9. Galen
GALEN
Nina held sixty-five on the motorway without complaint, temperature needle steady, engine turning over with the smooth indifference of a van that had never once given him trouble in her life.
Galen kept glancing at the gauge anyway, out of habit rather than worry, and each time found nothing but good behaviour looking back at him.
Ashcombe fell away behind him mile by mile, and for the first hundred of them he let himself feel nothing except the specific, uncomplicated relief of being competent at his own life again.
The work went well. It was meant to, and it did.
He learned Dev's book inside a day, adjusted his fingerings to a bass player who liked everything half a step lower than sensible, and played six sets clean enough that by the third venue the promoter was asking Ferras whether Galen might be free for the autumn as well.
A fiddle player in Stroud told him, with the particular bluntness musicians reserved for other musicians, that he played like a man who'd learned to listen before he'd learned to perform, which Galen chose to take as the compliment it probably was.
He arrived early, packed down without being asked, took his fee without complaint, and left before anyone had time to notice him leaving.
It was, by every measure that had ever mattered to him professionally, a very good week.
Somewhere around the fourth night, in a green room that smelled of someone else's cigarettes, Galen noticed the shape of what he was doing and did not much like it.
He arrived, became useful, played well, helped pack the desk, took the thanks, and left before anyone's face had time to change when he said goodbye.
He had spent ten years perfecting the choreography and calling it a strength.
Being welcome everywhere and belonging somewhere were not the same skill; he had practised the first until it looked like the second.
Martin's texts arrived just as sparse as Galen should have expected and read a dozen times more than their length justified.
Glad it went well. Drive carefully, forecast's turning Friday.
Once, after Galen sent a photograph of Nina parked outside a particularly ugly function room, three words came back — she looks pleased — which was as close to sentiment as Martin apparently allowed himself over a screen.
Galen sent a joke about the tea in Cheltenham falling well short of Ashcombe standards and got no reply at all, and told himself that meant nothing, and read the silence four more times before he put the phone down.
He missed more than he'd expected to: working in a shared, unbothered quiet, Martin's face doing the small, private thing it did when a difficult passage resolved clean, Hazel's questions that never demanded a whole answer, being expected at a table at seven and noticed, however briefly, whenever he came home from wherever the day had taken him.
The Bristol room was precisely as he'd left it, and that was the problem.
Post sat neatly stacked where the landlady always left it.
The bed was made under a thin layer of dust. His stored boxes waited in the same corner they'd waited in for three years, patient and undemanding, holding nothing he'd missed enough to think about in all the time he'd been at Ashcombe.
Nothing was wrong with any of it. It was clean, functional, legally his, and entirely indifferent to whether he'd come home tonight or in another six months.
Nobody here would notice if he never returned at all, and nobody would be wrong not to notice, because he had never given this room a single reason to expect him.
He sat on the edge of the bed with his coat still on. The room asked nothing of him. It had never expected him back.
Ferras rang the next morning with the offer of a longer continuation, more dates, a fuller autumn than he'd had in years, the kind of run his younger self would have accepted before she'd finished the sentence.
"I can do some of it," he said. "Not the whole run back to back. I'll need gaps."
"Define gaps."
"A week here and there. Maybe more."
There was a pause that had nothing to do with signal. "As long as you're where I need you when I need you, I don't much care where you spend the rest of it."
It had genuinely never occurred to him, in ten years, that the arrangement could be renegotiated rather than simply endured. He had built an entire identity on being endlessly, uncomplainingly available, and nobody, in the end, had actually required that of him. He had required it of himself.
He let himself sketch it out properly for the first time in the last quiet hour of the run, in the loose, unfinished way he sketched a new arrangement before committing it to paper.
Ashcombe as a base rather than a stopover.
The autumn dates Ferras had offered, taken selectively, with real gaps between them instead of a continuous chain.
Seamus's Fridays whenever he was home. Perhaps lessons, eventually, if Wrenwood's children ever wanted them, or session work he could record and send rather than travel for.
He would keep the Bristol room a while longer, if only because giving it up before he knew the new arrangement was real seemed like betting more than he'd yet earned the right to bet.
None of it was decided. All of it was, for the first time, actually his to decide.
He found Martin's pencil that evening, tucked into the outer pocket of the guitar case where he'd put it without asking, the same pencil he'd used every night of the run to mark a fingering he kept forgetting.
He turned it over once, the way he might have handled a lyric he hadn't finished writing, and saw that he'd taken it the same way Martin had cleared a corner for his guitar: quietly, on faith, trusting that the taking would simply be allowed.
Neither of them had ever asked for anything outright. That, Galen thought, was precisely the problem the two of them had built together.
The final fee came in clean and on time.
Ferras confirmed the autumn dates, fewer than offered, the exact number Galen had actually wanted, with a gap now sitting open in front of him for the first time in years, entirely his to fill.
He sat in Nina afterward with the sat nav glowing faintly on the dashboard, the route to his Bristol room already plotted, the familiar pause before he arranged whatever came next.
He cleared the route and entered Ashcombe instead.
Nina climbed out of Bristol steady and uncomplaining, temperature needle holding right where it should, and stayed that way for every mile back toward Wrenwood.
No warning light. No knock. No excuse handed to him by the van, the weather, or anyone else's convenience.
The evening had turned mild enough that he drove with the window cracked, warm air moving over his arm the whole way, undemanding and entirely pleasant — the first weather all week he hadn't needed to check twice.
Every mile toward Ashcombe was entirely his own choosing — which was, Galen recognised, exactly why her repair had mattered so much in the first place.
He had spent ten days proving, to Ferras and to himself, that he could still keep leaving.
He turned down the Ashcombe lane to ask for what he wanted.