‘You did this to yourself, Josh. You destroyed us. I can’t ever play for you with my guard down, and I’ll never trust you around my music.’
‘You sent me Fraser’s song the minute you finished it.’
‘I wasdrunk. I was completely out of control.’Why am I admitting this?
‘For some reason that’s comforting.’ He rubs his forehead as though it’s aching from years of this feud. ‘Alcohol is a truth serum.’ For a long moment, I stare at that fact. He doesn’t know the depths of my dependency. The chokehold alcohol had over me. The way it subdued me. Dismembered me. Thrashed me in the shallows in its crocodile death roll until it swallowed my relationship with Parker whole.
‘For me it was a numbing serum, but I don’t need it anymore. And, Josh, where I am with my music right now—after spending so long thinking my career was over and that I had blown my one opportunity to really make something of myself—I can’t be near you.’
By the time Beau returns fifteen minutes later, I’ve just about pulled myself together. Frankly, it’s a relief to have someone else’sproblem to focus on as he leans against the curve of the piano and I look up at him from the stool.
‘Right, Mr Davenport. Tell me where you’re stuck,’ I say, calling this experiment, and the morning, and my life, to order—trying, unsuccessfully so far, to shake Josh’s energy from the room.
It’s as if Beau is configuring the problem in his mind, assembling it into a set of palatable key messages that he’s nervous to drop, before he takes a breath and launches it at me: ‘The problem is that what she and I had was explosive. So the tension between the protagonists was off the charts. She was the sort of woman who lit up the sky and burnt out on impact. Dangerous, impulsive, electric …’
Four sentences into his speech and I’m sorry I asked. It’s an eruption of information I wasn’t prepared for. I’m one part enthralled, nine parts screamingly envious of the sort of woman who could light up Beau’s sky and his film script so devastatingly that he’s had to go all scorched earth on it in her wake.
‘Audrey?’
My face is hot. I’ve gone straight to a place of schoolgirl inferiority, comparing myself to the iridescent cheerleader who has stolen my crush’s heart while I’m in the library alone over lunch.
‘I don’t have to change the plot too much,’ he explains, unaware that my head has fallen off. ‘It’s the character. Every attempt I’ve made to change her has only watered her down. No one is going to fall in love with someone I can’t rouse any interest in myself, as the writer. I need to start from scratch.’
Right.
‘So someone equally explosive? Or a whole other energy?’
Please say the latter. Say you want someone broken and messy, with cracks and flaws, who’ll smash into your car and stand on the bonnet of it and scream the place down.
Intense blue eyes search my face for answers before he says, ‘The character I had justworked.’
He looks as despondent as I feel. I can’t tell if he’s maudlin about the loss of the character or the woman who inspired her, but I say, ‘Tell me more?’ Because I am clearly a masochist.
‘Can’t,’ he replies. ‘I signed a nondisclosure agreement. Can’t talk about her. Can’t write about her …’
‘Can’t get over her?’ The question lopes into the room, echoing off the acoustic panels, followed by a loaded beat of silence during which our eyes meet and I almost forget how to breathe.
It stops him short. ‘I am over her,’ he says quietly.
He does notseemover her.
My hands go ahead and fill the awkward silence that follows with a few chords on the piano. The chords are not going anywhere. They don’t mean anything. They’re just noise, trying to jostle the uncomfortable truth into the corner, out of our sight.
‘Does the character change the story?’ I ask.
‘Characters always drive the story. The strong ones can survive any plot twist we throw at them.’
My fingers return to their comfort zone. The final lines of Fraser’s piece. The part of the sheet music with the strong double bars and two dots—the ‘repeat’ sign that’s sent me back over the same minorkey section over and over again …
But it won’t now; the music pulls me from the old reprise through this unexpected bridge into a major key and a bright new melody that shouldn’t work but does.
Beau’s expression shifts as he listens, attuned to the changes, the music lifting us through some invisible transition, experimenting, improvising—
‘I heard something once about loss,’ he says. ‘That the hole it leaves in your life never disappears, but your life expandsaround it, like this. New music mingles with the old. The central melody is still there … It’s just bigger. It has to be. Or you wouldn’t be alive.’
I haven’t been.
I’ve been in purgatory since Fraser died. Stuck thinking my chance at life had been irreparably stolen from me, too. Trying to preserve what we had. Worried any steps forward would taint his memory. Certain that our experience was so incredible and unique, there could never be a situation that would make it worth risking my heart again. Never a person worth risking that for. I’ve gripped onto this so hard. Thought it was keeping me safe when it was suffocating me. And here I am, daring to play different music for the first time inyearsand—
