Page 79 of Ghost Note

“Sorry, what?”

“I asked how it went. You’ve barely said two words to me since you got in the car. I thought you’d be bouncing all over the place.”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Good. Yeah. It was… decent.”

I smirked, frowned, and looked back at the road. “That doesn’t sound so convincing.”

“We had some issues, obviously. It was our first proper gig. It can’t go smoothly from the off, Daisy.”

“I never said it should. I was only asking.”

“It is what it is.”

“What went wrong?”

“Nothing major. Few of the songs on the setlist were out of order, and we got confused. Started a couple of tracks wrong. A couple of awkward pauses, not a lot of smooth transitioning from one track to the next. It didn’t help that half the amps were shite. It’ll be better next time.”

“I’m proud of you. I hope you know that.”

He met my declaration with silence, and when I looked at him again, he was staring out of the passenger window in thought.

He was rarely like this, but when he was, I often kept myself busy or found a distraction I knew would bring him back to life again the way I always needed him to be. Reaching over, I turned the CD player on and waited for Ocean Colour Scene to do their thing. This album was one of Danny’s favourites, and he played it on repeat whenever we drove anywhere, always giving me a fun fact about the band along the way.

They were formed in Birmingham.

Ocean Colour Scene chose their name by randomly picking words they liked from the dictionary.

An anagram of their name was Ace Cure Clone Soon.

Okay, so that was all I could really remember, but at least I knew some lyrics, too, and whenThe Downstreambegan to play, I sang.

My fingers curled around the wheel, and I joined in with the lead singer whose name I didn’t know, asking where Danny went when it wasn’t where he was going.

I asked how he saw when the light wasn’t shining.

I asked where he could be if he worked out the timing.

And I asked him in song how on earth he did the things he did…

My voice floated along, leading us around the curves in the road, guiding us back to home.

Danny’s hand on my thigh brought my attention his way, and when I saw him leaning towards me looking a lot like the boyfriend I knew, I smiled softly and continued to sing because my song brought him a form of peace I didn’t understand.

“Thank you,” he whispered as we hit a country road.

I shifted gears and flashed him a bright smile. “Maybe one day I’ll be able to see you play to an audience so you don’t have to answer all my questions when you get in the car.”

His face fell, the contentment slipping off him too easily. “Yeah. Maybe.”

When he slumped back in his seat, Danny released a sigh that sounded like it held a thousand problems within it, and it didn’t take long for him to close his eyes and shut out the universe for a few moments.

“Or not. I know you want to do this alone,” I offered, wanting to appease him.

“It isn’t about wanting to do it alone, Daisy. It’s—”

“I don’t mind. Honestly. This is your thing. I get that. We’ll take this at your pace.”

“Of course we will,” he muttered. “God forbid we should do anything different.”

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