Chapter Seven
The train back to London gave Iona five hours to think, which was approximately four hours and fifty-nine minutes more than she wanted.
She'd texted the group chat from Inverness. No luck. She said no. Then she'd turned her phone to silent and stared out the window at the countryside rolling past, green and endless, trying very hard not to think about anything at all.
It didn't work.
She kept seeing Maeve's face. The way her eyes had widened, just for a second, when she'd opened the door. The careful blankness that had followed. So many years, and Iona could still read her like a song she'd memorized, even when Maeve was trying her hardest to be unreadable.
The sheep bite on her hand throbbed. She'd cleaned it properly at a service station, bought plasters and antiseptic from a tiny Boots, but it still stung.
A fitting souvenir, really. She'd come all this way and all she had to show for it was a wounded hand and a heart that felt like it had been scraped raw.
By the time she got home, it was nearly ten at night. Mo was asleep, or at least pretending to be. Iona stood outside her daughter's bedroom door for a long moment, listening to the silence, then went to bed herself without eating.
The next morning, she met Cam and Ellie at a café in Soho that Cam had chosen because she knew the owner. The table was fine. The coffee was fine. Everything was fine, except for the part where Iona had to look at her two oldest friends and admit that she'd failed.
"She said no," Iona said, wrapping both hands around her latte. "Very clearly. Multiple times."
Cam slumped back in her chair. "Did you try begging?"
"I tried everything short of begging. And some light begging."
"What about crying? Did you cry?"
"A sheep bit me and I bled on her kitchen floor. I think that's close enough."
Ellie, who had been quiet, reached across the table and touched Iona's arm. "Are you alright?"
The question was so gentle, so Ellie, that Iona felt her throat tighten. "Fine," she said. "Bit embarrassed. A lot rejected. But fine."
"We shouldn't have asked you to go," Ellie said. She had shadows under her eyes that her concealer wasn't quite hiding, and she pressed her fingers to her temple like she was fighting off a headache. "It wasn't fair to put you in that position."
"Someone had to go. And it was always going to be me." Iona shrugged, aiming for casual. "We all knew that. Besides, you didn’t make me. I offered."
They all knew. That was the problem. Whatever had happened between Iona and Maeve, whatever almost-thing they'd never quite named, it meant something. It meant that if anyone could get through to Maeve, it would be Iona. And of course Cam and Ellie knew about it. As close as Iona and Maeve had been, Cam and Ellie weren’t far behind.
Quieter, less… central, perhaps, but always steadfastly there.
Except she hadn't got through. She'd traveled all the way to Scotland, and Maeve had looked at her like she was a ghost, and then she'd said no.
"Right," Cam said, sitting up straight with the air of someone who was about to make everything worse. "Right, okay, so Plan A didn't work. That's fine. We move on to Plan B."
"What's Plan B?" Iona asked, not sure she wanted to know.
"I know a guy who knows the guy who manages a tribute band. The Stage Girls Experience, or something like that. They're based in Leeds. I reckon we could poach their singer."
Ellie and Iona exchanged a look.
"A tribute band," Ellie said flatly.
"Their lead singer is apparently brilliant. Does all the classics. I Wanna Be a Star, that other one we did, the B-side nobody remembers."
"Cam," Iona said. "We can't steal a singer from our own tribute band."
"Why not? It's not like they've got copyright on being us."
"That's exactly what copyright is."
Cam waved a hand dismissively. "Fine, fine.
Plan C, then. We find someone new. Hold auditions.
X Factor style, except with taste." She was already warming to the idea, gesturing expansively.
"We could do it at Shepherd's office. Make it a whole thing.
Get some press, build some buzz. Maybe Netflix would be interested in that, actually. "
"Shepherd won't represent us without Maeve," Iona reminded her. "He was very clear about that."
"Then we find a new agent."
"With what reputation? We're a one-hit wonder from fifteen years ago. Without Maeve, we're just three women who used to be in a band."
The words came out sharper than she'd intended. Cam looked stung. Ellie's hand tightened on her water glass.
"Sorry," Iona said quickly. "Sorry, I didn't mean that. I just meant that we need Maeve. Everyone keeps saying we can do it without her, but we can't. She was the voice. The songs. The thing that made us actually good."
The silence stretched.
"It was a silly idea anyway," Ellie said finally. She was staring at her water. "Getting back together. We're different people now. We've got lives. Responsibilities. It's not like we can just drop everything and go on tour like we're nineteen again."
She didn't sound angry. She sounded resigned, which was somehow worse.
Iona thought about Ellie's three kids, her house in Surrey, her husband who adored her.
She thought about Cam's chaos and her own shapeless life and all the years they'd spent apart. And… and something inside her clicked, some little piece of her found a voice, and it said that she wanted this, they all wanted this. And that defeat wasn’t in her blood.
"Maybe not," she said slowly. "But let's not give up yet. Let's take the night, think about it, come up with ideas. There might be something we haven't considered."
She didn't really believe it. But the alternative was admitting that she’d lost, and she wasn't ready for that.
Not when she'd just seen Maeve for the first time in fifteen years.
Not when her heart was still doing weird things every time she thought about red hair and green eyes and a stone cottage at the edge of nowhere.
Cam brightened immediately. "Right. Yes. Good thinking. I'll brainstorm. I've got loads of contacts. There's this woman I met at a festival once, she's married to someone who used to produce for Sony."
"Cam," Ellie said.
"And there's this bar in Hackney where all the industry people hang out. I could go tonight, do some networking."
"Cam."
"Or we could just kidnap Maeve. Drug her and put her in the boot of my car. Does that count as Plan D, or is it its own category?"
"I think that's a felony," Iona said.
"It's only a felony if you get caught."
Ellie stood up, reaching for her bag. "On that note, I need to get home. Ben's got football and Jake's hopeless at remembering his kit." She paused, looked at Iona. "Don't beat yourself up about this. You tried. That's more than most people would have done."
She left before Iona could respond. Cam watched her go with a thoughtful expression.
"She seem alright to you?" Iona said.
"She's tired. Three kids. You know how it is."
"I do. But do you? You can barely keep a cactus alive."
Cam snorted. "It was suicide, I'm sure of it. The little bastard threw himself off the windowsill." She drained the last of her coffee and stood up. "I'm going to make some calls. Don't lose hope, yeah? Something will work out. It always does."
She said it with such confidence that Iona almost believed her.
THE FLAT WAS quiet when she finally got home after coffee and shopping and spending far too long in a record shop listening to songs that she wished she’d played on.
Too quiet. Mo's school bag was dumped by the door, shoes kicked off at random angles, but there was no music coming from her room, no sound of the telly, nothing.
"Mo?" Iona called. "I'm home."
Silence.
She found Mo in the kitchen, slumped at the table with her phone in her hands, scrolling through something with the glazed expression of someone who wasn't really seeing what was on the screen.
"Hey," Iona said. "Good day at school?"
Mo shrugged without looking up.
"What did you have for lunch?"
Another shrug.
"Did you remember to hand in that history homework?"
Mo sighed. It was a sigh of such theatrical exhaustion, such profound teenage suffering, that Iona almost laughed.
Almost. But there was something underneath it that stopped her.
A brittleness that hadn't been there six months ago.
She blew out a breath. Might as well get this over with.
"Mo," she said, sitting down across from her. "What's going on with you?"
"Nothing."
"You've been acting different lately. Quiet. Is something happening at school?"
Mo finally looked up. Her eyes, so like Iona's, were flat and closed off. "I'm fine, Mum. Just tired."
"You seem more than tired. You seem upset."
"I'm not upset."
"Then why won't you talk to me?"
"Because there's nothing to talk about." Mo pushed back from the table, pocketing her phone. "Can I go to my room now, or do you need to interrogate me some more?"
Iona tried hard not to rise to the bait. "I'm not interrogating you. I'm asking how your day was. That's what parents do."
"Well, maybe I don't want to talk about my day. Did you ever think of that?"
"Mo."
"What?" Mo was already at the door, her whole body angled away like Iona was something dangerous. "I've got homework. I'll be in my room."
She left. A moment later, Iona heard her bedroom door close. Not a slam, which might have been easier to handle. Just a quiet, deliberate click that felt like a door closing on more than just a room.
Iona sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at nothing.
Her daughter was slipping away from her, and she didn't know why, other than the fact that she was fourteen and stroppy.
Her oldest friends wanted something she couldn't deliver.
And somewhere in Scotland, in a cottage surrounded by sheep, was the woman who'd kissed her once, fifteen years ago, and then vanished from her life like she'd never existed. And a sheep that bit.
What would it have been like, Iona wondered, if the band had never broken up? If Maeve had stayed? If that one kiss had turned into two, then three, then something that had a name and a shape?
She'd be a different person now. Maybe happier.
Maybe not. Maybe she'd have made different mistakes instead of the ones she'd actually made: the too-quick marriage to Shepherd, the even-quicker marriage to Calinda, the years of drifting from one hobby to another, never quite finding the thing that made her feel like herself.
Or maybe she'd have made the same mistakes anyway. Maybe she'd have found different ways to fail.
But there’d be no Mo.
MO’S DOOR STAYED closed all evening. Iona made dinner for two and ate alone, leaving a plate covered in cling film on the counter for whenever Mo emerged.
She didn't emerge. At eleven, Iona knocked gently, said goodnight through the door, and got a mumbled response that might have been "night" or might have been "go away. "
She went to bed feeling like she was failing at everything, all at once.
In the dark, with the city noise filtering through the curtains, she thought about Maeve again. That stone cottage. That hostile sheep. Those green eyes.
Maybe Maeve was right to say no. Maybe some things were better left in the past.
But Iona couldn't shake the feeling that something had stirred in Scotland, something that had been sleeping for fifteen years. And now that it was awake, she wasn't sure she could put it back to sleep again.
Not that it mattered. Maeve had said no. That was the end of it.
Wasn't it?