Page 42 of Ghost Note

“In my hands?”

“Answer the damn question, Danny.”

“I found out this morning. It’s why I came to the shop to talk to you.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me before you left?”

“When did you want me to tell you, Daisy? While you were crying, or while you were—”

“Okay, stop!” I held my hands up in the air, cutting him off as I closed my eyes. “Just… stop,” I sighed and brought a hand down to my thigh while my other pinched my nose. This life I’d tried to create on my own had been built with bricks made of Silver, and it cheapened the whole thing—the years of hard work, the moments of feeling like I’d achieved something alone.

I was twenty-five, and for eleven years now, everything had been about Danny. I couldn’t take another second of it.

Looking back up at him, I shook my head and held his gaze.

“Is this the part where you run again?” he asked quietly.

“If I stay, I’ll say some things I won’t mean. Or maybe I will mean them, and then you’ll know.”

“Know?”

“Yes. That loving you has been the biggest mistake of my life.”

He looked like I’d shot an arrow straight into his heart, the sharp pinch of his brows and the parting of his lips revealing his pain.

“You don’t mean that, Daisy.”

“Then how come it feels like the truth?”

When I turned to walk away, I did so slowly, not scared of his threat about what would happen if I turned my back on him a fourth time. I was tired of fleeing now, knowing I couldn’t outrun him no matter how fast I flew. That didn’t mean I had to suffer his face for a second longer than I needed to

* * *

“Are you nervous?”

Danny was sitting in the driver’s seat of his new car when he turned to me. “A little,” he confessed.

I took him in, wearing a dark grey, distressed T-shirt, and his black jeans. He hadn’t done anything particularly different with his hair. It was its usually shaggy messy from him running his hands through it over and over again. Still… he looked different.Somehow older, and less like my boyfriend of the last few years.

He’d joined a band not long ago. Their name, although weird in my mind, was one Danny said no one would forget in a hurry, and so on their offer to be a part of something special, he’d accepted his place among Front Row Frogs as their lead guitarist.

To say he’d been thrown in at the deep end was an understatement, but as with everything he did, Danny hadn’t wasted time on nerves or questioning himself. He’d simply caught up and secured his position. And now we were here...

Taking one last look at the neon signs above Bar Belgrave in our neighbouring town of Kingsbridge, I strapped on a smile I didn’t fully commit to and squeezed Danny’s hand. “You know you’re going to blow everyone away, right?”

“Am I?”

“There isn’t anything you can’t do, Daniel Oliver Silver.”

“Full naming me. You must be serious.” He smirked, but I saw that rare uncertainty in him, so I squeezed his fingers again, knowing that no matter how strong the pep talk, he wasn’t going to listen and take it in. When Danny got like this and went inside his own head, it was better to let him ride it out. So many times, we’d argue when I’d try to pull something out of him that he wasn’t willing to share, and now I was learning that his brooding silence wasn’talwaysa bad thing. It just meant he had to get his thoughts in order.I hoped that was what this was because sometimes, lately, his silencehadbeen a bad thing, and it had created days of distance between us that made me nervous. Distance that had only been there since he’d joined the band.

Danny took a look out of his window and blew out a breath, tilting his focus up to the neon signs. They projected an array of colours of his chiselled jaw and perfectly straight nose—they caught the moisture in his eyes and lit them up. And somehow, while looking at him sitting there close to me in that car, I felt Danny slipping away.

Swallowing down the odd sense of unease, I let go of his hand and squeezed both of mine between my legs.

He took a minute for himself before he eventually turned to me and raised his brows.

“Well, I guess this is it.”

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