Page 109 of Crescendo

“Two points,” I said. “One is that I make no apologies for stealing the show everywhere I go. It’s the only setting I know. Point number two is that evenIcannot take attention away from that suit. Look at that thing.”

He laughed, shaking his head, a long stare over the tables and out to the distance. “You know, in a way, you kind of remind me of Callum… larger than life, always taking everything he did to the maximum. Stole the show in every room he walked into.”

I looked down. “You never recover from a loss like that, do you?”

“You start to realizerecoverisn’t a thing. When we say recover, we usually mean… back to the way we were before. Over time, you realize you don’t need to be the way you were before, you’ve become who you need to be now. Does the grief ever go away, no. But you learn not to fight it. You learn that it’s a part of you, and that it’s just your heart’s way of remembering someone. The grief doesn’t control me anymore. It has its rooms in my heart, and when I want to see it, I… I go into those rooms, sit down with it, share a story or two, laugh a little, cry a little. And I go back to the rest of my life, where I have my husband, where I have my daughter, where I have a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood with some of the best friends and some of the worst weather. So, no. You don’t recover. But you realize you don’t need to recover. You are the person you need to be right now. That’s a hard lesson to learn.”

I let my gaze drift, slowly, across the pub, to land on Ella, talking and laughing together with Edward. That bright light in her eyes. “Do we think,” I said quietly, “that Ella will find that point, too?”

He chuckled. “I think she’s an awful lot closer to it with you around. No surprise Ella would take to someone like you… she always was drawn to big personalities.”

“Oh, yes? Any sordid past date stories she wouldn’t admit to me herself?”

He grinned. “Briefly, in med school, she did date an older woman, a practicing doctor. Very Dr. House type.”

“That sounds like… an interesting power dynamic.”

He inclined his head. “It ended when Ella found out she wasn’t the only younger woman she was enjoying that power dynamic with.”

“Ah. Wait, and we’re comparing me to her?”

He chuckled again, taking a long draw from his beer and setting it down, folding his arms, giving me a kindly smile. “Only in that you’re the kind of big, bright light that Ella’s been looking for in her life. It makes sense she’d fall for a musician. Makes even more sense she’d fall for a great, famous musician flying in from another continent.”

Falling forwas an awfully strong term. But I could hardly protest that we were just casual. She took me to meet her parents.

Right after telling me we didn’t have a future together. Holy mother of mixed signals.

“You ever find yourself in London again,” Tom said, his voice low, pointed with a quiet meaning that wasn’t lost on me, “you have to make sure you come up and see us again. Harpenden’s a quiet place. Could do with more of Lydia Howard Fox herself on that little stage.”

“I beg of you, not the full name.”

He smiled. I looked away.

“We’ll see,” I said. “LA is a long way away from here…”

“Ella tells me you've made it over here twice already.”

I didn’t get the time to push, to try to work out what I was even supposed to feel around all this—around the impossible idea of just making all that distance work, of being with Ella no matter how far apart we were—before Ella and her Papa showed back up, dropping into the other seats at the table, Ella dropping her hand on mine to give me a squeeze before she sat close to me, and we lost ourselves in the little pieces of conversation, chatting about everything under the sun, everything except for the elephant in the room.

Tom gave me a big, warm handshake once Ella and I were leaving, and Edward even gave me a hug, which I understood was about one sixth of a British person’s yearly allotment of hugs, so the significance of the act wasn’t lost on me. Ella and I sat close together on the train ride back, her head resting on my shoulder, and I let myself indulge in it, taking her hand and holding it on the spot where our legs were pressed together. We didn’t talk, easy and companionable silence, but I think we both knew what was on each other’s minds the whole trip.

Once we finally got back to the apartment, it was well past nightfall, and my head was filled with thoughts of Ella enough that nothing else really seemed to matter—how far we were from LA suddenly just a number that truly meant nothing, that my musical struggles were just one step in a longer, larger journey, that Ella’s grief was in another room and content to wait for Ella to visit it and spend some time together, that all that mattered was that right now, she was here and I was here, and that was right. I rounded on her in the foyer, pressing up against her and pulling her into a kiss, and she murmured noises of contentment against me, her hands falling to my hips, as I walked her back against the door, kissing her and kissing her, reveling in the feeling of her against me, neither of us in a hurry to get anywhere.

“Ella?” I said, softly, hovering just short of her lips. She kissed my lips again before she said,

“Yes?”

“Take your clothes off.”

She barked a short laugh. “Wow. Er—pardon?”

“These things.” I tugged on her shirt, and she laughed, reddening in the face.

“Don’t tell me you were sitting there with myparentsthinking the whole time about taking me home and ripping my clothes off,” she laughed.

“I’m mostly thinking that I want to spend the next few hours making you see how beautiful every inch of you is in my eyes.”

She softened, gaze melting into something dangerously close to adoration, as she slipped her hands up to the collar of my shirt, holding me lightly. “You really can be such a romantic…”

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