Chapter 8
Eight
NOAH
By midday the siege had developed a festive mood, which is the most Kingsbarns sentence I can think of.
Word spread faster than scandal here—across the green, down the lane, through the bakery where the sisters weaponized shortbread.
People took shifts outside the inn like it was D-day and the enemy was polyester parkas.
Esther set up a folding table and declared it Headquarters.
Gregory became Head of Security, wearing a whistle and the expression of a man who has been waiting his whole life to use it.
Cherise managed a thermos station. Shannon acquired a megaphone and should never be allowed to own one again.
Meredith produced a plastic cash box from her handbag like a magician pulling out a rabbit and started selling everything that wasn’t nailed down for the Winter Warmer Fund.
The paparazzi tried to be professional.
Whenever a lens angled toward the door, the Book Bitches would immediately burst into a carol at a volume that rendered audio useless and made the paps groan.
When someone tried to wedge a foot through the gate, Gregory blew his whistle and fixed them with a stare that made their ancestors feel judged.
The school kids arrived with hand-lettered signs: ESTHER FOR PRIME MINISTER and BUY A RAFFLE TICKET OR GO HOME.
Rosie and Harper delivered mulled cider and a stack of photocopied “Know Your Rights” sheets for villagers dealing with “overly enthusiastic media professionals.”
“We’ve invented a street faire,” I told Skye, peeking through a small hole in the curtain.
“We’ve invented probable cause,” she muttered, then leaned closer to the glass despite herself. “Is Shannon shaking them down for tickets for their extended families?”
“Ten quid for plus-ones.” I’d listened. “Meredith’s upselling the Dundee cake. Esther’s insisting on exact change.”
I still hadn’t turned my phone on. I knew I’d have to face the world at some point, but I’d wait until the paps had their next story. There was always something else that would draw their attention.
Inside the inn, it got quiet.
Skye shooed me away from her books and I took to the lounge, sitting on the floor in case there were any gaps in the curtains, and stoking the fire as I scribbled lines to a song that had been bouncing around my head ever since I’d returned home.
After a while, Skye brought a bottle of wine and uncorked it with the competence of a woman who has held a house together with faith and a laundered tea towel, then she poured it into two mismatched goblets.
“I thought, at this point, we might as well.” Skye gave me a wry grin, and despite my worry over my career tanking in flames, I smiled back.
Because when everything was falling apart, what else could you do but drink wine on the floor with the love of your life?
We sat on the floor with our backs to the sofa and sipped our wine, watching the flames dance in the grate. The fire popped.
“Show me your songs,” I said, not because I thought it was wise but because sometimes the shortest road to a thing is through.
She didn’t move for a long breath. Then she put her goblet down, stood, and disappeared up the stairs, her footsteps growing softer the farther away she got from me.
I stared at the fire and thought about my past sins. What I’d gained. What I’d lost.
I’d been just a kid, really, barely twenty-two—a record contract on the line.
Skye had refused to sign because of the manager we eventually signed with.
I told her that she was a fool who didn’t know any better.
I told her that we could achieve what we’d always wanted.
She’d wanted our success, I knew that, but not if it came with working with someone she didn’t trust.
So she’d left.
And broken my heart.
And I’d broken hers.
It was all muddled now, softened around the edges, with the way time does to memories.
Skye came back with a shoebox, and my breath caught as she walked in the room, eyes huge in her face. She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
It had always been her. The one who made my heart sing.
Skye sat cross-legged on the rug, set the box between us like a living thing, and took off the lid.
Notebooks. Receipts. The backs of flyers. A napkin from a café in St. Andrews with a ring of tea on it, and in the circle, five words I could tell were hers … teach my mouth mercy first.
“I know it looks like a mess,” Skye said, looking up at me, the reflection of the flames glinting in her eyes.
“It looks like a life,” I said.
She sifted the stack as if she were divining the right scrap the way you find shells on the beach. She pulled a folded sheet from an old spiral notebook and stared at it long enough for me to realize I was holding my breath.
“It’s not a song,” she said.
“What is it?”
“A chorus that kept pretending to be one.” She cleared her throat, eyes on the page. “It’s not … great.”
“Most things aren’t when they’re honest,” I said.
Her mouth twitched. She handed it over.
The handwriting was round, urgent, a tiny leftward slant like she was leaning into wind. The words weren’t pretty. They didn’t try to be.
If I come back, let it be softer,
corners sanded by the years.
Let the floorboards learn our footfall,
let the heart forget our tears.
If I come back, let it be braver,
no white flags at the door.
If I come back, let it be choosing,
not running like before.
“Not a song,” she repeated. “Just … a begging letter, I guess.”
My throat tightened. I handed it back like I was returning a relic.
“Verse?” I asked, instead of the ten things I wanted to say.
“I don’t have one,” she said. “I have these.” She brandished a handful of scraps of paper. “They don’t go together.”
“That’s half the job, as you know,” I said. “What do they want?”
“To be taken seriously.” She laughed softly. “They want to stop being in a shoebox.”
Outside, the Book Bitches had gotten into an argument about whether angels have wings or were more high-tech these days and rode segways.
I pulled my guitar case toward me and opened it without ceremony. The guitar wasn’t my touring one. It was just my old favorite. My constant. I tuned by muscle memory while Skye paged through scraps she pretended not to be attached to.
“Let’s start from the middle,” I said, when Skye made a frustrated noise. “Write the chorus like it’s a promise you’re scared to make.”
“I’m not writing a song about me,” she said quickly.
“It’s not about you,” I said. “It’s about someone who sounds like you. Anyone who has ever felt like you.” I played a chord.
She made a face, but the kind you make when someone’s handed you a biscuit and you said you weren’t hungry. “Four chords?” she asked, resigned and fond. “You still a four-chord man?”
“When I’m trying to be honest.” I strummed a chord and built on it. I played it once, twice, let it settle. Her shoulders dropped a half inch.
“Give me the first line,” I said. “Not the best line. The first one.”
She sifted. Squinted. Chose. “I’m not the girl who held your chorus while the kettle learned to sing.”
“That’ll do,” I said softly, and my fingers found the chord without asking me. “Okay. Keep going.”
She shook her head, panicked and amused. “Don’t look at me.”
“I’m looking at the fire,” I lied. It was impossible not to look at Skye when she wrote songs. Her face lit from within, her eyes going soft and dreamy and somewhere else, and I wanted to follow her there, wherever her dreams took her.
We fought our way to a verse the way you fight through the brush to get to the water.
Cursing and laughing when we got snagged.
I threw words at her and she threw better ones back.
We let the lines come when they wanted. We didn’t force it.
I tried a melody. She shook her head. I tried another and she nodded.
Outside, the light fell out of the sky and left us with the reflected glow of a village deciding to be louder than money. Someone brought fairy lights. Someone else had brought speakers and Esther was now standing at a table, headphones half on, pretending she was DJing a set at Glastonbury.
We stayed on the floor like heathens and built something fragile and stubborn.
It wasn’t polished. It didn’t need to be. It sounded like us fifteen years ago if we’d learned to apologize in the middle of a fight.
We opened another bottle of wine and ate the scones she’d baked for her now-departed guests.
Skye’s voice found the melody like it had been waiting to come home, but not showy. She sang like she was politely asking the words to endure her. When she forgot herself, her hand lifted out of habit, fingers cueing air. I matched it without thinking.
“Bridge,” I said, because we were doing this.
“I don’t have anything left,” she said on a half laugh. “There’s nothing left in the box.”
“Then write something you don’t have,” I said. “Write a line like a dare.”
She bit her lip and the moment stretched between us.
She spoke first. “If we come back, come back hungry, don’t feed us ghosts or bread made of lies.”
There she was. There was my girl.
We looked at each other and grinned. For a second we were twenty-two and freezing and sure of only this, that music was the one honest magic and we were lucky to have a trick that worked.
“Again,” she said, not smiling, and we sang a bridge that would take the weight if it had to.
We ran the whole thing once, twice. It wasn’t ready to show anyone. It might never be. That wasn’t the point. The point was there was something new between us that wasn’t a wound.
“You were right,” she said finally, voice small. “I put them in a shoebox so they couldn’t hurt me.”
“I’ve been singing mine at stadiums so they look big enough to be afraid of,” I said. “Neither strategy seems to have worked spectacularly.”
She made a tired, incredulous sound that was almost a laugh. “My divorce lawyer would agree with you.”
“You don’t have to—”