprised to hear Sie Harrington singing at a baby shower,” he said through gritted teeth.
Her shoulders stiffened, but she continued to walk away from him, muttering, “Nearly as surprised as I was to see Graham Ford at my friend’s baby shower.”
They had passed the edge of the party and were heading out into the bush that surrounded Clara and Taylor’s garden when Ford caught hold of her arm and spun her to face him.
“You left,” he said quietly.
She nodded, not meeting his eyes.
Sixteen years was gone in the blink of an eye as he stood in front of the woman he thought would be by his side for the rest of his life.
He always thought he would feel irrational anger when he found her again, but surprisingly, what he mainly felt was disappointment.
Why had she left him?
“You left me,” he whispered.
This time, her gaze flew to his and locked. He stared into her blue eyes, and a frown tugged at his eyebrows.
“What happened to your eyes? They were violet.”
She sighed. “I was an idiot kid. When I was sixteen, I got the idea that I wanted violet eyes, and I started working to be able to afford contact lenses rather than wear my glasses.” She pushed her pink glasses up her nose.
Ford huffed in disbelief. “We were together twenty-four hours a day. How did I not know?”
Sie shrugged. “I wore them twenty-four hours a day. I guess I thought if I didn’t tell anyone, no one would know that it wasn’t my real eye colour. To be very honest, I’m pretty surprised that I didn’t go blind.”
“I had no idea.” A cold unease crept through him. He thought he’d known everything about Sie, but he hadn’t known her name, or even her hair and eye colour.
What else about her hadn’t been real? Had anything been real?
“You weren’t meant to.” Sie shrugged again, like it was no big deal.
To Ford, it was a big deal. She'd lied about something so fundamental.
“What else did you lie about?” he growled.
Sie looked affronted. “Nothing. I didn’t lie.”
“Really? I didn’t even know what you really looked like. The eyes, the hair—” Bitterness tinged his voice.
Sie reached up and touched her blonde curls, which were so different to the straight black hair he'd known her with. She sighed deeply as if this conversation was painful for her.
As if she wasn’t the one who had left him and vanished without a trace.
Silence stretched between them, filled only by the rustle of wind through the gum trees.
At last, Sie spoke, saying quietly, “I was trying to fit in.”
“Fit in with what?” Ford was baffled.
“You,” she replied simply.
What was she talking about?
“Do you remember the first time I ever saw you?” Sie raised an eyebrow in question.
“Yeah. It was when you auditioned for the band.”
She shook her head, the blonde curls that he couldn’t get used to flipping around her face.
“No. I’d seen you so many times before. You, Scotty and Joel. I saw the three of you so many times at the youth centre where you rehearsed.”
“That can’t be right. I would have seen you.”
“No, you didn’t.” Her voice was flat. “I was the quiet kid with thick glasses and wild blonde curls. The girls you hung around with were all goth or emo, or whatever we called it twenty years ago. They all had straight black hair and too much eye makeup.” She ran a hand through her blonde curls and dropped her gaze from his.
Ford’s eyebrows pulled down in a frown. “No. That’s not right. I had never seen you before the day you auditioned for the band.”
Sie laughed dryly, and her eyes shot back up, pinning him. “No. You saw me so many times. But you never actually saw me. I wasn’t the type of girl you were interested in. So you looked right through me.”
No, that couldn’t be right. He wouldn’t have looked through her. It was Sie. He would know her anywhere.
A small part of his mind whispered, had he known her at the concert?
But his mouth said, “No.”
“Yes,” Sie replied.
Even as he denied it, he remembered the boy he was back then. So self-centred and oblivious to those around him.
Had he ignored her? Had she changed everything about herself so he would notice her?
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath, then said louder, “You changed everything for me?”
Sie shrugged. “I don’t know anymore. For a long time, I thought I’d changed everything for you. But the reality is, I changed it for me. I was sick of being overlooked.” She laughed bitterly. “It turns out I didn’t like all those eyes on me either.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“You don’t get to cry. You left me.” The bitter words slipped out before he could stop them.
He regretted them immediately as Sie dropped her head and blinked a few times, wiping at her eyes.