I flip through pages without reading the words. Reading them would hurt too much, like pressing on a wound that never quite healed. These songs represent a version of myself that believed music could fix anything, that the right combination of melody and truth could save what was breaking.
That was before Jason left. Before I learned that loving a musician means watching them choose everything else over you. Before I understood that single mothers don’t get to chase dreams that won’t pay for groceries.
A car door slams in the alley, startling me back to the present. I close the notebook and snap the case shut, pushing it back where it belongs. Some things are better left buried.
The Friday folder reveals tomorrow’s lineup: three acts, all local, all hungry for their fifteen minutes. Small crowds, smaller pay, but they keep the doors open. That has to be enough.
I lock the cabinet and kill the lights, gathering my purse and keys. Outside, the Nashville night is still alive, with music and laughter reverberating through the streets. I swear this city never sleeps, and when it does, it’s never for long.
The drive home takes fifteen minutes through neighborhoods changing faster than longtime residents can track. East Nashville gentrifies in patches—restored Victorian houses next to empty lots, craft coffee shops sharing blocks with auto repair shops that remember when this area housed actual working families. Every time a new restaurant goes in or a new house goes up, I think, this is it; this will change the area.
Nope.
My house occupies a corner lot on a street lined with oak trees older than the city itself. The mortgage stretches my budget thinner than it should, but Lily deserves a yard for her bicycleand a front porch where she can sit with her books without traffic noise drowning out her concentration.
The porch light illuminates my mom’s Buick in the driveway. She’s probably asleep on the couch with a romance novel open across her chest, reading glasses sliding down her nose.
I let myself in quietly, hanging the keys on their hook and slipping off the shoes worn smooth by three years of standing on concrete floors. The living room glows with light from a single lamp, and, sure enough, Mama sleeps on the couch with a paperback face down on her lap.
The stairs creak despite my careful steps. Lily’s door stands slightly open, soft light spilling into the hallway. I peek inside to find her sitting up in bed, notebook balanced on her knees, pencil moving across the page with the intense focus she reserves for things that matter most.
“Hey, baby.” I step into the room, noting the camp clothes laid out for tomorrow and the water glass on her nightstand that she never remembers to drink. “What are you working on?”
“Just writing.” She closes the notebook quickly, but not before I catch a glimpse of musical notation mixed with words I can’t read from this distance. “Mama, can you sing that song tonight?”
“Which song?”
“The one you promised. About the Mockingbird and the Storm.”
My chest tightens. I made that promise three weeks ago during a bedtime conversation about birds and weather and how some creatures survive by learning new ways to sing when their old songs no longer work. Lily asked if I could write a song about it, and I said yes without thinking—the way you do when your ten-year-old looks at you like you hold all the answers.
“I’m still working on it,” I tell her, settling on the edge of her bed and smoothing the covers around her legs. “Songs take time.”
“But you write songs all the time. I hear you humming.”
“Humming isn’t the same as writing.”
Lily fixes me with the look she inherited from her grandmother—the one that sees through excuses and demands better. “You could write it if you wanted to. You just don’t want to.”
The accusation lands closer to home than I care to admit. She’s right, of course. I could write her song. I could face the instrument gathering dust in my office and find the melody that’s been circling my subconscious for weeks. I could give my daughter what she asked for.
I could become the songwriter I used to be.
“Some songs need to find their own time,” I say instead, offering the kind of non-answer that parents use when they can’t explain their own failures.
Lily nods, but I catch disappointment flickering across her face before she hides it. She’s too young to understand that sometimes protecting the people you love means protecting them from the parts of yourself that broke too badly to fix.
“Will you stay until I fall asleep?”
“Of course.”
I adjust her pillows and pull the covers to her chin, then settle into the chair beside her bed. This ritual hasn’t changed since she was small enough to curl against my side during thunderstorms. Now she’s all arms and legs, growing into the person she’ll become while I try to figure out how to be the mother she needs.
Lily closes her eyes, but her breathing doesn’t settle into sleep immediately. Instead, she starts to hum—soft andunconscious, the melody floating through the dark room like something she can’t help but release.
The tune stops my breath.
It’s complex without being complicated, the kind of melody that sounds simple until you try to replicate it. The rhythm shifts between measures in a way that shouldn’t work but does, creating a sense of movement that makes you want to follow wherever it leads.
