The room quiets. Faces turn toward me. Dean and Jo are at their sweetheart table, arms around each other. The book club is clustered near the front.Asher and Mads are slow-dancing even though there’s no music yet. And Delilah is standing near the back, watching me with those eyes that have haunted me for twenty years.
“So Dean asked me to sing something,” I say. “He said, and I quote, ‘Nothing fancy, just one song, and don’t make it weird.’”
Laughter from the crowd. Dean shakes his head.
“But here’s the thing.” I adjust the guitar strap. “Three days ago, I drove four and a half hours in the middle of the night to find a woman I’ve loved since I was seventeen years old. I found her at a cemetery, talking to her father’s headstone, convinced she wasn’t worth staying for.”
The room is silent now. Delilah’s hand is pressed to her chest.
“She was wrong. She’s worth everything. And on the drive back, I wrote this song. It’s the first thing I’ve written in months, maybe the first real thing I’ve written in years.” I look directly at her. “It’s called ‘Staying.’”
I start to play.
The melody is simple, something that came to me on a dark highway with no sleep and too much coffee, my heart cracked open and bleedinghope for the first time in forever. The words are simpler, because the truth usually is.
I sing about running, about twenty years of almost and not quite, about a girl with flowers in her hair who taught me what it meant to want something I couldn’t have.
I sing about coming home. Showing up even when it’s terrifying. Choosing someone, every day, even when they make it hard.
And I sing about staying. Planting roots in a small town by the sea. Love that doesn’t leave, that doesn’t give up, that shows up at cemeteries in the middle of the night because some things are worth chasing.
The last note fades into silence.
Then the room explodes.
Cheering, applause, the book club absolutely losing their minds. Jo is crying. Dean is pretending he’s not. Mads has her phone out, definitely recording, probably already posting to every social media platform known to man.
But I only see Delilah.
She’s crying too, but she’s smiling, and she’s walking toward me, pushing through the crowd, not running away for once.
I set down the guitar and meet her halfway.
“That song,” she says, voice cracking.
“Was about you. Obviously.”
“You wrote that on the drive back?”
“Somewhere around hour three. I was running on caffeine and desperation.”
She laughs, wiping her eyes. “It’s beautiful.”
“You’re gorgeous.” I cup her face in my hands. “And I meant every word. I’m not going anywhere, Delilah. LA, New York, wherever the music takes me, I’m coming back here. To Twin Waves. To you.”
“What about your career?”
“I can write anywhere. I can record in LA when I need to. But home is here now.” I rest my forehead against hers. “Home is wherever you are.”
“That’s very cheesy,” she whispers.
“I’m a songwriter. Cheesy is literally my job.”
She laughs again, and then she’s kissing me, right there in the middle of the dance floor, with half of Twin Waves watching and the book club cheering and Rex barking and somewhere Jo is yelling “Finally!”
When we break apart, she’s glowing.
“I’m done running,” she says.
