19. Things That Can’t Be Unsaid
Things That Can’t Be Unsaid
Nora
When were you going to tell me about San Francisco?
The words hung in the shop air and Nora’s whole brain went white and useless, the way it did when a chord she’d been sure of came out wrong under her fingers.
San Francisco. The Fillmore. The call she’d made from the parking lot and not mentioned, the thing she’d been so sure she’d find the right moment for, and here was the moment, arriving without her, in Morgan’s voice gone cold as a wrench left out overnight.
“How do you—” She stopped. The how didn’t matter and she knew it didn’t matter and she was reaching for it anyway because it was easier than the rest. “Who told you?”
“A reporter.” Morgan set the rag down on the bench, slow and exact. “Came by today. Wanted my side of the story. He thought I already knew.”
Oh, God.
“Morgan—”
“Found out my girlfriend’s leaving for a month from a stranger with a recorder.” Flat. Each word placed down like a part being laid on a clean cloth. “In my own shop.”
“I was going to tell you, I swear I was, I’ve been—it’s been sitting in my chest for two days, I kept—” The words came tumbling, too fast, the way they always came when she was scared, while Morgan just stood there straight-backed and still, and the contrast of it made Nora hate her own voice.
“I meant to tell you and then we were just—it was good, we were good, and I didn’t want to be the one who—”
“When did you say yes?”
“Morgan, please—”
“When?” Not louder. Just immovable.
Nora’s mouth went dry. “Wednesday.”
A silence. Then, quietly, she said, “You slept here Wednesday.”
“That’s not—it’s not like I was lying next to you with some big secret plan, it wasn’t calculated, I’m not—” She dragged a hand through her hair. “I made the call from the parking lot like an hour before I came in and then I just—I froze, okay, I froze, I do that, you know I do that—”
“You decided,” Morgan said. “By yourself. Something that changes both of us.”
“It’s four weeks!” It came out too loud, bouncing off the concrete; Rusty had gotten up from under the desk, ears flat, looking between them.
“It’s four weeks of shows and I’m coming home between dates, I built the whole thing around coming back, I told Adrian I wasn’t living in a hotel for a month because I wanted—because you’re here, this isn’t me leaving you, it’s me trying to figure out how to have both, you and the—”
“You didn’t ask me about both.”
That stopped her.
“And it’s not just one thing,” Morgan continued. “It will be this first. Then other things. Other opportunities.”
“Well, yes,” Nora said, trying to find her footing. “That’s my career we’re talking about—”
“It’s not even the leaving.” A breath. “People leave. I know that part.”
“Don’t say it like that, like I’m just—like I’m Hannah, or—”
“It’s not about that,” Morgan said. “It’s about me fitting into your life. About me wanting that life.”
Nora swallowed hard. “What? What do you mean? Of course you fit. You fit perfectly, these past few weeks have been great, and I’ve loved—”
“This has been a break for you.” Morgan’s voice stayed quiet, which was worse than loud. “But for me, it has been disruption.”
Nora stilled, the words like ice through her.
“They come to the shop now,” Morgan said, flat and low. “Strangers. Your fans. Reporters. They want to talk to me. They take pictures of the building. Rusty. Me.”
“What?” Nora blinked, thrown by the swerve. “Who does—”
“Today a man photographed my front door while he told me you’re playing the Fillmore.” Morgan’s jaw worked. “Little hearts online. Where it all started. My whole—” She stopped, started again. “It’s not yours to give away. My life. My face.”
“I didn’t— Morgan, I have no control over what people post. You think I’m sending them here? You think I want strangers in your lot?” Nora’s voice climbed. “That stuff just happens, it happens to me constantly, it’s been happening for years, I can’t—”
“I know it happens to you.” And there—finally—something under the flat, something that cracked.
“You don’t feel it anymore. That’s the difference.
It costs you nothing, and you want it. You like the attention.
Meanwhile, it’s taking my whole life apart and you didn’t even think to mention it might. ”
“That’s not fair.” It came out small. “That’s—you’re acting like I’m doing it to you. I’m not the reporter. I didn’t take your picture. I’m the person who’s been here, every day, on that stool—”
“Knowing.” Morgan narrowed her eyes. “About San Francisco. For two days. Saying nothing.”
“Oh, that’s rich.” And there it was, the worst part of her, the cornered part that had learned a long time ago that the fastest way out of being seen was to swing. She felt it pick up the knife and she swung anyway. “You want to talk about saying nothing? You?”
Morgan went still in a different way.
“The lease.” Nora’s chest was heaving. “The shop. You’ve been losing it for months and you never said one word.”
The shop went silent. Even the radio seemed to drop away.
“I know,” Nora said, and watched it land.
“I found the notice. In your apartment, a week ago—it was just there, I wasn’t snooping—and I’ve been carrying it around, sick about it, waiting, because I thought if I was just patient enough, if I was safe enough, you’d let me in.
And you never did. You were never going to. ”
Something crossed Morgan’s face—shock, that Nora knew, a flinch she couldn’t catch in time—and then it sealed over, colder than before.
“So don’t you stand there—” Nora said, “—lecturing me about deciding alone, about not telling people, when you’ve got a whole locked-up life nobody’s allowed to touch, when you’d rather lose the only thing you ever built than say I need help out loud once, to anyone, when your own mother has to guess something’s wrong because you won’t—”
“Stop.”
Not loud. The opposite of loud. A door closing so completely that loud would’ve been a mercy. It stopped Nora dead, breath sawing, standing in the wreckage of what she’d just thrown.
When Morgan spoke again her voice had gone somewhere new. Quiet, even, final—a person reading off a result they’d long expected.
“You found it a week ago.” A beat. “And used it just now. As a weapon.”
Nora opened her mouth and nothing came.
“That’s why,” Morgan said. Simple. “That’s why I don’t tell people.”
“That’s not—don’t make this into proof that you were right to shut me out, that’s not—”
“Hannah said I wasn’t as self-sufficient as I thought.” Morgan almost smiled. It was awful. “She had it backwards. I am. I just forgot it. Around you.”
“Stop doing that.” The tears were coming now, hot and humiliating, exactly when she didn’t want them, the way they’d come on a stage in LA in front of two thousand people.
“Stop deciding it’s over in your head and reading me the verdict.
I’m standing here. I’m fighting with you, which is more than you do for anything—you don’t fight, you just shut the door and call it being self-sufficient—”
“And you run.”
Three words, no heat behind it, and that only made it hit harder.
“You got close to something real and a stage rang the bell and you said yes in a day.” Morgan’s eyes didn’t leave hers.
“You’ll always say yes. The second staying means the boring part, the actual part, you’ll have somewhere louder to be.
” A pause, precise as a blade finding the gap. “Your ex knew. You told me yourself.”
The static came up under Nora’s skin, the room tilting, four things you can see, four things—and then the air came back wrong, came back as fury.
“At least I let people look at me,” she spat.
“At least I’m not going to die alone in a garage with a dog and a notice I pretend doesn’t exist, telling myself how self-sufficient I am while they tear the building down around me.
You want to be alone, Morgan? You’re going to get to be. You’re so good at it.”
The words left her and she’d have given anything—anything—to claw them back out of the air.
Morgan didn’t flinch this time. She just stared at Nora a long moment, and her face went smooth, and final, and gone. The walls didn’t just come up. The lights behind them went out.
“You should go,” Morgan said. “You’ve got packing to do.”
“Morgan—” The fury collapsed all at once, leaving only horror at herself. “I don’t mean it, I’m—that was the worst thing I’ve ever—please, I get cruel when I’m scared—”
“Go home, Nora.”
She said it the way you’d speak to a customer.
The way you’d speak to someone who didn’t matter enough to be angry at anymore, tired and emotionless.
Rusty leaned his weight against Morgan’s leg and Morgan dropped a hand to his head without looking down, and that small automatic tenderness, aimed at the dog and not at her, was the loneliest thing Nora had ever seen.
She picked up her guitar because her hands needed something to do. She got to the bay door and turned around.
Morgan had already crossed back to the bench, her back to the door, facing the wall of the shop she was losing—the shop Nora had just thrown in her face—and she did not turn around, and she was not going to turn around, and Nora understood that with total clarity.
“I’ll come back,” Nora said, to Morgan’s back, wrecked. “When you’ve… I’ll come back. I’m not letting this be the end.”
Morgan said nothing.
The radio came back up out of the silence, some bright stupid song about summer, and Nora stumbled out into the dry gold evening with the guitar banging her hip and her own cruelty ringing in her ears, and behind her the shop stayed exactly as quiet as she’d made it.