Chapter Ten
The hotel room was tiny. Maeve sat on the edge of the bed, which was the precise texture of a firm handshake from someone who didn't like you, and stared at a framed print of a bridge. Not even a famous bridge. Just a bridge. Some bridge, somewhere, doing bridge things. The artist had signed it with a flourish, as if that made it meaningful. Why a bridge? Maybe there was some kind of underlying meaning there that she wasn’t getting.
She'd been in London for a day. It felt like seventy years.
Her phone rang, and she answered without looking. "I hate it here."
"Good morning to you too," Glinna said cheerfully. "And what's wrong with it now?"
"The shower has two settings. Scalding and dribble. The bed is haunted."
"Haunted."
"By the ghosts of middle managers. I can feel their mediocrity seeping into my bones. At least I hope that’s what it is. It is a hotel bed, after all. I dread to think what might be seeping out of it."
Glinna laughed, which was irritating. Maeve had been hoping for sympathy. "You've been there a day, Maeve."
"Twenty-four hours too long." She stood up and walked to the window, which offered a view of another building's window. Someone had hung a plant in it. The plant looked depressed. "I should come home."
"You should not come home."
"The cottage—"
"Is being renovated, as you well know. Unless you want to sleep in a construction site with no running water." Glinna's voice gentled. "Be open-minded. Remember what we talked about. Things that are good for you don't always feel good at first."
Maeve pressed her forehead against the glass. It was cold and slightly greasy. "That's very wise. Did you get it from a tea towel?"
"I got it from watching you dry out, actually. And from drying out myself, of course."
The words weren’t cruel, just honest. Glinna had always been honest.
"Mmm," was all Maeve said.
Silence stretched between them. Maeve watched the depressed plant sway slightly in some unseen draft.
"I'm scared," she admitted finally. The words came out rusty.
"I know." Glinna's voice was warm. "But you agreed to this. You said yes. So give it a real chance, yeah? Not a half-arsed chance where you've already decided to fail."
"I don't do things half-arsed."
"No, you do them completely arsed or not at all. Which is why I'm telling you: commit to this. Really try. And then, if it doesn't work, you can come home and complain about it for the rest of your life. I'll even listen."
Maeve almost smiled. "You're a good friend."
"I'm your sponsor. Friends would let you wallow."
They talked for a few more minutes about nothing important.
Charity's new obsession with snails, the sheep's ongoing vendetta against Maeve's garden, the plumber who'd shown up ill to the cottage and had to be sent away.
Normal things. Safe things. By the time Maeve hung up, she felt marginally more capable of facing the day.
Which was, even she had to admit, an improvement.
THIS WAS… WEIRD. It was all weird. For a long time, Cam and Ellie and Iona had been her life. They’d all revolved around each other like crazy little teenaged planets. Coming back was… weird.
The rehearsal space had a carpet that smelled funny and suspicious stains on the ceiling.
Maeve arrived early, because being early meant she could stake out a position and pretend to be busy so as not have to make awkward small talk as people filtered in.
She'd brought a folder of songs she'd been working on.
Real songs. Proper songs that she'd spent years perfecting in the quiet of her cottage.
Ellie arrived next, bass case slung over her shoulder.
She nodded at Maeve with the comfortable acknowledgment of someone who also didn't want to make small talk. They existed in companionable silence, and Maeve thought that she’d always liked Ellie best. Ellie who looked older now, more sensible, like she should be driving a Land Rover rather than playing a bass.
Cam burst through the door, somehow already in the middle of a sentence. "—and I told him, mate, that's not how electricity works, but did he listen? He did not." She was wearing something that appeared to be made entirely of buckles. "Morning, everyone. Who's ready to make magic?"
"Magic?" Maeve said. "No worries about sounding pretentious then?"
"Sod off," Cam said cheerfully, dropping onto her drum stool and twirling a stick between her fingers. "Where's Iona?"
The door opened, and Maeve steeled herself, and then berated herself for steeling herself. It was just Iona. The same Iona who had once peed in a field with a bull. The same Iona that had once cut her hair herself and ended up looking like Iggy Pop.
"Here," Iona said, slightly breathless. "Sorry, the Tube was a nightmare. Someone fainted at King's Cross and everything went sideways." She was carrying two cups of coffee and handed one to Ellie without being asked.
Maeve noticed this. She didn't know why she noticed it. She decided to stop noticing things.
"Right," she said, standing up and opening her folder. "I've got some material. Songs I've been working on. I thought we could start with—"
"You brought songs?" Cam peered at the sheets. "As in, finished songs?"
"As in, songs that need a band to perform them. Yes."
"That's… I mean, that's great. I just thought we'd be working on things together. Collaborating." Cam glanced at Ellie for backup. "That’s how we always worked."
Ellie shrugged noncommittally. "Let's hear them first."
Maeve distributed the sheets. The song was called "Aftermath," and she'd written it during a particularly brutal winter two years ago when the pipes had frozen and she'd had nothing to do but sit by the fire and pick at her guitar. It was good. She knew it was good.
They played through it once. Then again.
It sounded wrong.
Not wrong in the way that meant it needed adjustments.
Wrong in the way that meant the soul of the thing wasn't translating.
The bass line was technically correct but felt leaden.
The drums were too busy, then too sparse.
And somehow, impossibly, Maeve's own voice sounded disconnected from the rest of it.
"Maybe if we—" Cam started.
"It's fine," Maeve said flatly. "We just need to get it tighter. Again."
They played it again. It was worse.
"The bridge isn't working," Ellie said, which was the most words she'd said all morning. "It doesn't build anywhere."
Maeve's jaw tightened. "The bridge is fine."
"It's a bit…" Iona trailed off, seeming to search for a diplomatic word. "Static? Like, we're waiting for something to happen, but then it doesn't."
"The song builds through restraint," Maeve said. "It's meant to feel like that."
Iona tilted her head, considering. "What if we changed the progression here?" She pointed at a measure. "Something that opens up a bit. Gives you somewhere to go."
"The progression is what makes the song work."
"I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just—"
"You're saying I don't know how to write a song."
Iona smiled. It was the most infuriating smile Maeve had ever seen. Patient and warm and utterly unrattled. Typical bloody Iona. "I'm saying maybe we could try it a different way. Just to see."
"The song is finished. It doesn't need to be tried differently."
"Fine." Iona shrugged, picked up her guitar, and started playing the altered progression anyway. Softer, gentler, with a melodic lift that opened the whole thing up.
Maeve stared at her. "I said no."
"I heard you." Iona kept playing. "I just thought I'd show you what I meant."
"That's not…you can't just…" Maeve sputtered to a halt, which was not something that happened to her. She was eloquent. She was articulate. She did not sputter.
Cam was already nodding along, tapping out a new rhythm on the edge of her snare. "Oh, that's nice. That's actually really nice. Ellie, can you—"
"Already on it." Ellie's fingers found a bass line that threaded through Iona's guitar like they'd rehearsed it for weeks.
Maeve stood there, microphone in hand, watching her song get hijacked by people who apparently thought "collaboration" meant ignoring everything she said.
The worst part was that it sounded better.
She could hear it. The progression Iona had suggested opened the song up, gave it room to breathe, made the restraint she'd built feel intentional rather than stuck.
She hated it.
"Well?" Iona looked up at her, still playing, still smiling that ridiculous smile. "Want to try singing it?"
"No."
"Maeve."
"I said no."
Iona's smile didn't waver. "Alright. We can wait. Take your time."
Maeve had forgotten that. Forgotten how Iona didn't fight. How she didn't back down. She just stood there being aggressively pleasant until you ran out of things to push against. It was like trying to argue with sunshine. You couldn't win because sunshine didn't know it was supposed to lose.
Maeve took a breath. Then another.
"Fine," she said. "Once."
They played through the revised version. It still wasn't perfect. There were rough edges, moments where they stumbled over each other, but there was something there. A spark of potential. Which Maeve refused to acknowledge out loud.
"Better," she said grudgingly.
"See?" Iona beamed at her. "Collaboration."
"I hate that word."
"I know."
They ran through two more songs. Neither worked particularly well. By the end of the session, Maeve's throat was dry and her patience was thinner than the rehearsal room's walls.
"Same time tomorrow?" Cam asked, already gathering her things. Her phone had been buzzing intermittently for the past hour, and she'd been checking it with increasing frequency. "I've got to run, but tomorrow, yeah?"
"Tomorrow," Ellie confirmed.
Iona lingered as the others packed up. "You okay?"
"Fine." Maeve was stuffing her song sheets back into her folder with more force than necessary.
"The songs are good. Your songs, I mean. They just need…"
"I know what they need."
Iona nodded, still wearing that placid expression that made Maeve want to shake her. "Okay. See you tomorrow, then."
She left. They all left. And Maeve stood alone in the empty rehearsal room, surrounded by the ghost of music that hadn't quite worked yet.
She knew where this was going. She'd known these people nearly all her life. Cam would continue being chaos. Ellie would continue being sensible. And Iona would continue being relentlessly, impossibly sunny until Maeve either cracked or gave in.
Predictable. All of it.
She gathered her things and headed for the door. At least she knew what she was dealing with.
Except she really didn’t. As the next day was about to prove.