“I went on a bit.”
I glance at her. “Don’t apologize for that.”
I’ve been observing it happen over the last few minutes—the change that occurs in her when she gets into music. The way she sits differently. The way her hands move unconsciously, keeping rhythm against her knee. The precision in her voice, the facts she remembers, the genuine passion for something she cares about that much.
That's just how she is with music. It’s always been that way. Since she was a kid, she'd play melodies she’d heard once on akeyboard she wasn’t supposed to touch because it belonged to Noah.
I’ve been seeing that version of her come and go throughout the whole trip. Brief flashes of her real self when she’s not trying to control it. In the coffee shop. At the fair with the penguin. Last night on the wall.
And now this.
She’s the most animated I’ve seen her. It shouldn’t take this much to get her here.
“Nicks and Buckingham got back together briefly after the tour,” she says after a while, quieter now. “Did you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
“It didn’t last, but they tried. She said later that she never stopped loving him. She just couldn’t be around him.”
“Sounds complicated.”
She hums her agreement.
The music keeps playing, softer now, the songSarafilling the space between what we’re saying and what we’re not. I reach forward and turn it up.
Piper sinks back into her seat. We let Fleetwood Mac fill the space. It’s the least they deserve.
Twenty-Two
Piper
Four days ago, I was in a gas station bathroom wearing a dress that wasn’t mine, pressing my hands against a door and trying to remember how to breathe. Four days ago, I was walking down an aisle that felt like a corridor with no way out. Four days ago, I ran for my life and right into Griffin’s Camaro.
It feels like something that happened to someone else.
We’ve been drifting south, stopping whenever the road shows us something worth exploring. We found a bookshop yesterday in a town whose name I’ve already forgotten. Griffin lingered in the engineering section for twenty minutes while I sat on the floor in fiction and read the first forty pages of a romance novel, before he just bought it for me. We ate tacos at a place with a resident cat that willingly accepted steak offerings without shame.
Every night, two beds. Every morning, coffee and the road.
I never thought I’d be sharing a room with another man every night, but we’ve reached a level of cohabitation that’s becomedangerously easy. He makes coffee if he’s up first. He doesn’t talk until I’m ready to talk.
I’m glad it’s him. I’m choosing not to examine why.
What Iamexamining is the fact that Griffin Hayes is currently folding my underwear.
It’s the natural result of four days on the road with a bag holding three sets of clothes. When the laundromat in this coastal town turned out to have only one folding table and no privacy, Griffin simply picked up my bag and started sorting. I didn’t object because I was busy eating a bag of chips and couldn’t think of a way to stop him without making things more awkward.
But now he’s folding my underwear.
What has my life actually become?
The laundromat is calledSuds & Such. It’s warm and smells like synthetic lavender.
The machines hum. Outside, the afternoon has hit that slow, golden phase.
Griffin is annoyingly efficient at this.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, wiping crumbs from my lap.
