Leanne blinked through the rain at her own daughter. Her brilliant, brave, curious daughter, who stood wide-eyed and openhearted, fully lit from within by joy.
And Leanne knew, right then, that she had to tell Nora.
Tell Nora never to shrink. Never to fold herself into someone else’s dream. Never to ignore the fire in her gut, no matter how loud the world got.
And maybe—just maybe—it wasn’t too late for Leanne to take her own advice.
Maybe there was still time.
Not to rewrite the past.
But to start living the future.
Chapter Thirty
There was definitely something wrong with her mother.
Nora studied Leanne from the passenger seat, stealing glances at her mom, who gripped the steering wheel of the Lincoln like it might suddenly buck her off. The skin of her face was suddenly tight, too quiet, her lips pulled into a brittle smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
There were plenty of times her mom had been quiet back home. The queen of doing dishes in silence, folding laundry with a pinched mouth, offering the occasional “mm-hmm” to fill the air. But this trip had been different. Leanne had been talking more. Laughing. Opening up in ways Nora had never expected. And Nora had started to love that part of the drive—the winding roads and the stories that came with them.
But now? Now, it felt like someone had shut the radio off mid-song.
“Mom?” Nora asked gently. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Leanne blinked as if she’d just been pulled out of a dream—or a nightmare. She turned her head, smiled the kind of smile parents reserve for “everything’s fine” lies, and nodded once.
“I’m good,” she said too brightly. “Shall we look for her?”
Eleanor.
After her grandmother’s haunting performance onstage—the one that had stopped time, cracked hearts wide open, and left the crowd singing like they’d brushed something magical—she’d vanished. Again. Like a magician in full purple-and-yellow fashion disappearing into a magic hat.
One moment, Eleanor had been shoulder to shoulder with Shep Moon, strumming like her fingers were dipped in lightning, and the next—poof. Gone. No last-minute words. No goodbye. No encore. She’d even ditched her interview with Joe, which Nora had been hoping to sneak in on.
They’d scoured the grounds, but the tent where the band had been camped was already packed up, the area nothing more than trampled grass and discarded cigarette butts. Not even the Beatles’ look-alikes who’d been standing guard were left.
The few people still lingering offered only vague shrugs and a lot of “Maybe she left with Shep?” speculation.
Nora exhaled hard, pressing her forehead to the cool window as Leanne started the engine. The Lincoln rumbled to life, its radio fizzing to static before settling on an Elvis track.
“I wish Joe were with us,” she muttered.
“Me too,” her mother said softly.
He had a way of knowing things by asking the right questions. Nora had never met anyone like him—charming, intelligent, and interested in her world views.
But, with a serious glint in his eye, like the story was alive and writhing in his notebook, and he had to pin it down before it slipped away, Joe had taken off after the show, saying something about following a tip. Typical journalist. Always chasing, always hunting the next thread. Nora just hoped that thread led to Eleanor.
Or, at the very least, back to her.
Nora said she understood. Sort of. She was a writer too, at least intheory. The mudlarking scene would make it into her leather journal beside the other lines she’d scribbled in ink so smudged they looked like they were sweating. She knew what it meant to need quiet to think. To feel like your best ideas only visited when you were alone.
What she needed to remember was that however much she liked Joe, he was just a summer crush. Still…Joe would’ve made excellent company.
He knew all the bands. All the roadie gossip. All the fast ways to track down the next show. And right now, she and her mom were just driving around Atlanta like detectives in a B-rated noir film, stopping at every roadside motel with a VW van in the parking lot, hoping for a lucky break.
For the record, they were not getting lucky.
