Chapter Eighteen
The knock came at half past nine.
Iona had been doing nothing productive. She'd turned the television on and then off again, scrolled through her phone until the screen made her eyes hurt, made a cup of tea she hadn't drunk, and was now sitting on the sofa staring at her guitar case in the corner like it might offer life advice.
Shepherd’s news has given the band the oomph that they needed, but Maeve had been off all afternoon, Ellie had begged off early again, and Cam had spent so long on her phone that she might as well not have been there at all.
The music was coming together. But they weren’t. They as in the people. It just… wasn’t how it used to be. But maybe that was too much to ask. Maybe she was expecting too much. She sighed.
Mo was at Shepherd's for the night, which meant the flat was quiet in that particular way that made Iona want to fill every corner with noise or crawl out of her own skin.
Then came the knock.
She opened the door and found Maeve on her doorstep. Maeve, who had never been to her flat, who didn't even know where she lived. Maeve, looking like she hadn't brushed her hair in three days and was red-cheeked from running from the Tube and… just Maeve. Beautiful, wild, un-put-together Maeve.
"Shepherd gave me the address," Maeve said before Iona could ask. "I hope that's alright."
"Of course it's alright." Iona stepped back. "Come in. Do you want tea? I've just made some, actually, though it's gone cold, so I'd have to make more, but I can do that, it's not…"
"Iona."
Iona stopped talking. Maeve was standing in her hallway now, tall and angular and completely out of place against Iona's cheerful clutter.
There was a dried flower arrangement on the hall table that Mo called "depressing" and a coat rack that held at least twenty coats because Iona could never quite commit to getting rid of any of them.
"Sorry," Iona said. "Come through. Sit down. Tell me what's wrong."
"Nothing's wrong." Maeve followed her into the living room but didn't sit. She stood by the window instead, looking out at the street below, her reflection ghostly in the glass. "Things are just… confusing."
"I was thinking along the same lines. Confusing how?"
Maeve turned. In the low light of Iona's single lamp, she looked beautiful and fragile and like someone who had come a very long way to get here. "I'd like a little honesty. If that's possible."
Iona sat down on the arm of the sofa, because standing felt too formal and sitting properly felt too relaxed, and she needed something in between. "Honesty. Right. Like when we all insulted you during rehearsal? I’ve got to admit, that was pretty cathartic."
The corner of Maeve's mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "Not quite like that."
"Shame. I had some excellent material prepared about your hair."
"My hair is fine."
"Your hair is spectacular and you know it."
Maeve looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, "Is there anything you'd like to say to me? Or ask me?"
The question landed like a stone in still water.
Iona felt the ripples spread out through her chest, her stomach, the backs of her knees.
There were a thousand things she wanted to say.
A thousand things she'd been not-saying for fifteen years.
She looked at Maeve properly. The sharp lines of her face, the tension in her shoulders, the way she held herself like she was bracing for a blow.
Beautiful. Fragile. Real. Honesty. Yes. Maybe that was what was lacking.
"Why did you drink?"
Maeve's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind her eyes. "That's what you want to know?"
"It's a start."
For a moment, Iona thought she wouldn't answer.
Then Maeve moved away from the window and sat down in the armchair across from her, folding her long limbs into the space like a heron settling onto a branch.
"It was a way to deal with things I didn't know how to deal with," she said.
"The fame. The money. Everyone wanting something from me all the time.
The pressure of being the voice, the songwriter, the one they all looked at when things went wrong. " She paused. "Other things."
"Other things?"
Maeve's gaze was steady. "Other things."
Iona didn't push. She'd learned, over years of failed relationships and difficult conversations, when to leave a door closed.
Instead, she asked the question that had been sitting in her throat for fifteen years, the one she'd never let herself say out loud because saying it would mean admitting how much she'd wanted a different answer. "Then why did you leave?"
There was silence for a long minute. "Because I couldn't have that life and stop drinking at the same time.
" Maeve's voice was matter-of-fact. No self-pity, no drama.
Just the truth, laid out like a hand of cards.
"The band. The touring. Being surrounded by it all the time.
Every venue had a bar. Every celebration had champagne.
Every bad night had a whiskey cure. Every good night too, come to that.
I had to get out or I was going to die. It was that simple. "
"Okay," Iona said. And it was, mostly. She understood the logic of it, the necessity. What she didn't understand was everything else. The silence afterward. The years of nothing. And then there was the other thing. The one none of them mentioned.
She wanted to bring up the kiss. The way Maeve had looked at her that night, backstage at that terrible venue in Camden, both of them sweaty and high on the gig, and how Maeve had leaned in and pressed her mouth to Iona's like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The way it had tasted how it was the end of something she hadn't known was beginning.
But she didn't. She couldn't. Some doors were too heavy to push open.
"Can I ask questions now?" Maeve said.
Iona swallowed and nodded. Her heart was beating too fast.
???
Maeve watched Iona’s face in the lamplight and tried to remember how to breathe.
This was a mistake. Coming here was a mistake. She should have stayed in her hotel room, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the name written on that school form. Maureen Faith-Nixon. Maureen. Mo. The name had been rattling around in her skull all evening like a marble in a jar.
But she hadn't been able to stay still. She'd paced the room until the walls felt too close, and then she'd gone outside and walked until she found herself at Shepherd's office, asking for Iona's address like it was a perfectly normal thing to do at eight o'clock at night.
Shepherd had looked at her for a long moment before writing it down.
He hadn't asked why. Maeve wasn't sure she could have told him.
She wasn't even sure she knew. All she knew was that she needed to see Iona, needed to hear it from her own mouth, needed to understand what the hell any of this meant.
Needed to know that she’d been wrong. That Iona hadn’t forgotten.
"Why didn't you come after me?" The question came out rougher than she'd intended. "When I left. Why didn't you come looking?"
Iona's hands twisted in her lap. "It didn't seem right. Nothing seemed right. You were gone and I didn't know what that meant, whether you wanted to be found, whether I had any claim to…" She stopped. Swallowed. "Nothing seemed right."
It wasn't the answer Maeve wanted. But then, she wasn't sure what answer she wanted.
She wasn't sure of anything right now except that she was sitting in Iona Faith's living room with a question burning a hole through her chest. She also thought that Iona wasn′t telling the truth, that she was holding something back.
"Did you think about me?"
Iona looked up. Her eyes were very blue in the low light. "Yes."
One word. Such a small word for something so large.
"And then there's Mo," Maeve said.
She watched Iona's face go through several expressions in quick succession: surprise, then wariness, then something that looked almost like fear. "What about Mo?"
"Her name."
The silence stretched out between them like a held breath.
"You know," Iona said finally. It wasn't a question.
"I saw a letter. From her school. It had her full name at the top."
Iona's laugh was shaky and didn't have any humor in it. "God. I always wondered how that conversation would go, and I never imagined it would be because of a bloody school letter. I always thought… At the beginning I thought you’d come back and I’d tell you and, I don’t know. And you’d be happy. Proud. Something."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why did you name her after me?"
Iona stood up abruptly, moving to the window where Maeve had been standing before. She wrapped her arms around herself like she was cold, though the flat was warm enough.
"Because I never stopped thinking about you," she said to the glass.
"Even when I tried. Even when I married Shepherd, even when I married Calinda, even when I told myself I was being ridiculous and needed to move on with my life like a normal person.
I didn't know how to fix anything. I didn't know how to make it right.
I thought about coming to find you a hundred times and I always talked myself out of it.
What would I even say? What right did I have? "
She turned around. There were tears on her face, catching the light.
"All I knew was that I kissed my oldest friend and then she ran away, and I never got to find out what that meant. Whether it meant anything at all. Whether I'd imagined the whole thing. And… and maybe you’d run away because of me. Because of that night. Because… because we kissed."
Her voice cracked.
"So when I had a daughter, I named her after the person I couldn't stop thinking about.
Because at least then I'd have something.
Even if I never saw you again. Even if you'd built a whole new life without me and forgotten I existed.
At least I'd have that one small thing. Like a memorial, I suppose. "
Maeve couldn't move. She'd thought that the kiss meant nothing to Iona. That it had been a blip, a mistake, something Iona had probably forgotten by the next morning. She'd told herself that story so many times it had become the truth.
But this was a different story. This was Iona, standing in front of her with tears on her face, telling her that she'd named her daughter after a woman she couldn't forget.
The thinking that Iona forgot everything is wrong, whispered something in Maeve's head. All of it is wrong.
She’d never forgotten. Maeve had never forgotten.
And she hadn’t run because of the kiss. Or maybe she had.
Maybe it had been too much, too real, more than she could possibly handle.
Or maybe she’d needed to be here, clean, sober, before she could let it happen again.
Maybe she’d had to turn into the kind of person that would deserve to be kissed by Iona Faith.
Maeve's heart was in her mouth. She shouldn't be doing this.
Every sensible part of her brain was screaming at her to stop, to protect herself, to remember that she'd already ruined this once and she'd probably ruin it again.
She was a drunk. She was damaged. She'd broken everything she'd ever touched.
But Glinna's voice was there too, cutting through the noise. You can't just press pause on life and step away from it. You have to have more than that. You have a right to be happy, Maeve. Even you.
Even if she was a drunk. Even if she'd broken things before. Even if she'd spent fifteen years hiding in a cottage with only a hostile sheep for company. She had a right to try.
So she stood up. Crossed the space between them. Three steps. It felt like miles.
Then Maeve leaned in and kissed her.