the windowsill as her absent fingers pick out the notes.
“But I see her every night, it seems…”
She is in his bed, his broad hands playing out the melody on skin. Her face flares hot at the memory as he sings.
“And I’m so afraid, afraid that I’ll forget her, even though I’ve only met her in my dreams.”
She never gave him the words, but he found them anyway.
His voice is clearer, stronger, his tone more confident. He just needed the right song. Something to make the crowd lean in and listen.
Addie squeezes her eyes shut, the past and present tangling together in her head.
All those nights at the Alloway, watching him play.
All the times he found her at the bar, and smiled.
All those firsts that were not firsts for her.
The palimpsest bleeding up through the paper.
Toby looks up from the piano, and there’s no way he can see her in a place this big, but she is sure his eyes meet hers, and the room tilts a little, and she doesn’t know if it’s the beers she drank too fast or the vertigo of memory, but then the song ends, replaced by a warm wave of applause, and she is on her feet, moving toward the door.
“Addie, wait,” says Henry, but she can’t, even though she knows what it means to walk away, knows that Robbie and Bea will forget her, and she will have to start again, and so will Henry—but in that moment, she doesn’t care.
She cannot breathe.
The door swings open and the night rushes in, and Addie gasps, forcing air into her lungs.
And it should feel good to hear her music, it should feel right.
After all, she has gone to visit pieces of her art so many times.
But they were only pieces, stripped of context. Sculptured birds on marble plinths, and paintings behind ropes. Didactic boxes taped to whitewashed walls and glass boxes that keep the present from the past.
It is a different thing when the glass breaks.
It is her mother in the doorway, withered to bone.
It is Remy in the Paris salon.
It is Sam, inviting her to stay, every time.
It is Toby Marsh, playing their song.
The only way Addie knows how to keep going is to keep going forward. They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.
“Addie?” Henry is right behind her. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. She wipes the tears away and shakes her head because the story is too long, and too short. “I can’t go back in there, not now.”
Henry looks over his shoulder, and he must have seen the color drop from her face during the show because he says, “Do you know him? That Toby Marsh guy?”
She hasn’t told him that story—they haven’t gotten there yet.
“I did,” she says, which isn’t strictly true, because it makes it sound like something in the past, when the past is the one thing Addie’s not entitled to, and Henry must hear the lie buried in the words, because he frowns. He laces his hands behind his head.
“Do you still have feelings for him?”
And she wants to be honest, to say that of course she does. She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air.
But it is not love.
It is not love, and that is what he’s asking.
“No,” she says. “He just—it caught me off guard. I’m sorry.”
Henry asks if she wants to go home, and Addie doesn’t know if he means both of them, or only her, doesn’t want to find out, so she shakes her head, and they go back in, and the lights have changed, and the stage is empty, the house music filling the air until the main act, and Bea and Robbie are chatting, heads bent just the way they were when they walked in. And Addie does her best to smile as they reach the table.
“There you are!” says Robbie.
“Where did you run off to?” asks Bea, eyes flicking from Henry to her. “And who’s this?”
He slides his arm around her waist. “Guys, this is Addie.”
Robbie looks her up and down, but Bea only beams.
“Finally!” she says. “We’ve been dying