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Earl reaches across the counter to give her head a pat. It’s so gentle he almost sets off another round of sobs. “Call your mum back, yeah? She’s been messaging me all morning asking if you’ve dropped by.”

Another sniff. For the first time in weeks, she feels homesick. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Earl echoes softly before he goes back to wiping down the counter, humming along to his playlist while he wakes up the pub and Florence sips her lukewarm tea.

She calls her mum a few hours later, curled up on the sofa in their practice room while the muffled noises of the pub drift through the ceiling. Her mum picks up on the third ring.

“Florence?”

“Mum,” she says. She tries to sound normal, but her voice trembles traitorously even on that one syllable.

“Oh, darling,” her mum says. “I’m so sorry.”

And that’s all it takes to make the tears spill over for the second time that day. Florence presses her face into the dusty arm of the couch to muffle a small sound.

“Are you still at Earl’s?”

“Y-yeah.”

“Good. That’s good.” Her mum blows out a breath. After a moment, she asks, “Did he reach out to you at all?”

“No,” Florence says. “Not once, Mum. I didn’t know the label was his. I wouldn’t have called them if I had.”

It feels imperative, suddenly, that her mum understands that Florence didn’t do this on purpose—that she never wanted to work with her father, that the idea alone is enough to make her feel ill.

“I know, darling. I know.” From the other end of the line, there’s a small sniff. More tears spill down Florence’s cheek at the idea that her mum is crying as well, right there in her office.

“Mum, are you mad at me?” she manages, voice small.

“Mad at you? Why would I be mad at you, Florence?”

“I don’t know.” She presses her eyes shut and tugs her knees closer. She’s trying so hard not to make any sounds, but she can’t stop the tiny hiccup from wrenching free. “I just—I know you hated that he toured. And now I’m doing the same, and I . . . I’m so scared that he’s the reason. That I only did all of this because I wanted to be like him, because I thought it would prove something. I don’t . . .” The next hiccup sounds closer to a sob, torn from someplace deep. “I don’t want to be like him, Mum.”

“Florence,” her mum says, and this time her tone is different. This is the version of her mother who did Florence’s homework with her like she was running her through drills. This is Kelly Gibson, PhD. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

“It is. You’re nothing like him. And you aren’t doing this to—how did you phrase it? Prove something to him.” She can hear the creaking of her mum’s office chair as she sits up straighter. “Let me tell you something. One of the very first words you spoke, after all the usual ones, was song. Once you’d figured it out, you said it all the time. Song, song, song, until I turned on the radio.” A small, huffed laugh. “You’d try to babble along every time I sang you a lullaby, right up until you fell asleep. After you got your first CD player, you would spend hours lying on your bed, just listening to the same album over and over. You were writing songs when you were eight years old and performing them for anyone that would listen. That is yours, Florence.”

Florence is properly crying now, staining the sofa with her tears, shoulders shaking silently.

“You have always wanted this so much,” her mum says. “You wanted this since before you had the words for it.”

She’s right. Florence thinks of the years of desperately pouring her all into the band. The rejections, the doubt. The familiar, stubborn thing at her core that refused to stop trying, flinging herself at a wall again and again in the hopes that it would somehow give way this time. All you need is one yes. All you need is one person to believe in you and help you get a foot in the door.

The door was just inching open. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if it turns out she’s ruined it all. She wishes she could stop wanting so much, all the time. She wishes she could be satisfied with smaller, softer dreams: something she might actually reach, something that doesn’t feel like constantly flaying herself open for the entire world to see.

She whispers, “I wish it didn’t hurt so much.”

“I think it’s supposed to,” her mum tells her softly. “That’s how you know it means something.”

31

It’s strange to wake up alone. At some point over the last three weeks, Luca had gotten used to the sound of four other people breathing, to the disoriented joy of waking up in a new city. To the instinctive glance over at Florence, first thing in the morning.

The blare of her alarm drills into her skull. She gropes blindly around her sheets until she finds her phone and turns it off.

Pale light filters in around the edges of her blackout curtains, spotlighting the piles of laundry on the floor and her unpacked suitcase. The calendar alert on her phone flashes with the time of her shift at the café.