She rewrapped the towel around her waist and pulled her Jackson hospital sweater on over her damp bathing suit then sat down next to the fire.
Brodie perched on the edge of his chair, stoking the flames with a stick. He looked boyish in the firelight, flopping haired and twinkly eyed, like he used to at school. It made her say, “You said you used to come here with Ethan?”
Ethan was Brodie’s younger brother, same year at school as Maeve. Cut class all the time. Way too cool to be friends with Maeve, but she knew him through her friend Piper, the one who’d persuaded her to go to Brodie’s concert.
Brodie looked up, there was something about his eyes that made him look like he was permanently amused by a joke, the uptilt at the corners and the fan of coal-black lashes.
Don’t look, Maeve. She lowered her gaze.
“Yeah, this is where we wrote a lot of Silver Sky songs. Just the two of us. They were good times.”
“You miss him?” she asked. No one had seen Ethan for years. But a while back, Maeve had bumped into Piper at the grocery store and her friend had told her that she thought she’d seen the elusive Carter brother on her street. “It was weirdest thing, I looked out my window and I swear I saw Ethan standing under the streetlamp.”
Maeve had said that she didn’t think he’d stand under a streetlamp if he didn’t want anyone to know he was there, which seemed to be the case as no one had heard from him, but Piper was having none of it. “It was him, Maeve, I know it was,” she’d said.
“Yeah, I miss him,” Brodie nodded without question. “He was like…” He paused trying to think of an analogy. “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I can write a good song on my own, but with Ethan, it becomes something else. He can see a lyric or a melody and knowexactlywhat to change to take it to another level, give a song some gravitas.” Then he laughed. “I didn’t even know I knew that word.”
Maeve laughed despite herself.
The smile in Brodie’s eyes only intensified having made her laugh.
The air seemed to still, pause on the moment.
She felt her face get warm and pulled her damp hair up from her neck.Don’t look at him, Maeve.
They sat in silence but it wasn’t the same silence as before. There was suddenly an awareness to it rather than an awkwardness. She could hear her breathing, watched the movement of his throat as he swallowed. She should have gone to bed. She tried to stay focused, willed herself not to look at him, but she couldn’t help it, her gaze drawn to his side of the fire, the hypnotic blue of his eyes.It’s not real, Maeve,she warned herself.It’s all just a trick of the light.
“Brodie, I’ve been meaning to tell you…” she began cautiously.
His brows drew together. “Is this to do with Ethan?”
There was a hopefulness to the question that made her feel for him as she shook her head. “No, it’s to do with your mom.”
“Mymom?” He pointed to his chest as if to confirm.
The tension dropped like a stone, gone in an instant at the mention of his mother.
“Yeah.” She nodded, leaning down to pick up a twig from the ground and chucking it on the fire. “She’s helped me quite a lot with Zoey.”
Brodie cocked his head. “Does she know?”
Maeve winced. “No. And I feel awful about it.” She bit down on her nail, a terrible habit that she’d got into at medical school, so she tucked her hands into the cuffs of her sweater. “My grandma died when Zoey was three years old. It was really sudden.” Maeve remembered coming home and finding her grandma apparently asleep in her chair one afternoon. There was a bag of apples on the floor next to her that she’d obviously been given by John-Luke at the orchard as she’d walked past. She still had her coat on. Maeve had known as she stood in the doorway, she’d seen enough death at work to know that her lovely grandma was gone. She’d walked over and pressed her cheek to hers, her eyes welling with tears, and said, “Thank you for everything.” Clutched her grandma’s clasped hands in hers and said a prayer for her to sleep peacefully. When Maeve had stood, it felt like the world had given way underneath her.
“I was a bit of a mess afterwards for a while,” she said to Brodie, who was studying her too intently for her liking, like he could see through to everything she was thinking. “My grandma had always looked after Zoey, so without her I was pretty overwhelmed by everything. One day in the grocery store, Zoey was having a meltdown and I just kind of broke down—it was a bad day,” she added jokily to try and lighten what she was saying.
Brodie smiled softly.
Don’t look at me like that.
Maeve tried her very best not to be distracted by the creasing of his eyes at the corners.
“Anyway,” she said, forcing her gaze back to look at the fire, “your mom was there, and she tried to help me but I wassoterrified of her getting involved that I just ran away from her. Literally, picked up Zoey and fled. She must have thought I was crazy. After that, any time I saw her, I’d completely avoid her, even though she was just trying to help. She’d come round and ring on the bell and I’d pretend not to be at home.”
Brodie gave a wry smile. “She’s a very persistent woman!”
“Tell me about it!”
He chuckled and it seemed to bring them suddenly closer, joined, almost like family, by such intimate knowledge of a parent’s behavior.
