Archive of Our Own

The Santa Ana winds arrive early that morning, carrying the kind of dry heat that makes Los Angeles feel like a tinderbox waiting for a spark. Daisy wakes to the sound of palm fronds scraping against her bedroom window, a rhythmic scratching that pulls her from dreams she won't remember but that still leave her with a familiar ache behind her ribs.

The sheets are bunched around her legs, a comforter thrown off the bed sometime in the night. Her house in the Hills is too big, too quiet, too much of everything except what she actually needs. She bought it six months ago with royalties alone. Her accountant said it was a smart investment, Simone said it was beautiful, Teddy said it would give her privacy.

To her, it feels like someone else's house. Like she's housesitting for a version of herself she hasn't met yet.

She kicks free of the sheets and pads across the carpet to the window, pushing aside the heavy curtains. On clear mornings like this, you can see the mountains. It's stunning. That’s what people always say. She doesn't remember the last time it made her feel anything except far away from everything.

She moves around the kitchen. Viking range she's never turned on, copper pots hanging like artwork, a wine fridge filled with sparkling water. She makes coffee in the same Mr. Coffee machine she dragged here from her last place, the only thing in this kitchen that feels real. While it burbles and hisses, she stands at the massive island, palms flat on the marble, and tries to remember what she's supposed to do today.

Nothing.

The answer is nothing, and that's been the answer for three weeks now since she told her manager she needed "time to write," which was code for "time to figure out what the fuck I'm doing." She's not writing. She's barely even breathing, just existing in this careful way that makes everyone around her cautious but relieved.

At least she's not with Johnny anymore. At least she's sober. At least she's alive.

The coffee is too strong. She drinks it anyway, standing in the living room where the Fazioli takes up half the wall. Next to it, almost hidden, is the old Martin she can't bring herself to get rid of. The one with the capo still on the third fret where—No.

She sets the mug down hard enough that coffee sloshes onto the table. That's a door she keeps closed, locked, bolted, furniture piled in front of it. The name she's trained herself not to think, scrubbed from her vocabulary like a curse. The reason she walks out of rooms when someone puts on Aurora.

Five years. It's been nearly five years since Chicago, and she still can't—

The phone rings, shrill in the quiet. She considers not answering, but it might be Simone, and Simone is the only person who doesn't treat her like she's made of glass.

"Hello?"

"Daisy, honey." It's her publicist, Marcia, who only calls on Saturdays when there's a problem.

"What did he do now?"

There's an awkward laugh from Marcia's end. "Johnny's telling people you owe him money. That he supported you when you were getting clean, and now you won't take his calls."

"That's completely—" Daisy grips the phone tighter. "He's the reason I relapsed. I'm not giving him a cent."

"I know. But he's desperate. Apparently the IRS is after him, and he owes money to some casino in Vegas."

"Not my problem."

"No, but..." Marcia pauses carefully. "His new manager mentioned he has some personal items he's thinking of selling. Photos from when you were together."

The words hang there. Daisy's stomach turns.

"What kind of photos?"

"He wasn't specific. But he made it clear they're... private. From those parties last year, the weekends you don't remember clearly."

Daisy closes her eyes. There are gaps in her memory from that time, whole days lost to whatever cocktail Johnny was providing.

"That's blackmail."

"I know. Desperate people do stupid things."

"How much does he want?"

"A hundred thousand."

"A hundred—" Daisy almost laughs. "Are you serious?"

"He says you owe him for 'emotional support and career guidance' during your relationship."

"Career guidance? He’s gotta be kidding.” Her voice rises sharply. "And emotional support? He was high for ninety percent of our relationship."

"I'm just telling you what he said."

"He's delusional. I don't owe him anything. If anything, he owes me for the years of therapy I'll need."

"I know that. You know that. But he's convinced himself otherwise." Marcia sighs. "What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

"Daisy—"

"No. I'm not paying him to go away. That's not how this works."

"And if he actually has photos? If he sells them?"

Daisy doesn't answer right away. The truth is, she doesn't know what he has. There are too many nights she doesn't remember, too many parties where someone always had a camera.

"Then everyone will see what kind of man he really is. Someone who sells private moments to pay gambling debts."

"That's very principled of you, but—"

"Marcia, if I pay him now, when does it stop? Six months from now when he's broke again? A year?"

"You're right. I know you're right. I just want to protect you."

"I know." Daisy exhales slowly. "Just... let me know if he escalates. But don't engage."

After they hang up, Daisy stands there holding the dead phone. Johnny fucking Fox. Still finding ways to make her feel unsafe in her own life. She can picture him now—last she heard he was in London, probably several drinks in, telling anyone who'll listen how she owes him everything. Rewriting history to make himself the hero instead of the reason she almost didn't survive 1981.

She needs to get out.

The decision is sudden and necessary, like coming up for air. She can't stay in this house today, can't sit here waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Johnny to do whatever desperate thing he's planning. Even from up here in the Hills, she feels exposed. Like he could have hired some photographer, pointing up at her house, selling another piece of their story.

She pulls on yesterday's pool clothes: a black bikini she never swam in, the Turkish caftan she bought on tour, blue geometric patterns on white cotton. Her hair is a mess from sleep, curls still tangled. She doesn't bother fixing it, just pushes sunglasses on top of her head like a headband.

The garage holds her collection of impractical cars: the Ferrari from Johnny (she should sell it but hasn't), the Porsche Don gifted her after the Grammy win (too pretentious), and tucked in the corner, her '73 Mercedes convertible. Cream colored, brown leather seats, the kind of car a French actress would drive along the Riviera. She bought it the week she got out of rehab the second time, when she was still shaky and strange, trying to remember how to be a person without pills to smooth everything down.

The engine turns over on the third try, rough but willing. She backs out carefully, the morning sun already brutal on her shoulders through the thin cotton. She doesn't know where she's going, only that she needs to move, needs to feel the wind strip away the feeling of being watched, analyzed, discussed.

She turns onto Mulholland, then winds her way down towards the PCH. When she flips on the radio, it's playing a familiar song. She reaches to change the station, but something stops her.

Her own voice pours out from the speakers.

Did you see me walking by?

Did it ever make you cry?

Am I still, am I still, your favorite mistake?

She wrote most of it during those first three months in New York, staying at Simone's after rehab. After Chicago. When the anger was the only thing keeping her upright, when fury was all she had.

But she couldn't finish it then. Too close to the wound. It sat in a drawer for a year before she added the last verse—the one that turned questioning into knowing, doubt into declaration. By then she had enough distance to see the truth.

Teddy said it was too raw for the album. But raw was all she had then, and the song went to number one for seven weeks straight. Somewhere out there, wherever he is now, he’s heard this song. Has probably heard it in his car, his house, the grocery store. She doesn't know which is worse—that he's undoubtedly heard every word, or that he heard it and just never cared to respond.

The Pacific Coast Highway opens up before her, the ocean glittering in the white sunshine. She needs the beach, needs the kind of emptiness that only comes from staring at something bigger than your own problems. She needs to find a place where she can exist without being Daisy Jones, where she can just be a woman with sand between her toes and salt in her hair and a history she's trying to outrun.

The first beach she tries is on the north end of Santa Monica. The parking lot is half-full with weekend surfers, a few families setting up for the day. She parks and walks towards the sand, the caftan whipping around her legs in the ocean breeze.

She's almost to the water when she hears it, that shift in energy that makes her immediately tense. A group of college kids, probably USC from the looks of their matching tank tops, are nudging each other, whispering. The blonde one is already reaching for something in her beach bag.

"Holy shit, are you Daisy Jones?"

Daisy keeps walking, but they're following now, their voices getting louder, more excited. The blonde is holding a camera. Of course.

"It is her! Oh my god, can we get a picture?"

"Where’s Johnny?" Another guy calls out.

She turns back towards her car, keys clutched between her fingers like claws. The kids are still following, getting bolder. One of the boys is jogging to keep up.

"Hey, wait! Just one picture!"

She manages a smile that feels like bared teeth. "Sorry, I get that a lot. Not her."

"But you look exactly—"

She's already in the Mercedes, backing out too fast, kicking up dust. In the rearview mirror, she can see them still standing there, the blonde taking a picture of her car.

She's back on the PCH before they can process the lie, heading north, searching for something that probably doesn't exist, a place in Southern California where nobody knows her name.

The second beach looks promising from the road, but as she pulls into the lot, she sees them—photographers already set up. A fashion shoot from the looks of it. There’s a model wearing a highcut bathing suit, posing against the rocks while an assistant holds a reflector. One of the photographers glances at Daisy's car, does a double-take. She doesn't even turn off the engine, just backs out and continues north.

The third beach is beyond the Malibu Pier. Packed with families, volleyball games, teenagers with boom boxes. She doesn't even slow down.

The fourth has a news van in the parking lot, apparently some local interest story. The fifth through ninth are all wrong for different reasons. Too public, too popular, too many cars with out-of-state plates, too many people with cameras, too much of everything she's trying to escape.

She passes Neptune's Net on her right—motorcycles lined up out front, the smell of fried fish there and gone. Her stomach growls. She ignores it. Keeps driving.

The green sign appears around a bend. Los Angeles County Line. She watches it shrink in her rearview mirror.

Across the county line, she feels it—the weight lifting, the air opening up. Like she can finally breathe without someone watching her do it.

She stops for gas in Ventura, standing by the pump in her caftan and bikini, feeling ridiculous and exposed. The attendant stares at her a beat too long. She can't tell if it's recognition or just the outfit. Either way, she gets back on the highway.

By the time she reaches the thirteenth beach, it's past noon. The sun is directly overhead, brutal and unforgiving.

She's north of Ventura now, in that stretch where the coast goes wild and the beaches don't have names, just numbered access points. The highway curves away from the ocean here, and she almost misses the turn.

Beach Access #13 is barely marked, just a wooden sign half-hidden by overgrown sage brush, the number faded to almost nothing. The access road is more dirt than pavement, narrow enough that she worries about the Mercedes' paint job for a moment before deciding she doesn't care.

The parking area is just a rough clearing, empty except for a beaten pickup truck with surfboards in the back, wetsuits hanging from the side mirror to dry. But whoever owns it is nowhere to be seen, probably out in the water somewhere, invisible among the waves.

She parks and sits, engine ticking as it cools, watching the path that leads down to the sand. It's steep, carved between two cliff faces, uninviting enough to keep the casual beachgoers away.

Perfect.

The path down is treacherous, carved steps eroded by wind, some missing entirely. She has to grip the cliff face in places, the sandstone crumbling under her fingers. Her sandals are wrong for this, slipping on loose rocks. Halfway down, she takes them off, carries them, letting her feet find their own grip on the warm stone.

The beach, when she finally reaches it, is nothing like the manicured stretches closer to LA.

It's a small cove, maybe forty yards across, hidden from the highway by tall bluffs that curve around it. The sand is coarser here, mixed with tiny shells and smooth black stones, not the processed perfection of Manhattan or Hermosa. There's kelp washed up in dark tangles that pop under her feet, driftwood along the high tide line smoothed gray and twisted. The waves are different too. Rougher, less predictable. They don't break in neat lines like at the surf beaches but come in at angles, colliding with themselves.

There's no one here. Not even footprints except for bird tracks.

She spreads out the beach blanket she keeps in her trunk, another relic from her past life, bought at a tourist shop outside Miami. She was on tour, her last and only tour with the band (though they didn't know it yet). She’d been coming off the drugs, shaking and cold in the ninety-degree heat. He had been the one to notice her shivering in the bus, had made them stop at some roadside place selling Florida kitsch. The blanket was hideous—palm trees and flamingos on scratchy turquoise fabric, "MIAMI BEACH" printed in sunset colors across the bottom.

"This is the ugliest thing I've ever seen," he'd said, but bought it anyway, wrapped it around her shoulders in the back of the bus while everyone else pretended not to notice she was falling apart. She was coming down hard, sweating and freezing at the same time, and he'd sat next to her for two hundred miles to Tampa, not saying anything about the fact that she was gripping his hand under the blanket like it was the only thing keeping her tethered to earth.

The sand is hot through the blanket when she lies back, she can feel it through the thin caftan. The sun is brutal at this angle, directly overhead, no mercy in it.

She should have brought sunscreen. She should have brought water. She should have brought anything that suggested she was planning to take care of herself, but self-preservation has never been her strong suit.

When she closes her eyes, the sun turns the inside of her eyelids red. She pulls the straw hat from the sand and drops it over her face. The darkness is immediate, the woven pattern creating tiny pinpricks of light like stars.

It took thirteen beaches to find one empty, but finally it's mine.

The thought comes unbidden, shaped like a lyric, and for the first time in months, she wishes she had her guitar. But that would mean going back to the house, and she can't go back, not yet. Not when the afternoon is stretching ahead like a promise and the ocean is loud enough to drown out the sound of her own name. Not when she's finally found a place where no one is watching, where she can be nobody, anywhere, just a woman on a beach wondering how she got here.

The waves keep coming, irregular and wild, and she times her breathing to match them. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, she doesn't want anything—not a drink, not a pill, not even him. Just this: the sun and the sand and the solitude, thirteen beaches away from everything that knows her name.

She dozes in the sun, that dangerous kind of half-sleep where memories slip through the cracks. She wakes with salt dried on her cheeks. From the ocean spray, she tells herself, though the wind isn't strong enough to carry it this far up the beach.

The sun has shifted west, no longer directly overhead but angled now. Late afternoon at least, she's lost track. Her legs are tight with the beginning of what will be a vicious sunburn, the kind that will make her feel like she's wearing her skin too tight for days.

She stands up, pulling the caftan over her head in one motion. Looks around. Still alone. She walks down to where the waves are reaching further up the beach with the incoming tide. The sand is cooler here, damp and firm under her feet. The water is colder than expected when it rushes over her toes—Pacific-cold, the kind that steals your breath. She forces herself forward, lets it wash over her feet, then her ankles, then wades in up to her knees.

The pull is immediate. Each wave that recedes tries to take her with it, sand eroding under her feet, making her sink deeper. She goes further, up to her thighs now, the cold so sharp it feels like cutting. Then waist-deep, gasping as a wave hits her stomach.

For a moment—just a moment—she understands the appeal of walking straight in and not stopping. Not in a desperate way, not like the pills or the powder or the way she used to chase oblivion at the bottom of bottles. This would be different. This would be like becoming part of something larger, dissolving into the salt and the vast indifference of the ocean.

But then she thinks of Simone, who would never forgive her. Thinks of Teddy, who's saved her too many times to count. Thinks, despite herself, of Billy reading about it in the papers, probably at his kitchen table with his perfect wife and his perfect daughter, his perfect life interrupted by the news that Daisy Jones walked into the ocean and didn't walk out.

Would he care? Not the public caring, the statement he'd have to make about the loss of a talented artist and former bandmate. But the real Billy, the one who used to look at her onstage like she could see straight through him. Would he care?

The thought makes her angry, the kind of clean, bright anger that feels like power. She takes a breath and goes under.

The cold is everywhere at once, a full-body shock that whites out thought. She stays down, eyes closed, hearing nothing but the muffled roar of water and her own heartbeat. Stays until her lungs burn, until her body overrides her mind and forces her up.

She surfaces gasping, hair plastered to her head, salt stinging her eyes. She's further out than she meant to be. The beach looks smaller from here, her blanket just a dot of turquoise against the sand. She lets the next wave carry her in some, then swims parallel to the shore for a bit, remembering something about riptides.

By the time she makes it back to shallow water, she's shaking from the cold and adrenaline and something that feels like being alive. She stumbles out of the waves, legs unsteady, and runs back to her blanket. Actually running like a kid would, unselfconscious.

She wraps the Florida blanket around her shoulders, sits there dripping, shivering, watching the sun continue its descent. Everything's gold and rose now—photographer's light, the kind that makes even ugly things beautiful. The cliffs look like they're on fire. The water has gone molten.

She should go home. Should go back to her castle on the hill, order Thai food, take a Valium (prescribed, legal, necessary), and sleep through whatever fresh hell tomorrow's news cycle will bring. Should, should, should.

Instead, she gets in her car and drives further north, chasing the sun as it slides towards the ocean. Route One curves inland here, through stretches of farmland and occasional houses that haven't yet been devoured by development. She doesn't know where she's going until she sees the turnoff for the 33, the road that winds up into the mountains towards Ojai.

The mountains. Teddy's cabin.

The thought arrives fully formed, like it was waiting for her to discover it. Teddy mentioned last week that he was in New York for the month, meeting with some new band he's excited about. The cabin would be empty.

She knows where he keeps the spare key because she'd been there once before, back in '78 when she was working on her solo album. He'd sent her up there for a few weeks to write, away from LA's distractions. "Sometimes you need to hear yourself think," he'd said.

She'd written three songs in a week, sitting on that back deck overlooking the mountains, including the bones of what would become "Nightshade.”

Then a year ago, when things with Johnny were at their worst—after the second arrest, the public fight at the Rainbow—Teddy had pulled her aside in a meeting.

"You remember the cabin?" he'd asked, his voice low.

"Yeah."

"The spare key's under the flower pot by the back door. Left side of the steps." He'd written the address on a piece of paper, pressed it into her hand. "If you need to run, run here.”

She'd kept the paper in her wallet for months, then transferred it to the glovebox when she changed purses. She'd never taken him up on it, too proud or too scared to admit she might need a place to run to.

She reaches over now, pops open the glovebox. It's a mess—registration papers, old parking tickets, three pairs of sunglasses, the owner's manual she's never read. The paper is stuck underneath everything, folded small, Teddy's handwriting faded but still legible. An address in Ojai, and underneath: Take the 33 north past town, left at the old oak with the split trunk, follow the dirt road to the end.

The road to Ojai is a twisty climb through golden hills. She takes the curves too fast, sending the Mercedes’ engine into overdrive, but there's something necessary in the controlled danger of it, the way she has to focus on the road instead of the thoughts in her head. The radio has gone to static, too far from LA to pick up the city stations, and she drives in the white noise until even that becomes unbearable and she snaps it off.

The sun is gone by the time she reaches the turnoff for Teddy's place, just the memory of light bleeding pink and orange across the sky. The cabin is another two miles up a dirt road that probably becomes treacherous in winter but is now just dusty and rough, making her car bounce and rattle over the ruts. She knows she's punishing her car, but it feels good to push something to its limits, to test the boundaries of what will hold and what will break.

The cabin appears through the trees like something from a fairytale, or a horror movie, depending on your disposition. It's modest by Teddy's standards, which means it's still nicer than anywhere she lived on her own before the band made it big. Cedar and glass, built in the '60s by some architect who wanted to commune with nature but also wanted good water pressure and central heating.

She parks beside the wooden steps that lead to the front door and sits still, looking at the dark windows. There's something final about being here, like she's crossed a line she can't uncross. She could still turn around, drive back to LA, face whatever's waiting for her there. But her body is already moving, getting out of the car, climbing the steps, finding the flower pot in the dying light.

The key is there, just like Teddy promised. But when she goes to put it in the lock, the door is already open. Not wide open, just unlatched, like someone forgot to lock it. Her hand freezes on the doorknob.

She should leave. Right now. Get back in the car, drive to the nearest town, call Teddy from a payphone. But there's something. A smell drifting through the gap. Cigarettes. Fresh cigarettes, not the stale smoke that clings to the walls from Teddy's cigars. Marlboros, specifically.

She pushes the door open slowly, steps into the familiar smell of cedar mixed with this new smoke. Someone's been here. Recently. There's evidence—a coffee mug on the counter that should be in the cupboard, still with dregs in the bottom. An ashtray with fresh butts. A jacket thrown over the back of the couch that definitely isn't Teddy's.

She picks up the jacket without thinking, brings it closer. Black leather, soft at the elbows, smelling of cigarettes and something else she can’t quite place. Her fingers tighten on the collar before she realizes what she's doing and drops it back onto the couch.

Her heart lurches, a skip-stutter that feels like fear but isn't. She should leave. Someone's been here, might still be here, and she's alone and no one knows where she is. But her feet carry her further into the room, drawn by something she doesn't want to name.

The kitchen is small but well-appointed. All Teddy. She opens cabinets, not sure what she's looking for. The third cabinet is Teddy's liquor stash. Even here, in his hideaway, he keeps the good stuff. Bottles lined up neatly—gin she doesn't recognize, rum from somewhere expensive, and there, in the back, a bottle of whiskey that makes her stop.

She picks it up, studying the label. Knowing Teddy, it cost more than her first car. Twenty-five year, maybe thirty. The kind of thing you save for celebrations or catastrophes. She sets it on the counter, finds a glass—crystal, because of course Teddy has crystal even in his cabin—and stands there looking at them. The bottle and the glass, waiting.

She unscrews the cap, and the smell hits her—smoke and vanilla and oak, something that makes her mouth water immediately. She hasn't had a drink in six months, not since the night she finally left Johnny for good and Simone poured everything in her house down the drain while she sat on the bathroom floor and cried.

Six months of sobriety. Not from everything—she's not that strong—but from alcohol at least. Six months of waking up and remembering the night before, of driving home clear-eyed, of not wondering what she said or who she said it to.

She pours half a glass, picks it up, holds it to the light. The color is beautiful, amber and gold, like expensive honey, like sunset through trees, like—

She brings it to her nose, breathes in. That smell, God. It would be so easy. Just this one glass, here where no one would know. Not a relapse, just a pause in her sobriety. A brief timeout from being good, from being careful, from being the version of herself that everyone needs her to be.

She lifts the glass to her mouth. Her hands are steady, which surprises her. She thought they'd shake. She thought her whole body would rebel against this, but instead there's just stillness.

The whiskey is against her lips when she hears the car door.

Something in her already knows. The same instinct that used to tell her when he'd entered a room before she saw him, when he was about to change a chord before his fingers moved. Her body recognizes the sound of his footsteps—their rhythm, the weight of them—before her mind can process. The Marlboros should have warned her. The specific way the coffee mug was left on the counter. The leather jacket. All of it screaming something her conscious mind refused to process.

The door opens and she turns, slowly, like maybe if she moves carefully enough this won't be what she thinks it is.

But it is.

Billy stands in the doorway, grocery bags in his arms, and for a moment she can't reconcile the versions of him—the Billy from her memory, frozen at twenty-nine—and this one, five years older and real and right there. His hair is shorter than he wore it then, more tidy. The flannel shirt and jeans make him look like someone's husband, someone's father, which of course he is. Has been. All this time while she's been stumbling through her life, he's been both of those things.

But his eyes…green even in this dying light, wide with shock. Those are exactly the same. The same eyes that used to find her across crowded rooms, across stages.

Neither of them speaks. Can't speak. The moment stretches out, sustaining past the point of comfort, past the point of possibility.

The grocery bags slip from his arms—eggs exploding, something glass breaking—but he doesn't move. Just stares at her like she's a hallucination.

The whiskey glass is still in her hand. She becomes hyperaware of it, this prop in a scene she hasn't rehearsed. Five years of not seeing him, not speaking to him, trying not to think about him, and here she is in his space (is it his space?) wearing nothing but a bikini and a sheer caftan that's still wet from the ocean.

"I—" She starts, but there's nowhere for that sentence to go.

He's still frozen, eggs seeping around his feet, and she watches him cycle through disbelief, shock, something that might be panic or might not be—but she won't name that other thing. Won't let herself hope it's that.

"Teddy said—" She tries again, her voice cracking. "He's in New York. I thought the cabin would be empty."

Billy blinks, seems to remember how to breathe. "I've been—Teddy lets me—" He stops, runs a hand through his hair in that gesture she knows so well it hurts. "How long have you been here?"

"Half an hour?" Who knows. It could have been minutes or days since she walked in and found evidence of him everywhere.

They're still standing too far apart, the kitchen island between them like a barricade. The broken eggs are starting to smell. The last of the sunlight makes everything golden-orange, making everything feel even more unreal.

"You were going to drink that." It's not a question. He's looking at the whiskey glass still in her hand.

"I was thinking about it."

"For how long?"

"Six months. Or five minutes. Depends how you count."

There’s something in his face, concern overtaking shock. "Daisy…"

Her name in his mouth. She'd forgotten what that sounded like. Or maybe she'd made herself forget.

"I wasn't going to. Or maybe I was. I don't know." The honesty surprises her. But then, she's too tired to lie, too rattled by his sudden presence to maintain any walls. "I should go," she says, not moving.

"You don't have to." Too quick, too urgent. He catches himself. "I mean, Teddy wouldn't want—you're welcome to—"

"You've been staying here."

"Weekends occasionally. Writing retreats." He laughs, but it's hollow. "I should clean this up," he says, gesturing at the eggs.

"I'll help."

"It’s okay—“

"Billy." His name after five years feels like breaking a spell. "Let me help."

They move at the same time, both heading for the paper towels, and nearly collide. His hand brushes her arm—just the back of his fingers against her elbow—and the touch is so brief, so incidental, that it shouldn't register at all.

But it does.

She pulls back and he does the same, and now they're standing too close. They just stand there, suspended, until he clears his throat.

"I'll get the mop," he says, voice rough.

She nods, doesn't trust herself to speak.

They clean in silence, Billy mopping while she picks glass shards from the floor, dropping them into the trash with tiny clinks. The domestic normalcy of it feels surreal. Them, cleaning a kitchen together, like this is something they do.

She watches his hands on the mop handle. They're the same hands that used to shape chords she could feel in her chest, that once held her face between them on his mother’s porch in Pittsburgh. Now they're wringing dirty water into a bucket. Practical. Controlled.

She looks away before he can catch her staring.

When the floor is clean, they stand on opposite sides of the kitchen, unsure what comes next.

"I should go," Daisy says.

"No—stay. I'll go. There's a motel down the road. The Pines, or something." He's already looking around, taking mental inventory. "I'll just grab my things and—"

"Billy." She says it firmly enough that he stops. "You don't have to run away. I'm not going to bite."

He looks at her. Something flickers across his face.

"This is your weekend," she continues. "I'm the one who barged in. I'll just—"

"When's the last time you ate?"

The question catches her off-guard. She has to think about it, which is answer enough.

"Breakfast?" she tries.

He's already moving, opening the refrigerator, surveying what survived the grocery bag catastrophe. "I was going to make pasta. Nothing fancy. Just..."

She should leave. Should get in her car and drive back down the mountain before this gets more complicated than it already is. Instead she hears herself say, "I’m actually starving."

He nods, not looking at her, pulling tomatoes from the counter, salvaging what he can.

“I can help. With dinner."

"You don't have to—"

"I want to.”

They move around each other carefully, Billy washing tomatoes while she grabs a cutting board. They work in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds the knife against the board, water boiling on the stove. It's almost peaceful, this choreography of not touching, not standing too close, not acknowledging the strangeness of being in the same room after five years of nothing.

"How's Julia?"

Billy's hands still for just a moment. "She's…good. She's nine now."

"Nine." Daisy tries to picture it. Billy’s daughter now a whole person with opinions and preferences.

"She plays soccer." He relaxes slightly. "Forward. She's fast—really fast. Her games are at seven on Saturday mornings, which is…" He shakes his head.

"Brutal."

"Yeah. Which means we're up at six, making sure she eats breakfast, has her shin guards, her cleats, the whole thing. And I'm the orange slice dad."

She can’t help but smile at the image. "The what?"

"I'm in charge of halftime snacks. So I'm out there every Friday night cutting oranges in the dark, packing them in this little cooler with ice packs because if they're not cold enough, the kids won't eat them." There's something in his voice, not complaint, but a kind of wonder at the specificity of it. "Five dozen orange slices every week."

She watches him while he talks, the way his whole face changes when he mentions Julia. His hands, which have been gripping the knife, relax against the counter. This is the version of Billy she never knew—the father, the Saturday morning coach, the man who cuts oranges in the dark.

She wants to hate it. Wants to resent this life he built without her. Instead she just feels the ache of it, bearing witness to the tenderness for a life she’s not a part of.

"She has this routine," he continues. "Lucky socks—they're purple with lightning bolts. Hair has to be in two braids, not one. And she does this thing before games where she touches both goalposts. Just runs up, taps them, runs back. Says it doesn't count if she doesn't do it."

"Superstitious."

"Seriously. Gets it from—" He stops himself.

"From you," Daisy finishes. "You used to tune your guitar three times before every show. Even if it was already perfect."

"No, I didn’t.”

"You did. Every single time. Said things felt off if you didn't."

He's quiet, stirring the pasta. "I didn't know anyone noticed."

Yeah, I noticed, she doesn't say.

"We do carpools," Billy’s rambling now, pouring pasta into the boiling water. "Four families, rotating schedule. Tuesdays and Thursdays I drive. Three girls in the back talking about... I don't even know. Some show with dragons. Trading stickers. Who has a crush on who.”

Daisy tries to picture it: Billy in a car full of nine-year-old girls, navigating the politics of elementary school romance.

"That's... really normal."

"Yeah." He says it like he's still surprised. "It is. Sometimes I'm sitting at a stoplight with someone's kid asking me to change the radio station and I think—" He stops, catches himself about to say too much.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just. It's different than what I thought I'd be doing."

The understatement of it sits between them. Different than touring. Different than the music. Different than what they'd both imagined once, maybe, in moments they'd never admitted to.

"But you're good at it," Daisy says. "The dad thing. I can tell."

Billy doesn't answer right away. "I wasn't always." He shrugs. "Had a lot of ground to make up."

She doesn't say anything. She understands it, in her way. They both had debts that could never quite be paid.

"Graham's actually about to do all that," Billy says, changing the subject. "The kid stuff. He's going to be a dad."

"Graham?"

"I know. You heard he got married last year? They just found out she's pregnant."

"I heard something about a teacher?" The information feels dusty, secondhand. "Through Warren, I think."

"Jeanie. Yeah. Kindergarten teacher." Billy's voice warms slightly.

"Do you like her?"

"Yeah, I do.” He pauses. "She's good for him. Doesn't care about any of the music stuff."

"I can't imagine that," Daisy says. "Being with someone who doesn't—" She trails off suddenly. Understand that part of you, she doesn't say.

Billy glances at her but doesn't push.

"I haven't seen Graham since..." She tries to remember. "God, '78 maybe?”

Billy looks up from the stove. "You saw Graham in '78?"

She realizes her slip a second too late. That Graham had tracked her down. That he'd kept it from Billy all these years.

"He stopped by my place when he was in New York.” She says it casually, but the damage is done.

Billy goes still. "He didn't tell me that."

"I asked him not to." She keeps her eyes on the cutting board.

The silence stretches. She can feel him wanting to ask more—why Graham came, what state she was in, what they talked about. She can feel herself not wanting to answer.

"He was worried about everyone that year," Billy says finally. Quietly.

The pasta bubbles over, hissing on the burner, and Billy quickly turns down the heat. They don't talk about what Graham might have seen that made him worry. They don't have to.

"Shit." Billy grabs a dish towel, mops up the starchy water that's escaped onto the stovetop. “Can you grab the garlic? It's in the bag that..." He gestures vaguely at the floor where the grocery disaster happened. "Probably rolled under something."

Daisy crouches down, peers under the kitchen island. Dust bunnies. No garlic.

"I don't see it."

"Teddy's got to have some."

They both start opening cabinets, hunting through Teddy's spice drawer. Billy finds ancient bay leaves and something labeled in French. Daisy discovers three types of paprika but no garlic.

"Knowing Teddy, he's been living on takeout and scotch up here," Billy says, checking a lower cabinet.

"Or has his prime-rib sent up from Lawry’s.”

Billy snorts. "Found it. Garlic powder. Probably from the '70s."

"It doesn't go bad, does it?"

"Only one way to find out."

He shakes some into the pan with the tomatoes, and the smell fills the kitchen, not quite right but familiar enough. Daisy watches him work, the easy competence of someone who's made this meal a hundred times. She wonders if this is what he makes for his family, if there's a whole routine she'll never know.

"Bowls or plates?" she asks, already opening the cabinet where she remembers them being.

"Bowls. Easier."

They could take them to the table, there's a perfectly good dining table ten feet away, but neither moves towards it. Instead, Billy leans against the counter and Daisy mirrors him on the opposite side, the island between them like a neutral zone.

"When's the last time you talked to Teddy?" Billy asks, twirling pasta onto his fork.

"Last week. He called about..." She pauses, not wanting to mention Johnny or any of that mess. "Just checking in. You?"

“Few days ago. He’s working with this young girl. Voice like Aretha, apparently. Wants me to help with lyrics. He's got a full horn section, strings, the works."

"Teddy and his orchestras."

"He's determined to prove real instruments still matter. Says anybody can push buttons but it takes musicians to make soul." Billy takes a bite. "And he's not wrong. Though he's fighting uphill. Everything's going electronic."

"I know. I was at the studio last month and barely recognized it. Everything's digital. These massive boards with a million buttons and nobody knows what half of them do."

Billy shakes his head. "I saw it. Looks like a spaceship cockpit."

"The future, apparently."

"If that's the future, I'm officially old."

"You're thirty-three."

"Thirty-four. Last month."

She'd forgotten his birthday. Or rather, she'd remembered it and then forced herself to forget it, to not think about where he was or what kind of cake Camila made him.

"Well, I'm thirty-one and Teddy keeps introducing me to these producers who were literal infants when The Doors were playing the Strip." She takes another bite. "One of them asked if I'd ever considered 'updating my sound.'"

"Let me guess, drum machines?"

"And synthesizers. And a vocoder, which as far as I can tell just makes you sound like a very sad computer."

Billy actually laughs at that, a real laugh, and the sound surprises them both. It's been so long since she heard him laugh that she'd forgotten the particular quality of it, how it starts quiet and builds.

"The engineer kept telling me they can 'fix everything in post,'" Daisy adds. "Fix what? If I wanted it to sound perfect, I'd just let the machines sing."

"Remember when we recorded 'Let Me Down Easy' in three takes?"

"Two. The third was just you being paranoid about the bridge."

"I was right about that bridge."

"You were wrong and you know it."

They're almost bantering now, falling into an old rhythm that feels dangerous in its familiarity. This is how they used to talk in the good times.

"He's trying though," Daisy continues. "Teddy. To keep up with it all. But you can tell his heart's not in the electronic stuff."

"His heart's still in 1975."

"Weren't we all better in 1975?"

It slips out before she can stop it, and the comfortable moment wobbles. Because 1975 was before—before the band broke, when everything was still possibility.

"Maybe," Billy says carefully. "Or maybe we just remember it that way."

She wants to argue, to say that no, it really was better when music required actual instruments and actual talent and you couldn't just program a hit in some computer. But that's not really what she means. What she means is they were better when they still believed in things, when the future felt exciting, when they could be in the same room without all this weight between them.

"Sometimes I feel like we’re so fucking old," Billy says. "Like rock and roll is this thing that happened for a while and now it's over and nobody told us."

"It's not over. It's just..."

"Different?"

"Diluted." She pushes her hair back, frustrated. "Everything sounds the same now. Like it was made in a factory."

"'Your album doesn't sound factory-made."

She looks at him, surprised he'd bring it up.

"Neither do the songs you're writing for other people," she deflects. "Even if they're not what you'd choose to write."

"How do you know what I'm writing?"

Heat creeps up her neck. "Teddy mentions things. Sometimes."

It's a lie and they both know it. She seeks out his songs, finds them in the credits of albums she'd never otherwise listen to, recognizes his chord progressions and the particular way he constructs a bridge. But admitting that would mean admitting she thinks about him, looks for signs of him in the world, and that's too much truth for this moment.

Billy doesn't call her on it though, just nods and takes another bite. "They're not really mine anyway. The songs. They belong to whoever's singing them."

"That's…sad."

"It just work." He shrugs. "Someone needs a breakup song, I write a breakup song. Someone needs an anthem about small-town America, I write about places I've never been."

"You've been to small towns."

"Driving through them passed out from the night before doesn't count.”

The casual reference to that past surprises her— the tours, the drugs, the blur of cities that all looked the same from the inside of a venue. She watches him realize what he's said, see him decide not to take it back.

"I really did love 'Fading Summer,'" she says after a beat. "Melanie's voice was perfect for it."

"Thanks. She was easy to write for."

"Because she has good range?"

"Because she knew exactly what she wanted. No ambiguity." Billy relaxes slightly. "Three verses about lost love, upbeat enough for radio, nothing that would make anyone uncomfortable."

"And you delivered exactly that." There's something in her tone—not quite criticism, not quite sadness. "You're good at that now. Delivering what people want."

"Being a professional, I guess.”

"Remember when we couldn't get 'No Words’ right for a week because you insisted the bridge needed to feel like, what did you call it? ‘The moment before you cry but you never actually do’?"

He looks surprised that she'd remember his words all this time. That she'd been listening that closely. "That was—"

"Unprofessional?"

"Different." He's not looking at her now, focusing on his pasta like it requires concentration.

"That was... something else."

"Yeah. It was."

They stand there, bowls empty, the kitchen feeling too small suddenly. Billy starts clearing, moving to the sink, and she follows, bringing her bowl. They move around each other carefully, Billy washing, Daisy drying, not talking about how domestic this is, how it feels both completely wrong and hauntingly familiar.

"I should probably..." Billy starts, as they finish the last dish.

"Could you start a fire?" The words come out rushed, desperate. She catches herself, tries to sound more casual. "Before you go, I mean. I can't ever get them to catch right."

It's a lie. She spent a month in a cabin in Tahoe after the second rehab, learned to build fires that could last all night.

Billy pauses, and she feels compelled to explain, to fill the silence before he can say no.

"I'm freezing. I spent all day driving up the coast, looking for somewhere I could be alone. Thirteen beaches before I found one empty." She wraps her arms around herself. "Didn't exactly plan to end up here. Or to still be in a bathing suit at..." she glances at the clock, "seven at night."

"Do you—" He stops himself from offering his clothes, she can see it happen.

"Just the fire," she says quickly. "Then you can go."

But they both hear what she's really saying: Don't go yet.

Billy nods, already moving towards the living room, and she follows, grabbing a throw blanket from the couch, wrapping it around herself.

She curls into the corner of the couch, watching him work. He's methodical about it, crumpling newspaper, arranging kindling in a pyramid. His sleeves are pushed up now, and she can see the muscles in his forearms flex as he works, the familiar map of veins on the backs of his hands.

She used to know those hands so well. Used to watch them move across the guitar and think about them moving across her skin. The fire catches, sending a flare of orange light across his face, and she has to close her eyes against the memory.

"Congratulations, by the way," he says without looking up from the kindling. "On the Grammy."

"Oh. Thanks." She pulls her feet up under her. "Missed out on the big one though."

"52nd Street was good."

"You watched?"

He's silent for a moment, adding a log. "Yeah."

He doesn't say more. Doesn't mention the silver dress, doesn't mention Johnny kissing her when they called her name, doesn't mention how they looked like everything the magazines said they were. But it's all there in the way he won't look at her.

"Your album was just as good. Just politics, you know how it is…”

"I do.” She smiles slightly. "You really listened to it?"

"Of course.”

"I mean really listened. Not just..." She waves her hand vaguely.

"How long did recording take?" he asks, a clear deflection.

"Two weeks tracking, one week overdubs."

"That's fast."

"The players were too good to need multiple takes. And I didn't want to overthink it." She pulls at a loose thread on the blanket. "Not like when we spent three days on one guitar solo."

"That was Graham being precious."

"That was all of us being afraid to finish." She looks at him directly. "This time I just wanted it done. Wanted to prove I could."

Billy gives her a look. "Studio B, right? Not A?"

She nods, surprised he'd know the difference. "Couldn't do A." Where The Six had recorded. Where they'd spent all those hours together.

"The piano sounds different. Not Teddy's Steinway."

"How could you possibly—"

"The tone. Warmer, woodier. More broken in."

"We found this old upright at Village. Beaten to hell, cigarette burns everywhere, half the keys stuck." She almost smiles at the memory. "Had to oil them between takes."

"That's what gives 'Last Call' that honky-tonk sound?"

"You really did listen.”

He shifts in his chair, leans forward to adjust a log with the poker. "Waddy played on some tracks?"

"Three of them. He mentioned working with you the month before."

Billy nods slowly. "Studio B. Yeah."

"Same studio, same players, same engineers..." Daisy lets that hang. "Five years in the same city, Billy. Same circles. How did we never—"

"Timing?" But his voice says it wasn't timing at all.

"Right." She watches him. "You booked mornings. I only record at night."

"You always did work better after midnight."

"And you need to be home for dinner."

They look at each other across the firelit room, both understanding exactly how deliberate their avoidance has been. The fire pops, breaking the moment, and Daisy turns back to watch the flames.

"Don's on my case about the next album,” she says. “Something to follow up the last one."

"That's good, right?"

"I haven't written anything. Six months of nothing."

"You're probably overthinking it."

"Maybe. Or maybe I only had one solo album in me. Maybe everything I had to say, I already said."

"I doubt that."

"How would you know?"

He smiles slightly, one corner of his mouth lifting. "Because you're never done having things to say. Even when you should stop talking, you don't."

It's almost teasing, almost like before. She allows herself a small smile.

"It's harder now. Writing sober. I can't access that... rawness anymore. Everything feels muted."

"That's bullshit."

She looks up, surprised by his sharpness. He's sitting forward now, elbows on his knees.

"You wrote your first album sober," he continues. Then catches himself, sits back again. "Didn't you?"

"How would you know when I wrote it?"

"Teddy mentioned it. Said you wrote most of it in New York. After..."

He doesn't finish. After Chicago. After everything ended.

"That was different. I was..." She trails off.

"What?"

She looks directly at him, holds his gaze. "I was angry."

The word hangs between them, loaded with meaning.

He holds her gaze for a long moment. "And now?”

"Now I'm just... tired." She turns back to watch the fire.

It's true. The anger that wrote the album has burned down to nothing. She's been running on empty for months now, going through the motions—meetings with the label, halfhearted attempts at writing, sitting at her piano for hours without playing a note. The exhaustion isn't physical; it's deeper than that. It's the tiredness that comes from performing yourself for so long you forget who you actually are.

Billy should have left by now. Should be halfway down the mountain, heading to that motel. The Pines, or whatever. Instead, he's still here, feeding logs to a fire that doesn't need them. They're alone in Teddy's cabin, miles from anyone, the darkness outside complete. She wonders what excuse he's building in his head for staying. Wonders if he needs one.

"Your hair's different," he says suddenly, like he's been holding it back.

She touches it self-consciously. "Yeah."

"It's almost..." He stops himself.

"Almost like it used to be." She finishes for him. "I cut it all off about a year and a half ago."

"Why?"

She doesn’t answer right away, weighing how much truth to give him. "Johnny liked it long. Said it photographed better." She lets out a hollow laugh. "So after one of our breakups I took kitchen scissors to it. Cut it to here." She gestures just above her shoulders. "Looked horrible. Had to get José Eber to fix it immediately.” She almost laughs at the memory. “Cost three hundred dollars to repair what I did in five minutes of rage."

Billy's jaw tightens at Johnny's name, but he keeps his voice neutral. "But you went back to him?"

"Yeah.” She doesn’t offer anything more.

"How many times did you two break up?”

She can feel him trying to keep his tone casual, but there's something underneath it, that same protective intensity he used to have when she'd show up to rehearsal clearly hungover or high.

"I don't know. Five? Six?" She watches the fire. "It's hard to keep track. We were always breaking up or getting back together. Sometimes both in the same day."

"Sounds super healthy."

"It was what it was." She knows he wants to know more, can feel the questions building behind his neutral expression. "What do you want to know, Billy? You've clearly been following us.”

"I didn't follow anything. It was just... hard to miss."

"Hard to miss?"

"Come on. Every magazine, every gossip column."

"Since when do you read gossip columns?"

"I don't. But when it's on every newsstand..." He shrugs, like it’s casual. "That Rolling Stone cover was everywhere."

"Which one? We were on the cover twice."

"You know which one."

She does know. The second one. Her and Johnny under the sheets, the matching tattoos, champagne bottles scattered on the nightstand. The headline: "Love in Ruins."

"That was quite a photo," Billy says, not quite looking at her.

"It was meant to be provocative. Artistic.”

"Artistic." He lets out a disbelieving laugh. "That's what you’re going with?”

"What would you call it?"

"I don't know, Daisy. Trashy?"

"Trashy?" She almost laughs.

"Come on. You're in bed with him, practically—" He stops, jaw clenching. "Everyone could see everything."

"Not everything. The sheet was strategically placed."

“Seriously?”

"What? Too much for your suburban sensibilities?" She sits up straighter. "Sorry if it disturbed your Sunday morning coffee."

Billy shakes his head.

"It was rock and roll, Billy. That's what we do. What we did." She corrects herself. "While you were writing jingles."

"I don't write jingles."

"Sorry. Writing deeply meaningful songs about teenage heartbreak."

They glare at each other across the room, years of unspoken resentment suddenly crackling between them. Billy looks away first.

"You two were inescapable for a while," he says finally, his voice controlled but bitter. "Every magazine, every party photo.”

"That bothered you, huh?" She's actually smirking now, like she's caught him at something.

"Reading about your 'epic romance' in every magazine? Yeah, Daisy. It bothered me."

The admission hangs there for a second before he clears his throat, looks away. "I just mean, it was…constant. Like being forced to watch something on repeat."

"You could have looked away."

"Could I? The guy was shameless about it. About you." He's trying to sound detached now. "Pulling you onstage during his sets, that interview where he went on about your... flexibility."

"You read that interview?"

"Everyone read that interview. He made sure of it." Billy's grip tightens on the armrest. "He treated you like some kind of trophy."

"And that's supposed to be a bad thing?" Her tone is defensive now. "Someone being proud to be with me?"

Billy looks at her, surprised by the edge in her voice.

She's quiet, deciding how much to explain. "He told everyone he'd been pursuing me for years. That I was the impossible get. It wasn't entirely true, but I let him tell it."

"Why?"

"Because for once, I got to be the one who was hard to get. The one someone else was desperate for." She picks at the blanket, not looking at him. "He had flowers delivered every day for a month after we met. Different ones each time, like he had a florist on retainer. Chartered a plane to Paris for the day because I mentioned I wanted a croissant. For my birthday, he set up an entire carnival in his backyard. Ferris wheel, cotton candy machines…”

"That sounds—"

"Excessive? Insane?" She smiles. "It was.”

"And you liked that? The excess?"

"I liked being worth the excess." She holds Billy's gaze. "He chose me. Actively. Loudly. Every single day."

The implication lands. She watches him receive it.

Billy's quiet for a moment, poking at the fire. Then he lets out a frustrated breath. "Okay, I'm just going to say it—I can't stand the guy."

Daisy actually laughs at that. "No shit."

"I mean it. Everything about him. The way he holds a microphone like he's jerking it off. That stupid tongue thing he does."

"The tongue thing?" She's trying not to smile.

"You know what I mean. Every photo." He mimics it briefly, tongue out, then looks disgusted with himself. "And the guy's a walking cliche. Leather pants, the motorcycle, bar fights—"

"You got in plenty of bar fights back in the day."

"Not for publicity." He turns to look at her. "And I'm sorry, but—Johnny Fox. It sounds like a cartoon character."

"His real name is John Kowalski."

Billy snorts. "Was it the danger thing? The whole bad boy—"

"Billy." She's giving him a look—eyebrow raised, the corner of her mouth twitching. He's not even trying to hide it.

“What did you even talk about?”

“Normal things. Tours, parties, music.”

"His music?" Billy's voice gets sharper. "Did you sit around analyzing the deep meaning of 'Hot City Nights'? Really dig into the poetry of 'yeah yeah yeah, she's my kind of crazy'?"

"Fuck you."

“I’m serious. The guy doesn't even play an instrument. His band's songs all sound the same. Three chords and a scream."

"Now you're a music critic?"

“I’m an actual musician." He's worked up now, leaning forward, and she can see the vein in his neck that only appears when he's really angry. She used to watch for it in rehearsals, a barometer of how close he was to losing it. "He couldn't write a melody if you put a gun to his head."

She's smiling now. "Tell me how you really feel."

"I'm serious. Johnny Fox is everything wrong with rock right now. All image, no substance."

"He sells out arenas.”

"So does Liberace."

"You did not just compare Johnny to Liberace."

"At least Liberace can play piano."

She's laughing now. Hard. For the first time tonight, and when it fades there's a moment where they're just looking at each other, something lighter between them.

“You wanna know the truth? He was fun," Daisy says simply. "Wild. Free. Everything felt like an adventure."

"An adventure that wrecked you."

She tenses but continues. "Not at first. At first it was just... loud. Bright. He'd show up at 2 AM with his bike and we'd ride to the beach. No plan, no guilt, no consequences."

"And you wanted that?"

“After two years of feeling nothing? Yeah. I wanted to feel everything, all at once, turned up to eleven.”

"So when did it change? Because that fight outside the Rainbow, that didn't look fun. That looked like—" He stops himself, but it's too late.

"Wow." Daisy stares at him. "You really were paying attention."

Billy doesn't deny it, just averts his eyes. "It was hard not to be worried. Every week there was some new drama.”

"You were worried about me?" The question comes out softer than she intended.

He looks at her directly. "Of course I was worried about you."

That gives her pause. She pulls the blanket tighter, suddenly feeling exposed. "The Rainbow thing... I don't even remember what that was about. His ex, I think? We were both pretty gone. Threw glasses at each other in the parking lot."

"Jesus, Daisy."

"That was actually one of the tamer nights." She watches the fire. "The worst part wasn't the public fights. It was what happened in private."

"What do you mean?"

"He liked me best when I was just fucked up enough. Not too much—couldn't perform. Not too little—too boring." She picks at the blanket thread. "He'd leave bottles around. Coke on the bathroom counter. Then act supportive about my sobriety."

"That's sick."

"Teddy tried to warn me.”

"Teddy was worried. He called me once—" Billy stops.

"He called you? About me?”

"Just to see if I'd somehow heard from you. You'd been... avoiding him, apparently."

Teddy called Billy. She lets that sink in. That's not a casual phone call. That's a last resort.

"Johnny didn't like me spending time with Teddy. Or Simone." Her voice gets quieter. "Simone tried so hard. Showed up at his house once, tried to physically drag me out. I screamed at her. Told her to leave me alone.”

The shame of it still fresh, even now. Simone has saved her life more times than she can count. And Daisy repaid her by calling her jealous and bitter, by choosing Johnny over the only person who'd never given up on her.

"When was this?"

"Last year. Right before the worst of it. Right before—" She cuts off suddenly.

"Before the OD?"

She stops breathing. "How do you know about that?"

Billy's silent for a long moment, clearly debating how much to reveal.

"Billy. How did you know? It wasn't in the papers. We kept it out."

"I know."

"So how—" She stops, pieces clicking together. "Teddy?"

"No." He's gripping the armrest now. "It was... Camila."

"Camila?"

"I was with Julia at the park. Saturday morning in May. Felt wrong all morning. Like something was off." He's looking at the fire, not at her. "When I got home, Camila was waiting on the porch."

Daisy pulls her knees up tighter, making herself smaller.

"She had this look—" He stops, swallows. "She just said 'You need to call Teddy. Now.'"

"She knew?”

"She knew something. I actually never found out who called… but the way she said it, I knew it was about you." His voice is rough.

"What did she say?"

"Just that you'd... that something had happened at Johnny's house. By the pool." He finally looks at her. "That you were alive. That's the word she used. 'Alive.' Not 'okay' or 'fine.' Alive."

Daisy closes her eyes. The memory of that morning is still fractured—the pool lights underwater, Johnny's face when he found her, the sirens.

"I called Teddy from the kitchen. Asked if I should come to the hospital."

"Teddy didn't tell me."

"He told me not to come." Billy's voice is flat. "Said it wouldn't be appropriate. That Johnny was there, your people were there. That I'd just make things complicated."

"He was right."

"Was he?" Billy stands abruptly, paces to the window. "Because I sat in my car for three hours that day. In the hospital parking garage.”

Daisy's eyes snap to him. "What?"

"I drove there anyway. Sat in the parking structure. Couldn't make myself leave." He turns back to her. "Kept thinking if I could just see you, know you were—" He stops. "But Teddy was right. What would I have said? 'Hi, I know we haven't talked in years but I heard you almost died?'"

"Billy—"

"You want to know the truth? Camila knew I'd go. She watched me grab my keys and didn't say a word. Just went inside and started making Julia lunch."

"I didn't know," Daisy says quietly.

"Why would you? I never went in. Just sat there until visiting hours ended."

She thinks about what she must have looked like that day. The tubes, the bruises, the fluorescent lights. Johnny crying in the hallway, making it about himself. Simone sleeping in the chair by her bed, refusing to leave.

Billy was in the parking lot. Billy was right there, and she didn't know.

Would it have mattered? Would it have changed anything?

"I wouldn’t have wanted you to see me like that. Not again."

"Again." The word feels heavy. "Like Miami."

She nods, unable to speak. Miami. Billy finding her unconscious in the hotel bathroom, the first person she saw when she opened her eyes.

"That was different," Billy says. "In Miami, I could help. This time I just sat in my car like…”

"If it was reversed…would you have wanted me showing up? Uninvited? In the middle of your life?"

"Yes." The answer comes without hesitation. She wasn't expecting that. "If I almost died, I would have wanted you there. I wouldn't have cared about the rest of it.”

She doesn't know what to do with that. With the certainty in his voice. With what it means.

“That’s easy to say now,” she says, hearing the edge in her voice. “When it’s hypothetical.”

“It’s not hypothetical. You did almost die.”

“And you sat in a parking lot.” She’s not trying to be cruel, but the words come out sharp anyway. “For three hours. And then you went home.”

Billy flinches. "You just said you didn't want me there."

"I—" She struggles for words. "It's not about the hospital, Billy. It's about you. It's about what you always do."

"What do I always do?"

"Get close." The words come out bitter. "You get close and then you leave. You write me songs but you don't say the words. You sit in parking lots but you don't come in. You—" She's on her feet now, pacing. "You're always almost there. Always just out of reach.”

She watches him absorb it—the accusation, the pattern she's naming.

"You've had five years," she continues, quieter now. "Five years to actually show up. And you didn't."

"You didn't either."

“I wrote you a song, Billy. I wrote you a whole fucking album.” The words hang in the air between them. He’s staring at the fire, not at her. "But you already knew that."

He doesn't deny it. Doesn't say anything. Just sits there, caught.

"Twenty-two weeks on the charts." Her voice is flat. “The Grammy. Every radio station in America playing it on a loop. And you—what? Just pretended you didn't hear it?"

"I heard it."

"I put everything into that song. Everything I felt, everything I couldn't say to your face. And I sent it out into the world hoping—" She stops. Swallows. "I don't know. That you'd hear it and call? That you'd show up at my door?"

"Daisy—"

"You never did anything. You just let me—" She shakes her head in frustration. “At least tell me one thing, Billy." She meets his eyes, quoting her own lyrics back at him. "Do you lose your way completely when you hear me in this town?"

He almost smiles. "You want to know if it worked? If the song did what you wanted it to do?"

“Did it?”

“You got your wish, Daisy.” The almost-smile disappears. "I was lost. I'm still lost."

The words surprise her enough that she doesn't have a response.

"Every time it came on the radio—and it was fucking everywhere for a while—I had to pretend I was fine." His jaw is tight. "In the car with Camila sitting a foot away. Walking through the mall with Julia. I'd hear your voice come through the speakers and I'd have to just…stand there. Keep my face normal. Act like it wasn't ripping me apart."

She'd written the song hoping it would do exactly this. Follow him around, seep into his life, make him think of her whether he wanted to or not. She'd wanted to be inescapable. Wanted to crawl into his ordinary life and remind him of what he'd walked away from.

And now he's telling her it worked. She waits for the satisfaction. The vindication. Something that feels like winning.

It doesn't come.

"It was like you were haunting me. And I couldn't let anyone see." He looks at her. "I heard it everywhere for months. And every time, I had to pretend it was nothing. Pretend you were nothing."

She should say something. Good. You deserved it. I hope it hurt. She'd spent years hoping for exactly this, but now that she has it, she doesn't know what to do with it.

“You think I don’t know what I walked away from? You think I don’t—” He stops himself, seems to be waging some internal battle.

“What?” Daisy pushes. “You don’t what?”

“You think I don’t regret it? Every single day? You think I don’t hear your voice and feel like I can’t breathe?”

Her heart is hammering now. “Then why? Why did you leave?”

“Because you told me to,” he says simply. Holds her gaze. “You looked at me. On that stage. You told me to go.”

Go. She'd meant it as a gift. A release. She hadn't known he'd take it as a door closing forever.

“I meant go back to your family. Fix yourself. I didn’t mean—” She stops, frustrated. “I didn’t mean disappear from my life completely.”

"That's not what it sounded like, Daisy.” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Warren said you didn't want to hear from me."

“Because I was trying to survive.” Her voice rises. “I was trying to get clean, to figure out who I was without the band, without—” She stops before saying without you. “I needed space to do that. But I thought… I don’t know what I thought. That eventually, once I was okay, once you’d sorted things with Camila that maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

She can’t say it. Can’t admit that for months after Chicago, she’d jumped every time the phone rang, thinking it might be him. That she’d kept her New York number even when she moved back to LA, just in case he tried to reach her there.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she says finally.

"Doesn't matter?" He laughs, but there's nothing funny about it. "You think I'm not still living it? Every day?"

She doesn't answer.

“You wrote that song. You put it out there for the whole world to hear. So what was it, really? Revenge?”

He's standing now, she realizes. At some point he got up and started pacing, and now he's stopped directly in front of her, close enough that she has to lean her head back to look at him. Close enough that if she reached out, she could touch his hip, curl her fingers into his belt loop, pull him down to her.

She doesn't. But she thinks it, and from the way his breathing changes, she wonders if he thought it too.

“I wanted you to know that I knew. That I wasn’t stupid or naive about what happened between us. I wanted you to know that I understood exactly what I was to you.”

"And what was that, Daisy?" There's an edge to it. Like he's daring her to say it out loud.

She stands. He doesn't step back, and she doesn't expect him to. They've always been like this, drawn together even when they're fighting. She won’t let him look away.

"Your favorite mistake."

She's said it a million times in her head. Written it down, sang it to thousands of strangers. But saying it to his face, watching it land, is something else.

"No."

"No?"

"You were never my mistake." The certainty in his voice throws her. "A mistake is something you regret doing. I never—I never acted. That's the part I regret."

She stares at him.

"I regret going home. I regret being good. I regret every single time I wanted to touch you and I didn't." He shakes his head. "You want to know what my mistake was? My mistake was not making you my mistake."

Her heart is pounding. She can feel it in her throat. The words don't fit into the story she's been telling herself for five years. They're rearranging something.

“Then what am I, Billy?”

He's quiet for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is different. Softer. "You're just…my favorite." He says it simply. Like it's obvious. "You got that part right.”

She frowns, not following. "Favorite what?"

"Everything.” He says it like it's a secret he's been keeping too long. "You're my favorite everything."

She doesn't know what her face is doing. Can't control it. Just stands there as a warmth spreads through her. The place where she's kept every unfinished hope, every 3 AM fantasy, every version of this moment she'd imagined and then shoved away because imagining it hurt too much.

"Billy…" His name comes out strange.

He doesn't say anything. Just watches her, like he's done hiding and now he's just waiting to see what she'll do with the truth.

She becomes aware of things in pieces. How close he's standing. The way his chest rises and falls, not quite steady. She looks at his mouth, and she can't look away.

He notices. She watches him notice—the way his lips part slightly, the way his whole body goes still.

She doesn't know who moves first.

One moment there's space between them, and the next there isn't. His mouth is on hers, or hers is on his, and it doesn't matter because they're the same thing now, the same collision. Two people who've been holding back for so long that letting go feels like freefall. Her hands are in his hair and she's pulling him closer, closer, like she could climb inside him if she tried hard enough, like the only thing that matters is eliminating every inch of distance between them.

She's thought about this so many times. In hotels, in the back of tour buses, in the darkness of her bedroom with someone else's hands on her. But those fantasies were always hazy, half-formed things. She doesn't remember what he tasted like in Chicago. Doesn't remember if it felt like this.

This, she'll remember. Every detail sharp and clear and unmistakably real.

Her back hits the bookshelf and something falls. She hears it distantly, a thud, maybe a book, maybe a picture frame, but Billy's hands are in her hair and she's pulling at his shirt and nothing else registers. His fingers thread through her curls, not gentle, and she gasps into his mouth and he swallows the sound. She can feel him hard against her hip through his jeans, and the knowledge of it—that he's been wanting this too, this whole time—makes her dizzy.

"Fuck," he breathes against her mouth.

The caftan is still slightly wet from the swim, and he shoves it up frantically. His hands are rough and warm on her thighs and she shivers—she's been cold for hours, since the ocean, but she's not cold now. She's burning from the inside out.

She's already working his belt, the leather stiff and uncooperative until it finally gives. The button of his jeans, then the zipper, and when she gets her hand around him he makes a sound against her throat that she feels more than hears—a groan that vibrates through her skin and settles somewhere low in her belly.

"Daisy." He says her name like a warning. His hips jerk into her grip and his teeth graze her collarbone and she thinks, good, yes, lose control, I want to watch you lose it.

They don't make it to the couch. Don't make it anywhere.

Her legs give out or his do and then they're going down, his arm catching her waist, and she pulls him with her. The rug bunches under her back and the floor is hard beneath it and she doesn't care. She hooks her fingers into his belt loops and drags him closer, on top of her, his weight pressing her down exactly where she wants it.

His jeans are only pushed down far enough. Her bikini bottom pulled aside, the fabric cutting into her hip. There's nothing graceful about it—just his hand between them, positioning himself, and her hitch of breath, and then he's pushing into her and her back arches off the floor and her head tips back and—

His hand is there. Cradling her skull before it can hit the hardwood.

Even now. Even completely gone, he's protecting her from something.

She opens her eyes and finds him watching her, his face inches away, his expression something close to reverent. For a second neither of them moves. He's inside her and they're both breathing hard and the fire is crackling somewhere behind them and this is really happening. After all this time. After everything.

Then she hooks her leg around his hip and pulls him deeper, and whatever thread was holding him snaps.

He gives her what she's asking for. What they've both been asking for since 1975, since the first time they stood in a studio and the air went electric between them. His hips drive into hers and she rises to meet him, matching his rhythm, her nails digging into his back through his shirt because neither of them even got fully undressed, couldn't wait, couldn't stop long enough to do this properly.

The coffee table screeches across the floor—one of his feet must be braced against it, shoving it with each thrust. Right now she just hears it distantly, background noise to the sound of their breathing, to the small desperate sounds she's making that she couldn't stop if she tried.

"More," she gasps, and his forehead drops to her shoulder and his hips snap forward harder and it's not careful, it’s not pretty, it's two people trying to make up for five years in five minutes.

She can feel the rug bunching beneath her, the burn across her shoulder blades where her caftan isn’t covering, skin against wool against hardwood. She doesn't care. She'd let him wreck her right through the floor at this point.

His breathing is ragged against her neck, his whole body taut, and she can tell he's close. Can feel it in the way he's losing the rhythm, the way his hand tightens in her hair. She pulls him closer, her heel pressing into the back of his thigh, and says his name—just once, just "Billy"—and feels him shatter.

He buries his face in her neck and groans and she holds on as he shudders through it, his weight pressing her down, his heart pounding against her chest hard enough that she can feel it against her body. And somewhere in the middle of it she follows him over, the wave catching her by surprise, cresting and crashing before she can brace for it.

Then stillness.

They're lying on the floor of Teddy’s cabin, half-dressed, breathing like they've just walked off a stage. Her legs are trembling faintly, aftershocks she can't control. Billy is still on top of her, his face still pressed to her neck.

After a long moment, he rolls off. Lands on his back beside her, one arm thrown over his face. His shirt is rucked up, jeans still undone, his chest heaving. She doesn't look much better—caftan bunched around her waist, bikini bottom twisted, her hair a mess of curls spread across the rug.

"Shit," he says.

Here it comes, she thinks. The guilt. The "what did we just do." The part where he starts reassembling himself into the man who goes home to his wife, his daughter, his responsible life.

She stares at the ceiling, waiting for it, bracing.

"That's not—"

"No." She holds up a hand without looking at him. "Give me a minute."

"I just—"

"I know what you 'just.' Give me one fucking minute before your guilt kicks in and ruins this."

"I wasn't going to—" Billy starts. "I thought—I thought we’d at least make it to a bed."

She turns her head. He's not looking tortured or guilty. He's looking at the ceiling with an expression of mild disbelief, like he can't quite believe what just happened.

"What?"

"The bed is right there.” He gestures at the guestroom. “I didn't make it thirty feet."

The laugh escapes before she can stop it. "That's what you're thinking about right now?"

"I'm thinking about a lot of things. That's one of them." He keeps his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Also, the fact that I lasted about two minutes."

"Ninety seconds. Generously."

"Shit."

"I'm being kind. It might have been less."

He groans, pulls his jeans back up without bothering with the belt. She adjusts her bikini back into place, tugs the caftan down over her hips.

"This is not how I imagined it going."

She huffs a disbelieving laugh. "Bullshit."

He turns his head. "Bullshit?"

"In all those years, you never once imagined just... losing it completely? Taking me hard and fast on the floor?"

His mouth twitches. Caught.

"That's what I thought."

"I thought I'd have more…restraint. Make it good."

"What part of that wasn't good?" She shifts onto her side, looking at him. "Do you know what that does to me, knowing that you couldn't wait? That you wanted me so badly you couldn't even get my clothes off properly?"

He turns, meets her eyes.

"You shoved my bathing suit aside. Didn't even take it off. You just—moved it out of the way and went for it." She grins. "The coffee table's four feet from where it started. Something definitely fell off that bookshelf." She points in that general direction. "You held my head so I wouldn't get a concussion while absolutely railing me."

"Jesus, Daisy." A deep blush spreads across his cheeks, and she can't tell if he's embarrassed or turned on or both.

She settles back against the rug, thoroughly pleased with herself. She always did like riling him up.

"We were always going to end up here. Or somewhere like here. You know that. Some floor, some wall, some back seat. We were never going to be the people who talked about it first and made a mature decision. This—this is who we are.”

He's quiet, processing. Then: "Teddy can never know."

"About the ninety seconds or the table?"

"Any of it. All of it. He can never know we were here."

"We'll blame it on raccoons."

"Raccoons."

"Aggressive raccoons. Moved the furniture, scratched the floors. Happens all the time."

He laughs. A real laugh.

"Come on.” She stretches, feeling every place her body made contact with the floor. "That was hot. And you know it."

He turns his head, and he's smiling at her now. Not the guarded half-smile she's used to, but a real one. "Yeah," he says, a little breathlessly. "It was."

They both look back at the ceiling. The fire crackles.

"Hey." His voice is gentler now. More earnest. "You okay?"

She has to think about it. Is she okay? Her shoulders sting. Her legs are still shaky. There's a pleasant ache between her thighs and a less pleasant one in her hip where the bikini cut in. But okay?

"Yeah," she says truthfully. "You?"

He doesn't answer right away. She watches his profile in the firelight—the line of his jaw, the little frown between his brows. She knows what's happening. Knows his mind is reaching past this room, past these walls, to the life waiting for him back in LA.

She doesn't rush him. Doesn't fill the silence. Just lets him sit with it.

"Yeah," he says finally. Quiet but certain. "I am."

His hand finds hers on the rug between them, fingers interlacing. It's such a simple thing. They just fucked on the floor like the world was ending, and now he's holding her hand like it means something. Like she means something.

"Okay," she says softly.

They lie there for a while. She doesn't know how long. His thumb traces slow circles on the back of her hand, and she lets herself feel just that—the small, repetitive motion, the roughness of his calluses.

She's waiting, she realizes. Any second now, Billy's going to sit up and run a hand through his hair and say something like we shouldn't have or I need to think or worse—Camila's name—making all of this real in a way it doesn't feel yet.

She knows him. Knows the guilt is coming. It always does with Billy, that ruthless conscience rising up to ruin things just when they're starting to feel possible. She'd watched it happen a hundred times before. All those years of him choosing to be good.

So she waits. Focuses on the wooden beams above her. Keeps her breathing steady so he won't know she's bracing for impact.

But the seconds keep passing, and he doesn't pull away. Doesn't start talking about what they've done. Just lies there with her hand in his, breathing.

"I missed you." He says it quietly, almost to himself. Not an opening to a harder conversation. Just a fact, offered up and left there.

It catches her off guard. "Yeah?"

"Every day." He's looking at the ceiling, not at her. "I know that's... I know I'm not supposed to say that. But it's true."

She doesn't say it back. Doesn't need to. He knows.

She feels herself relax, just slightly. He's not spiraling. He's not going to ruin this with guilt, at least not tonight. And maybe that should worry her, the ease of it, how readily he's letting himself have this. But she doesn't want to examine it too closely. Doesn't want to ask questions that might make him start asking them too.

The fire has mostly burned down to embers now. She shivers and Billy notices immediately.

"Cold?"

"Little bit."

He releases her hand and she feels the loss of it instantly, but then he's sitting up, fingers moving to his shirt buttons. She watches him undo them slowly, one by one, shrug the flannel off his shoulders. He holds it out to her.

She lets herself look. All that time together and she'd barely seen him shirtless outside of quick changes backstage. Now she takes him in. He's in better shape than she expected, more defined through the shoulders and chest than the leanness she remembers from tour.

He holds the shirt out to her and she takes it, pulling the caftan over her head in one motion, leaving her in her black bikini.

She can feel him watching as she slides her arms into the sleeves. The fabric is soft, still warm from his body. She buttons it slowly—just the middle three, enough to hold it closed—and rolls the cuffs past her wrists.

When she looks up, he's still watching.

"What?"

"Nothing." But he doesn't look away. "You look good in my shirt."

"I know." She smirks. "I look good in most things.”

"Humble as ever." But he’s smiling too.

Something about wearing his shirt makes her restless. Or maybe it's just her—the inability to hold still when things feel too big, the need to move so she doesn't have to sit with anything too long.

She gets to her feet. Her legs are unsteady, and she likes that, the physical evidence of what just happened.

"Where are you going?" His voice is lazy, curious.

"Exploring." She glances back at him, still sitting on the floor in the half-dark.

Billy leans back on his hands, watching her move through the room. He doesn't try to follow. Just lets her go, like he understands she needs to move, needs to do something with her body that isn't lying still and waiting for the night to end.

She's grateful for that. For being known in this specific way.

**********

She finds the bathroom down the hall, closes the door behind her, takes inventory in the mirror. Her hair’s a mess, lips swollen, a flush still fading from her chest. She cleans herself up as best she can. Splashes water on her face, finger-combs the worst tangles from her hair, wipes the day old mascara from under her eyes.

When she comes back out, the living room is empty. She can hear water running in the kitchen, the clink of glasses.

She moves through the cabin slowly, letting herself look. The layout is familiar but the details are hazy. It's been years since she was here, and her memory of that time isn't exactly reliable. New things she doesn't recognize mixed with others that trigger sudden, sharp memories. A lamp with a stained-glass shade. She remembers reading by that lamp for hours, the glow of it the only light in the room.

The walls are covered with photographs. She drifts towards them, studying faces. A young Teddy standing next to Diana Ross. Another of him with Ray Charles. Sinatra, with his hand on Teddy's shoulder.

"Wow," she murmurs. She forgets sometimes, how deep Teddy's history runs. How many lives he's moved through before she ever knew him.

There are others she doesn't recognize—musicians, maybe, from before her time. A woman in a silver dress who could be anyone. Faces from another era, all in black and white.

And then one that makes her pause. Teddy in a recording studio, headphones around his neck, pointing at something. She leans closer and realizes it's the old Studio A at Sound City, before the renovation. Before everything.

"He's got that photo in his office too," Billy says, coming back with two glasses of water. He hands her one. "Different angle."

"I've never seen him this young." Teddy in the photo can't be more than thirty. Hungry-looking, none of the paternal softness he'd developed by the time she knew him. "He looks like he'd eat you alive."

"He probably did. Eat people alive, I mean." Billy takes a sip of water. "There are stories from back then. Before he mellowed out."

"Teddy? Mellowed out?" She raises an eyebrow. "The man once made me re-record a single line forty-seven times because I wasn't 'finding the truth of it.'"

"That's the mellowed version."

She laughs, moves along the wall. More photos. Teddy with Elton John. Teddy with—

"Is that us?"

Billy comes up behind her, not touching but close. The photo is small, hidden behind a floor lamp. The Six, backstage somewhere—she can't tell where. They're all there: Warren shirtless, Karen with a cigarette, Eddie making some kind of face at the camera, Graham with his arm around Billy. And her, slightly apart from the group, looking at…

Looking at Billy, she realizes now. She was looking at Billy, and someone caught it on camera, and Teddy framed it and hung it in his cabin.

"I never noticed this before," Billy says.

"Me neither."

They stand there for a moment, looking at their younger selves. She thinks about that time. The chaos, the exhilaration, the way everything felt like it was building towards something enormous. They didn't know it was building towards an ending too.

"We were so young," she says.

"You were young."

"And you were what, over the hill at twenty-eight?"

He cracks a smile. "Kind of. Yeah.”

She huffs a small laugh. "I thought you hated me. That whole tour. You were so—" She searches for the word. "Angry."

"I didn't hate you."

"I know." She looks back at the photo. "Took me a while to figure that out.”

She keeps moving, not wanting to linger too long on the photo. On what it means that Teddy kept it.

She stops at another shelf filled with various nicknacks. A snow globe from Paris. A chess piece, just the white queen. A small jade elephant, a rusted harmonica, an ashtray shaped like a hand.

"This place is like a museum," she says. “It's so different from his LA house."

“He told me once that the cabin is where he keeps his memories. The house is where he keeps his image." Billy shrugs. "Something like that. It was late, we'd been up all night.”

She thinks about that. The idea of having two selves, a public one and a private one. A version for the world and a version that's true. She understands it more than she'd like to admit.

She picks up the jade elephant. Rubs her thumb over the smooth stone. "He ever tell you the stories behind any of this stuff?"

"Some of them. The elephant's from Thailand, I think. Some trip in the sixties. The harmonica belonged to someone. I forget who. Little Walter, maybe?" Billy crosses to where she's standing, picks up the snow globe. "This one he got in Paris with his first wife. Before she left him for a jazz drummer."

"Teddy was married?"

"Twice. Briefly, both times." He shakes the snow globe, watches the fake snow settle over a tiny Eiffel Tower. "He says he's not built for it. Marriage.”

There's something in his voice when he says it. She doesn't push.

She moves on to the bookshelf, trails her fingers along the bindings. Teddy's taste in books is as eclectic as everything else. Philosophy next to pulp fiction, music theory next to self-help, a whole shelf of what looks like first editions.

"Has Teddy actually read Ulysses?" she asks, pulling the copy from the shelf. Pristine condition.

"Has anyone actually read Ulysses?"

"I have."

He looks at her. "You have not."

"I have. Three months of my life I'll never get back, but I got through it."

"Why?"

"Because someone told me I couldn't." She shrugs. "That's usually enough."

"Of course it is."

She smacks him with the book lightly and slides it back onto the shelf. Keeps browsing. Baldwin and Hughes. Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

And then—

A slim paperback, cracked and faded. She'd know it anywhere. She pulls it from the shelf.

The Awakening.

"Huh." She turns it over in her hands. The cover is water-stained, one corner curled. "Didn't think this was Teddy's speed."

Billy glances over her shoulder, laughs. "Definitely not. Probably belonged to Yasmine.” He leans against the bookshelf. "I actually read that one. A couple years ago."

She looks up, surprised. "You read The Awakening?"

"I was up here for a weekend, couldn't sleep. Found it on the shelf and just started reading." He shrugs. "Didn't know what it was about going in.”

"And?"

He doesn’t answer right away. Then: "It stayed with me. The ending especially. There's something about the way she just—" He stops, like he's not sure how to articulate it. "The parts about the water. Swimming out. I kept thinking about that part."

Daisy raises an eyebrow. "I've read this book about a hundred times. I just didn't think it would be your thing."

She flips through the book idly, still teasing—and stops cold.

Yellow highlighting. Faded but unmistakable, marking passages she knows by heart. Her own book, sitting on Teddy's shelf for years without her knowing.

"What?" Billy's watching her face.

"This is my copy." She says it slowly, still processing. "I must have left it here."

Billy goes very still.

She looks up. Finds him staring at the book in her hands.

"The highlighting," he says. "That's yours."

"Yeah." She flips through the pages, watching her own yellow marks flash by. "I've had this since I was, like, nineteen."

He's quiet for a long moment. "There's a passage about the sea. How it invites the soul to wander into solitude."

She knows exactly which one he means.

"You highlighted the whole page," he says. "And the part where she swims out. Further than anyone's gone before. Wanting to reach somewhere no one can follow."

"I remember."

"I didn't know it was you." He's not quite looking at her now. "But I kept thinking about whoever marked up that book. What they were going through when they read it."

The room feels very still. She doesn't know what to say. The book feels heavier than it should.

"I wrote a song," Billy says. "After I read it. For Melanie. It came out last year."

"'Where No One Follows.'" She says it before she can stop herself.

He stares at her.

"I've heard it." She keeps her voice neutral, but her heart is hammering now. She'd heard that song on the radio a dozen times. Thought it was beautiful. Thought it sounded like something she might have written, in another life. A woman swimming out past the point of return. "I didn't know it was yours."

"I didn't know the book was yours." He holds her gaze. "But I guess it makes sense. That it was."

The weight of it settles between them. All those years apart, and he'd been reading her margins. Her 2 AM thoughts. The passages she'd highlighted when she was a lonely girl trying to find herself in other people's words.

She thinks about Edna walking into the Gulf. About herself in the ocean this afternoon, the pull of the current, how easy it would have been to keep going. About the pool at Johnny's house, the water closing over her head.

Billy wrote a song about a woman swimming out too far. He didn't know it was about her.

Maybe it was always about her.

She slides the book back onto the shelf. Leaves it where it's been living all this time.

"Teddy never told you I'd been here?" she asks.

"No. Never mentioned you."

"Same."

They look at each other. The song feels like a third person now.

"It's a good song," she says finally.

"Yeah. It is."

Billy's still watching her. She can feel the question forming: what does this mean, what are we supposed to do with this? And she can't. She can't stand here and unpack the fact that he wrote a song for someone else using words she highlighted at nineteen, that they've been having a conversation across time without knowing it. If she thinks about it too long, she'll start crying or climbing out a window. She’s not sure which.

"I need some music," she says, already moving.

She finds Teddy’s vinyl in a cabinet beneath the window, a smaller collection compared to what he has in LA, but still impressive. She crouches down and starts flipping through, letting the familiar motion calm her. Nina Simone, Miles Davis, early Stones, a few classical albums that seem too highbrow for casual listening. And then—

She stops. Pulls the record out slowly, a grin spreading across her face.

"Oh my god."

"What?"

She holds it up. That punk cover—the four guys in leather framed by the taxidermy on the walls. The Stranglers, Rattus Norvegicus.

Billy groans. "No."

"Yes." She's already moving towards the turntable. "Do you remember Eddie’s obsession?”

"I try not to."

“He said it was the greatest bassline ever recorded."

"Eddie said that about twelve different songs. He was usually wrong."

"He wasn't wrong about this one." She slides the record out of its sleeve, flipping it straight to the B-side. "That whole stretch through Texas. Karen almost killed him in Amarillo."

"There was that thing with a fire extinguisher."

She laughs, setting the record on the turntable. The speakers crackle, then the opening bars hit—that driving bass, the sleazy keyboard riff.

"It's actually perfect, isn't it?" She's swaying now, letting the rhythm move through her. "In a totally filthy way."

Billy shakes his head, but he's half-smiling. He's stretched out on the couch, shirtless, one arm draped along the back cushions. Casual. Like he's settled into something he's stopped fighting. He tilts his head as he watches her. And he is watching—not hiding it anymore, not pretending to look somewhere else. Just taking her in with a kind of lazy hunger that makes her skin prickle.

She’s not quite dancing…just moving, really. Letting her body respond with the roll of her hips, the way his shirt slides up against her thighs.

“Strolling along, minding my own business…” she mimes, matching the song's bratty energy.

Billy laughs, a real one, surprised out of him.

She takes a step towards him, then another, timing her movement to the beat. Her voice drops lower, teasing, as she half-speaks the next line: “Walking on the beaches, looking at the peaches.”

"Peaches." He raises an eyebrow. "That what you were doing today? At all thirteen beaches?"

She grins, takes another step. "Wouldn't you like to know." She's close now, close enough that her knees nearly brush his.

"I would, actually.” His hands move from the back of the couch to his thighs. Like he’s physically restraining himself from reaching for her.

She turns slowly, giving him her back, letting him see the way the shirt rides up as she moves. Sings again, with exaggerated sultriness: “Got some sun-tan lotion in that bottle of yours. Spread it all over my peelin' skin, baby”

"Daisy." Half-warning, half-something else.

She looks over her shoulder. "You're thinking about Eddie right now, aren't you?" she teases. "Picturing him playing air bass in the back of the bus."

"I can assure you, I’m not thinking about Eddie right now."

She turns back to face him, sways closer, stepping between his knees. He inhales sharply and his thighs part wider, making room.

She stands over him, looking down, the power of it making her bold. Drops her voice low, almost speaking rather than singing: "Why don't you come on... and lap me up?"

Billy makes a sound, something between a groan and a laugh. His hands come up to her hips, fingers digging into the fabric of his own shirt.

"Gladly.” He tugs her forward—not hard, just enough. She catches herself with her hands on his shoulders, half-straddling him now, one knee on the couch beside him.

His hands slide down from her hips, following the hem of the shirt, moving to the waistband of her bikini underneath. His fingers hook into the fabric, a question in the gesture.

She nods.

He takes his time. Drags the fabric down slowly, over her hips, her thighs, his knuckles grazing her skin as he goes. She shivers at the deliberateness of it, so different from the frenzy on the floor. When the bikini falls to her ankles, she steps out of it, and his hands slide back up her bare thighs, coming to rest just under the hem of the shirt.

She reaches for the top button.

"Leave it." His voice is firm.

Her fingers still. "Yeah?"

His eyes travel down her body—the unbuttoned collar, the gap at her chest where her bikini top shows, the hem brushing her upper thighs. The knowledge of what's underneath. What isn't.

"Yeah." He swallows. "Leave it on."

Something about the way he says it, the want barely contained…she lets her hand drop.

"Okay."

She swings her other leg over, settling fully into his lap. His hands slide up under the shirt, palms flat against her lower back, and the touch is electric. She can feel him hard beneath her through his jeans. Rocks against him slowly, watching his eyes flutter closed.

"Daisy—"

She kisses him before he can finish. Softer than before—not like the collision on the floor, but something more intentional. She controls the pace and he lets her. His hands roam under the shirt, tracing her back, her waist, her hips, but he doesn't rush.

The record keeps spinning as her hands move to the button of his jeans. He helps her, and she lifts up to give him room, and then there's nothing between them at all. Just skin and heat and the smell of smoke from the fire and the last bars of the song fading out as she sinks down onto him.

**********

The crickets are chirping when Daisy slips outside. She stands on the back porch, listening to the wall of sound so constant it becomes almost meditative.

The space is small—just two Adirondack chairs overlooking the ravine below, framed by mountains against a black sky. And above them, more stars than she's seen in years. Maybe ever. Los Angeles has too much light pollution for skies like this. You forget they exist until you get far enough away to remember.

She pulls the blanket around her shoulders and lights a cigarette from Billy's pack, stolen off the counter on her way out. The smoke curls up and vanishes into air that's gone cold. Her feet are bare on the wooden planks, and she should go back inside for socks or shoes or something, but the chill feels good. Clarifying. A reminder that her body is real, that she's here, that tonight actually happened and isn't some fever dream she'll wake from alone in her too-big bed in the Hills.

She tilts her head back. Orion is up there somewhere. She learned the constellations in third grade, Mr. Stevens pointing at a pull-down chart with his wooden ruler, making them memorize the shapes. She'd been eight, maybe nine. Still young enough to think the world ended at her parent’s driveway. The idea that people had been watching these same stars for thousands of years, finding pictures in them, telling stories…it was the first time she'd understood the vastness of the universe. That it would keep going long after everyone she knew was dust. She'd found that comforting, somehow. Still does.

But she can't find the hunter now. Three stars in a row, his belt—she knows it's there. Too many stars, though. Too much sky. Somehow makes it harder, not easier.

The screen door creaks behind her.

"There you are."

She doesn't turn around. Just listens to Billy’s footsteps on the deck, feels him come to stand beside her at the railing. Not touching, but close.

"You okay?"

She turns to look at him. He's pulled on a fresh t-shirt, still barefoot. His hair’s a mess from earlier and he's made no effort to fix it. She doesn't know what to do with how much she likes that.

"Yeah." She takes another drag, lets the smoke out slow. "Just needed some air."

He doesn't push. Just settles his forearms on the railing and looks out at the same darkness she's been looking at, and waits.

"I forgot what quiet sounds like," she says eventually. "There's always something. Traffic, helicopters, someone's pool party three houses down." She exhales smoke. "Even when it's silent, it's not.”

"It's different here."

"It's like the world stopped."

She offers him the cigarette. He takes it and she watches him inhale. The ember flares up, illuminating the line of his jaw.

"I used to sneak out at night when I was a kid," she says. "Onto the roof outside my bedroom window. I'd sit up there for hours, just... hiding. Watching the sky."

"What were you hiding from?"

"Parties. My parents threw a lot of parties." She wraps the blanket tighter. "I was supposed to be asleep. But I could hear them downstairs, all these voices, all this laughter. It always sounded like they were having the best time without me. So, I'd climb out the window and sit on the roof and pretend I was somewhere else. Someone else." She shrugs. "Didn't really work. But it was better than lying in bed listening to them forget I existed."

Billy doesn't say anything, just waits.

"I spent my whole childhood feeling like I didn't belong in my own house. And then I grew up and got famous and bought my own house and I still don't belong in it.” She shakes her head slowly, like she's just now hearing what she's saying. "I don't belong anywhere."

The confession hangs there, more naked than anything they've done tonight.

"My father died last year,” she says suddenly. "February. Heart attack. Very sudden.” Her voice is flat. “He was a painter. Did you know that?”

“I didn’t. You never talked about him.”

“There’s not much to talk about. He wasn’t around.” She takes the cigarette from him. “But he painted. That’s what he did instead of being a father. He painted.”

“Was he good?”

“Yeah. He was good.” She hates admitting it. “Had shows, collectors. There are people who know his name.”

“What happened to the work?”

“I inherited some of it. When he died, I got forty years of paintings and not a single memory of him showing up when it mattered.” She takes a drag. “They’re in a warehouse in LA. Some climate controlled place. I’ve never been.”

“Never?”

“I can’t make myself go. I keep thinking—if I look at them, really look, I might feel something. And I don’t want to feel something for him. He doesn’t deserve it.”

“What are you afraid you’d feel?”

The question hits her somewhere soft. She doesn’t answer for a long moment.

“That I’d understand him,” she says finally. “That I’d look at his paintings and see why he chose them over me. And that I’d—” She stops. Swallows. “That I’d recognize it. That impulse. Because I have it too.”

Billy doesn't say anything. But he's looking at her differently now.

"You want to know the worst part?" She meets his eyes. "I didn't feel anything." She says it quietly, like a confession. "He died and I kept waiting to feel something—grief, relief, anything—and it just never came. I stood at his funeral and I felt like I was watching it happen to someone else. Some other daughter at some other funeral. I think I'd been mourning him my whole life already. The father I wished he was. By the time he actually died, there was nothing left to grieve."

Billy is silent, processing. Then: "My dad died last year too."

Daisy turns to look at him.

"October." He’s staring straight ahead. "Liver finally gave out. He'd been killing himself slowly since before I was born, and then one day he just... finished the job."

"Billy, I had no idea."

"Nobody does. I didn't tell—" He stops. "I went to the funeral alone. Flew to Tampa, sat in the back, left before anyone could talk to me."

"Graham didn't go?"

"Graham had his reasons for not going. I had mine for not telling him I was."

She lets that sit. There's history there, a whole landscape of family pain she’s only caught glimpses of.

"I thought I'd feel free," Billy says, still looking out at the mountains. "That's what I expected. He left when I was eight. Spent my whole life terrified of becoming him. And then he dies and I thought…finally. It's over. It’ll all be over." He shakes his head. "But I just felt…angry. I’m starting to think I'll always be angry."

"At him?"

"At all of it. At him for leaving. At myself for still caring what he was or wasn't after all this time." His voice is rough. “I hate that he still has that much power over me."

They're both quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote yelps, and suddenly the night feels wilder than it did a moment ago.

"We were both going through that," Daisy says slowly. "At the same time. Last year. And we didn't even know."

The thought settles between them.

"I thought about calling you." The admission surprises her; she didn't know it was true until she said it. "After my dad. I thought about finding your number and just—" She stops. "But what would I have said?”

"I would've listened."

"I know you would have." That's what makes it worse, somehow.

She takes the cigarette back from him, takes a drag. "I woke up this morning and I just—I couldn't be in that house anymore. I couldn't be anywhere. Every beach I tried, someone recognized me. Or there were photographers. Or tourists, or…." She shakes her head. "Thirteen beaches, Billy. I tried thirteen beaches before I found one where I could just... exist. Without being her."

"Her?"

"Daisy Jones." She says her own name like it belongs to someone else. "The one they write about. The one on the covers and the talk shows and the— I don't know. The product."

"You're not a product."

"I am, though. That's exactly what I am. I built this whole life around being seen. And now I can't stop being seen. I can't go to the grocery store. I can't walk on a beach. I can't—" She exhales smoke, watches it disappear. "I bought this house. You should see it. Six bedrooms. A pool. Views of the mountains.”

"Sounds nice."

"I walk around that place and I don't even know whose life I'm living. Everything's expensive and tasteful and exactly what I'm supposed to want, and I feel like I'm suffocating in it."

Billy doesn't say anything. Just listens.

"Everyone wants something," she continues. "The label wants another album yesterday. The fans want autographs and photos and five minutes of my time like it's their god-given right. The press wants whatever sells. Johnny wants—" She stops herself. "And the fucked up thing is, this is what I wanted, right? I wanted to be famous. I wanted everyone to know my name."

He looks at her like he understands exactly what she means.

"Now I'd give anything to be invisible."

The wind picks up, rustling through the trees below the deck. She shivers, and Billy moves closer, not quite touching but near enough that she could lean into him if she wanted. She doesn't.

"I had this thought at the beach. Of just…" She stops. This isn't something she'd say to Simone, or Teddy, or anyone who'd look at her with that worry she's so tired of. But Billy's not looking at her like that. "Of walking into the water and just... not stopping."

She feels him go still beside her.

"Not like—not like that," she adds quickly. "It was more like... what if I just stopped being a person and became part of something bigger? The ocean doesn't care who you are. It doesn't want anything from you."

"Daisy." His voice is serious.

"I told you, I wasn't going to do it. I'm just saying that's where my head was. That's how tired I am." She finally looks at him. "Do you know what it's like to be exhausted by your own existence?"

His face in the darkness is hard to read, but his eyes are fixed on her.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "I do."

She wasn't expecting that.

"I thought…" she trails off, gesturing vaguely. "The house, the kid, the—" She stops herself before saying wife. "The whole thing. Sunday morning soccer games and orange slices."

"Saturday morning."

"Whatever."

Billy turns, leaning his back against the railing so he's facing the cabin instead of the sky. Like he can't look at all that vastness and say what he's about to say.

"You want to know the truth? Most days I feel like I'm playing a part. Like there's this version of me that everyone needs me to be, and I just... put him on. Every morning. The dad who volunteers at the book fair and remembers to buy milk and doesn't think about—" He stops.

"Doesn't think about what?"

He doesn’t answer right away. She watches his profile, the way his jaw clenches.

"For years I've been getting up, doing the work, being where I'm supposed to be. And the whole time there's this feeling like I'm in a waiting room. Like real life is happening somewhere else and I'm just sitting there watching the clock."

"Is it the music?"

"It's everything. It's—" He struggles for words. "The songs I write— they're fine. They do what they’re designed to do. But there's nothing of me in them. It’s like that version is just…gone.”

"What happened to him?”

He turns his head, meets her eyes. Holds them. "I think I left him in Chicago."

She doesn't say anything. Can't. Because he's not talking about his music anymore, and they both know it.

The silence between them has a different texture now. Heavier. Like they're both aware of the door they've walked through and how it only opens one direction.

"You know the story with Julia. When she was born." Not a question.

She knows. Billy missing the first month of Julia's life. The thing he can't forgive himself for, no matter how many years pass or how many soccer games he shows up to.

"Every day since then, I've been trying to—" He cuts off. Starts again. "I have to be there. For everything. I don't get to check out.”

Daisy just looks at him, waiting.

“So yeah," Billy continues. "I know what it's like to be exhausted by your own existence. I know what it's like to feel like you're being the person everyone needs you to be instead of whoever the fuck you actually are." He turns his head, meets her eyes. "The difference is, I don't have the option of walking into the ocean. I have a kid."

"That's not a difference. That's a reason."

"Maybe."

They're both quiet for a while. The crickets fill the silence.

"I saw this movie once," Daisy says. "Black and white horror film from the sixties. Carnival of Souls. You know it?”

Billy shakes his head.

"There's this woman, she survives a car crash. And for the rest of the movie, she's walking around, living her life, but she doesn't feel real. She doesn't feel like she belongs to the world anymore. Like the crash changed something and she's just... drifting.”

"What happens to her?"

“Turns out she was dead the whole time. The crash killed her, and everything after was just her ghost, not realizing she was gone."

Billy's quiet, processing.

"Sometimes I feel like that," Daisy says. "Like the crash already happened. The OD or maybe even before that, maybe something in me died years ago and I just haven't figured it out yet. And all of this—the house, the album, the Grammy—it's just… afterlife. Sleepwalking.”

"You're not dead, Daisy."

"Then why don't I feel anything?" She turns to him. "Why does it take this—you—why does it take something impossible to make me feel like I'm actually here?" She shakes her head. "It’s like I've been…dying for something real.”

He reaches for her then, just his hand covering hers on the railing, his fingers intertwining. The touch is warm in the cold air.

"You're here," he says. "You're real. I can feel you."

"For tonight." And there's something in her voice—a heaviness, an acceptance. That this is what it is. That tomorrow the sun will come up and they'll go back to their separate lives and none of this will have been enough to save either of them.

She waits for him to say it back. He doesn't. Just holds her gaze, his jaw tight, and she can't tell if he wants to contradict her or if he's just accepting what they both already know.

She shivers again. Billy notices. He tugs her hand, pulling her into him, and she goes without resistance. Her forehead finds the space below his collarbone. His arms come around her, the blanket caught between them, and they stand there for a moment that doesn't need to become anything else.

"You're freezing," he says into her hair.

"I know."

"You used to walk around in practically nothing on those forty degree nights in December.”

"I used to do a lot of things." She pulls back just enough to look at him. "Cocaine's a helluva drug."

Billy smiles. "And right now?”

"Now I feel everything."

They stay like that a moment longer. The wind has died down, and the silence feels less daunting than it did before. Less empty.

"Let's go inside," he says.

**********

They walk back through the door and the warmth hits her immediately. She doesn't know what time it is. Late enough that it's early, that suspended hour when the world feels like it belongs to no one. Midnight, maybe. One AM. Time has no meaning tonight.

She should be exhausted. She should want to sleep. Instead: "I'm starving," she hears herself say.

Billy closes the door behind them and she watches him rub his arms, finally acknowledging the cold he'd been pretending not to feel.

"There's not much left," he says. "After the egg disaster.”

"Teddy’s got to have something in here."

They converge on the kitchen. She takes the upper cabinets; he takes the lower ones. The domesticity of it strikes her. How natural it feels to move around each other in this small space, how their bodies seem to know where the other one is without looking.

She finds a tin of sardines first, the kind with the little key you're supposed to use to peel back the lid. The sell-by date is 1980. She holds it up, eyebrow raised, and Billy shakes his head.

"No.”

"Could be a delicacy by now. Aged."

"Could be food poisoning.”

She sets it aside but doesn't throw it away and keeps looking. A sleeve of saltines that are soft and bendy. A jar of olives floating in brine that's turned cloudy. A box of pasta with a small hole chewed in the corner.

"This is genuinely sad," she says, pulling out what might have once been cheese. It's wrapped in paper that's turned green, and when she peels it back, the smell makes her recoil. "Oh, that's... no."

Billy takes it from her and drops it directly in the trash. "Teddy clearly doesn't spend much time here anymore."

He pulls a jar from the back of a bottom cabinet, holds it up to the light, turning it to read the label. "Peanut butter. Expiration... 1981."

"That's only a year old."

"That's a year past expiration."

"Peanut butter lasts forever. It's like honey. Or Twinkies."

"I don't think that's true.”

"I don't think I care." She takes the jar from him, unscrews the lid, and sniffs. It smells like peanut butter. A little stale, maybe, but not rancid. Not dangerous. Probably. "We've both survived worse than expired Skippy."

She finds a jar of honey that seems safe—honey actually does last forever, she's pretty sure about that one—and they end up at the counter with their assembled snack: the soft saltines, the questionable peanut butter, the honey, and two glasses of water.

She hops up onto the island, legs dangling, and doesn't bother with a knife—just uses her finger to scoop peanut butter directly onto a cracker. She takes a bite. The cracker is stale enough that it bends instead of snapping, and the peanut butter has that slightly cardboard taste of something past its prime, but it's food and she's hungry and there's something perfect about it.

"Verdict?" Billy asks. He's leaning against the opposite counter, glass of water in hand, watching her with amusement.

"I've put worse things in my mouth." She smirks.

Billy chokes slightly on his water. Rolls his eyes.

She makes another one—more peanut butter this time, with a drizzle of honey—and holds it out to him. He takes it from her and she watches him eat. Watches a crumb catch at the corner of his mouth and stay there. She has the urge to reach out and brush it away, to touch his face for no reason other than the wanting to. She doesn't. Just watches him chew and swallow and lick his lips, and the crumb is gone and the moment passes.

"You know," Billy says after a while, "I think this might be the worst thing I've ever eaten."

"Worse than that gas station burrito in Tulsa?"

He winces at the memory. "I'd blocked that out. Thanks for bringing it back."

"You threw up for six hours straight."

"Seven. But I still played that night."

“Not well.”

"I was…adequate.”

She laughs, and he's smiling at her and for a moment it's like no time has passed at all. Like they're back on the bus somewhere between cities, killing time between shows, being young and stupid.

Then her eyes drift past him, and the laughter dies in her throat.

The whiskey glass is sitting on the counter where she left it hours ago. Amber liquid. Still half full. She'd forgotten about it, or made herself forget, pushed it to the edge of her awareness. But now it's all she can see.

Billy follows her gaze. He doesn't say anything. Just waits.

"I didn't drink it," she says. Unnecessarily. Obviously.

"No."

"I was going to. I think. Before you walked in." She sets down the cracker she was holding. Her appetite has vanished, replaced by something else. Not a craving, exactly, but an awareness. "I had it in my hand. I could smell it."

"What stopped you?"

"You. The door opening." She pauses. "I don't know if I would have, if you hadn't. That's the thing. I don't know."

"Six months, right?" he says. Not quite a question. More like he's placing them both in time, remembering where they are in their respective counts.

"Yeah. Give or take.”

"Give or take?"

"I'm not really a counting-days person." She shrugs. "Feels too much like keeping score. Like I'm waiting to lose."

Billy nods slowly. She wonders what his count is. If he’s still at seven, since that first stint in rehab. Except for Chicago. She doesn't mention Chicago.

"I've never just had a drink," she says. The words come out before she's fully thought it through. "I mean—I've had thousands of drinks. But I've never just... tasted something. You know?"

"What do you mean?"

"It was always about where it would take me. How fast I could get there." She toys with the hem of his shirt. "The whiskey, the pills, whatever—it was never about the thing itself. It was about disappearing. About not having to be in my own head for a while."

She risks a glance at him. He's still watching her, but there's no judgment in his face. No worry, no pity. Just recognition.

"I used to think being sober meant not wanting it anymore,” he says. “Took me years to figure out it just means wanting it and choosing something else."

"What do you choose?"

"Depends on the day." He holds her gaze. "Today I chose being up here. Sitting in an empty cabin. Trying to write something that doesn't feel like a lie."

"Did it work?"

"No. But then you showed up, so." The corner of his mouth lifts. "Worked in a different way.”

She looks back at the glass. It’s perfectly still. Beautiful, really. The kind of thing you're supposed to savor.

"I want to know what that's like. To enjoy something like a normal person. Just for a moment. Just because it tastes good."

She feels stupid saying it out loud. Like a child asking permission for something they should be able to decide for themselves. But Billy doesn't laugh, doesn't tell her that's not how it works, doesn't remind her of all the reasons this is a bad idea.

He just looks at her. Sees her. The way he always has.

"Okay," he says.

She reaches for the glass. It's heavier than she remembered, the crystal substantial in her hand. She brings it to her nose first—that same smell from earlier, smoke and vanilla and oak, something that makes her mouth water but this time there’s no shame in it.

Billy hasn't moved. Hasn't looked away.

She raises the glass to her lips, tips it back.

The first thing she notices is the burn. Sharper than she expected, almost painful after six months of nothing. Then the taste underneath—complex, layered, things she doesn't have words for. It spreads across her tongue and brings warmth down her throat and into her chest.

She closes her eyes. Not in defeat, not in ecstasy. Just... feeling it. Letting herself experience something without immediately wanting more of it, without calculating how much is left in the bottle and how long until she can have another.

When she opens her eyes, Billy is closer. She didn't hear him move, but he's right there now, standing between her knees where they hang off the island. His eyes are fixed on her mouth.

"What does it taste like?" His voice is rough.

"Like something I don't need."

She's still holding the glass. He takes it from her hand, sets it on the counter behind her without looking. His fingers brush her wrist and she feels it everywhere.

"What else?" he asks.

"What?"

"What else does it taste like?"

She opens her mouth to answer and he's already kissing her.

It's not soft. It's consuming—his tongue sliding against hers, chasing the whiskey, taking the sounds she makes. His hand grips her jaw, holds her there while he licks into her mouth like he wants to taste every part of what she just swallowed.

His other hand grabs her hip, pulls her closer to the edge of the counter. She's dizzy with it. With him. With the wrongness of all of it—his mouth, this kitchen, that glass sitting inches away while he devours her.

"I could taste it," he murmurs against her lips when they finally break apart. "On you."

"Yeah?" She says, a little breathlessly.

"I wanted to." His mouth drags down her jaw, her throat, and her head tips back. "Not from the glass. From you."

"Billy…"

"Let me taste you," he says against her skin. Lower now, his lips tracing her collarbone, pushing aside the collar of his shirt—still barely buttoned—to find her shoulder. Then lower still, his hands sliding the fabric up her thighs as he sinks to his knees on the kitchen floor.

She stops breathing.

His lips move to her inner thigh and she's shaking. His breath is warm against her skin, and she wants to say something—more or now or just his name—but the words won't come. Her fingers twist into his hair and she feels him smile against her.

Then his mouth is on her and she stops thinking entirely.

The counter is hard beneath her, the edge digging into her thighs. She doesn't care. Her head falls back, one hand braced behind her and the other buried in his hair. She can hear herself making sounds she doesn't recognize, and she doesn't care about that either.

He takes his time. Slow, savoring. Like she's the whiskey now. Something to taste, to hold on the tongue. To let bloom.

**********

The guest bedroom is cooler than the rest of the cabin. Daisy feels it on her skin—the places where the sheet doesn’t cover, the places Billy isn't touching. They made it to the bed this time. Actually undressed each other like people who have time. She still doesn't know what time it is. Late. Early. The moon is lower in the sky since they stumbled in here, the light now a pale strip across the bed.

She's on her stomach, face half-pressed into a pillow that smells like cedar and dust and sex. Her eyes drift to the print on the wall beside the bed—she must have looked right past it earlier, too distracted by other things.

Fruit melting. Dripping at the edges like it can't hold its own shape. The peaches, the pears, all of it softening and oozing, becoming something other than what it started as.

She can relate.

Her body is overripe with him. Swollen, tender, used in ways she'll feel for days. She can still taste him in her mouth, still feel him inside her. Her skin is sensitized and she's lying here dripping—with sweat, with him, with the aftermath of everything they've done.

The fruit doesn't get to stay ripe. Neither does she.

But right now she's still sweet. Still full. Still his, for a few more hours. The rot will come later.

Billy's hand settles on her back, warm and heavy between her shoulder blades, and she lets her eyes close.

"You're not sleeping," he says.

"Neither are you."

"No."

Then she feels his fingers tracing a line she can't see.

"You have freckles here." His voice is soft. "I didn't know that."

"They come out in the sun."

"I like them." His touch circles a spot below her left shoulder, slow and wondering.

She doesn't say anything. Just lets him map her. His fingers move across her back like he's trying to memorize the terrain.

She's been touched by a lot of men. Grabbed, groped, handled, claimed. But she's not sure anyone has ever touched her like this, like she's something to be studied rather than consumed. Like her body is a text he's trying to read.

His hands keep moving. Down the small of her back, where she curves inward. The swell below, where she curves out again.

"You have a birthmark," he says. His finger touches a spot low on her back, just above her hip. "Right here."

"I know."

"What shape is it?"

"I don't know. I've never really looked at it."

"It looks like a comma. Or a tadpole, maybe."

She laughs. "A tadpole."

"A small one." She can hear the smile in his voice. "It's cute."

"Nobody's ever called my birthmark cute before."

"Nobody's ever looked at it properly."

His hands move to her sides, tracing down over her ribs. She twitches—she can't help it—and he pauses.

"Ticklish?"

"No."

“You’re lying.”

He doesn't tickle her, though. Just files the information away and keeps going.

His fingers trace up her arm—the one stretched out on the pillow—and find her hand. He threads his fingers through hers, squeezes gently, then releases. Continues up, over her shoulder.

He pauses at her shoulder blade. Touches something there that makes her wince.

"What’s this?"

She knows what he's found without looking. The rug burn from the living room floor, where the wool scraped her skin raw while he drove into her. She'd felt it happening and hadn't cared. Still doesn't.

“The rug. From earlier.”

"I did this." He sounds guilty.

"We did this," she corrects.

His fingers trace the edge of it, gentle. "Does it hurt?"

"Yes."

She doesn't say she likes that it hurts. That she wants to press her back against cold tile tomorrow and feel the sting and remember exactly how it happened. She doesn't say any of that, but something in her silence must give it away, because his hand flattens over the raw skin, possessive and warm.

He leans down and presses his lips to the spot, so gentle she barely feels it. Just warmth, and the brush of his mouth. He lingers there for a second. She feels his breath against her shoulder blade. Then: "Turn over," he says against her skin.

"Why?"

"Because I wanna see you.”

She hesitates. It's ridiculous—after everything they've done tonight, every way he's had her—but this feels different. Face-down, she could hide. She could be anyone, any body in the dark. Turning over means being seen. Fully. The parts she likes and the parts she doesn't, all of it exposed.

But she turns anyway.

The sheet falls away as she moves, landing somewhere around her thighs. She lies on her back, arms at her sides, and makes herself hold still under his gaze.

For a long moment, he doesn't say anything. Just looks.

Men have looked at her with hunger. With want. With a particular greed, figuring out what they can take. Johnny used to look at her like she was a prize he'd won, something to display. The men before him looked at her like a conquest, a story they'd tell later.

Billy looks at her like there's nowhere else he needs to be.

His eyes move slowly, her face first, then down. Her throat. Her breasts, rising and falling with each breath she's trying to keep steady. The softness of her stomach. The curve of her hips. She watches him take her in and has to fight the urge to cover herself, to make a joke, to turn this into something she can control.

"I used to think about this." He's not quite meeting her eyes, his gaze still traveling over her body like he can't help it. "Late at night. When I couldn't sleep."

"Think about what?"

"You. What you might look like." He pauses, and she watches his throat move as he swallows. "I had this whole picture in my head. Built it up over the years from what I could see, what I imagined. Something I could take out when I was alone."

She should say something. Make a joke about him being a pervert, about the sad state of his fantasy life. But her voice won't cooperate. She just lies there, exposed, waiting.

"And now?" she manages finally.

"Now you're actually here. And I—" He shakes his head slowly. "Nothing could have prepared me for this. For the real thing."

She doesn't know what to do with her hands. With her face. With the feeling expanding in her chest, too big for the space it's in.

She's softer than she was. Sobriety added weight she's still getting used to—a fullness to her hips and stomach that wasn't there on the album covers. That body was running on cocaine and champagne and not much else. This one is different. She wonders if he's comparing. If he notices.

But his eyes don't carry judgment. Just attention, and something that looks almost like reverence.

"You're beautiful." He says it simply, like it's not up for debate. Like he's just reporting what he sees. "You know that, right?"

"I know what I look like."

"That's not what I asked."

She doesn't have an answer for that. Knows what she looks like, yes. Has been told she's beautiful so many times the word has lost all meaning. But knowing it and feeling it are different things, and right now, under his gaze, she feels something she can't name. Seen in a way that goes past the surface.

He starts to touch her again. Slower now. His hand traces the line of her collarbone, then lower. The space between her breasts, the dip beneath her ribs. She watches his face as he touches her, watches the way his expression changes with each new discovery.

His left hand skims down her side, following the line from her ribs to her waist to her hip. She feels the ring before she sees it—cool metal against her skin, a small pressure that moves with his fingers. The simple gold band.

Then it reflects the faint moonlight. Just a glint, barely there, but unmistakable.

She watches it move across her skin.

Thinks about the hand that put it there. The vows it represents. The woman at home who doesn't know where her husband is right now, doesn't know he's in a cabin in the woods tracing the body of another woman.

She doesn't say anything. Neither does he. But the ring keeps moving, gold against her skin, and she knows they're both aware of it. Both choosing not to acknowledge what it means.

His hand continues its path downward. Over the swell of her hip, the soft skin of her outer thigh.

She feels his fingers brush something and stop.

She knows what he's found before he speaks. The small fox tattoo on her hip, right at the edge of where her bikini would cover it. Faded now, the lines lighter with age, but still there. Still permanent.

"I saw this." His voice is careful. "In that Rolling Stone spread."

"Yeah."

"He has the matching one. The daisy. On his chest."

"He did. Does. I don't know if he's covered it. Probably not. He likes keeping pieces of people."

Billy's thumb traces the outline of the fox, so light she can barely feel it. "Did it mean something? When you got it?"

She considers lying. But it's too late in the night for that, and she's too tired, and he's touching the thing itself—the permanent mark of a mistake she made when she thought she understood love.

"I thought it did. At the time, I thought it meant something,” she says. "He'd convinced me to come back. After I'd left the second time. Or third—I lose track." She's looking at the ceiling now, not at him. "He said this time would be different. That we'd have proof. We'd be permanent."

"Proof," Billy repeats.

"That I was his." She hears the flatness in her own voice. "I thought that's what love was supposed to feel like. That desperate. That consuming.”

She can feel the effort it's taking him to stay quiet.

"Every time I tried to leave, he'd..." She trails off. Swallows. "He'd fall apart. Completely. Sobbing, saying he couldn't live without me, that I was the only person who understood him. That he'd die if I left." She lets out a breath that's almost a laugh. "And I believed him. I thought I was saving him. I thought that's what love was—being someone's reason to survive."

"The night I…" she trails off. Still can’t say the words after all this time, "I woke up in the hospital and he was sitting by the bed. And the first words out of his mouth were 'You scared the shit out of me.' Not 'I'm glad you're alive.' Not 'I love you.' Just—I'd scared him. I'd done something to him."

She feels Billy's body go rigid beside her.

"That's when I finally understood," she says. "It was never about me. It was about what I was to him. What he'd lose if I wasn't there to—" She searches for the right word. "To make him feel like he was worth something."

Billy doesn't say anything for a long time. His hand is still on her stomach, his fingers pressing slightly into her skin like he's trying to hold her here, in this moment, in this bed.

"I wanted to kill him," he says finally. Matter-of-fact. "When I heard what happened. I wanted to drive to his house and—" He stops. His jaw works. "I sat in the hospital parking garage for hours. You know that. But what I didn't tell you is that I spent most of that time thinking about what I'd do to him if you died. How I'd make him pay."

She turns her head to look at him. His expression is raw, like he's admitting something shameful.

"You wouldn't have done anything," she says. Not unkindly. "You'd have gone home. Like you always do." It comes out harsher than she means it to.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

She should stop. She knows she should stop. But she's never been good at leaving things alone.

"Does she know?" The words come out before she can censor them. "About us. About… this."

Billy doesn't answer right away. She watches his face—the way his eyes go somewhere else for a moment before coming back.

"She's always known something."

"Something."

"We don't talk about it directly. Not since that night."

He doesn't have to say which night. She knows.

"She stayed," Billy says quietly. "After everything. After I disappeared for a month when Julia was born. After the drinking, the lying, the—" He swallows. "After you."

After you. Like she was some calamity he survived.

"She didn't have to," he continues. "Her sister wouldn't speak to her for a year because she took me back." He's looking at the ceiling now, not at Daisy. "And she stayed anyway. Forgave me for things I've never forgiven myself for."

Daisy watches his profile in the dark. The way he can't quite meet her eyes while he talks about Camila.

"You love her.”

He doesn't flinch from it. "Yeah. I do."

She knew that. She's always known that. But hearing it out loud, in this bed, with his body still warm against hers…it stings in a way she wasn't prepared for.

"She's a good person," Billy says, and there's something almost helpless in his voice. "That's the thing. She's not—she didn't do anything wrong. She loved me. She built a life with me. She raised our daughter while I was on tour, while I was in the studio, while I was—" He stops himself.

While you were with me, Daisy finishes silently.

"But it's different," he says. "What I feel for you. It's not—” He shakes his head, like he's struggling to articulate it. “It's something else entirely. Like it exists in a different part of me. A part she's never seen. A part I've never let anyone see."

"Except me."

"Yes.”

She doesn't ask what that means. Doesn't ask what happens now, what happens tomorrow, whether this changes anything or nothing. She just lets the words hang there in the dark between them.

After a moment, his hand finds hers. Traces the shape of her knuckles first, her wrist, the spaces between. His fingers lace through hers. His ring presses against her skin, a constant reminder. She doesn't pull away.

"What is this, Billy?" she asks after a long silence. "What do you call this?"

"I don't know."

"You've never known?"

He doesn’t answer right away. "There was this one night on tour. Somewhere after Miami—I don't remember where. You were in the back of the bus, writing in your notebook. I walked past and you looked up and smiled at me. That's it. You just smiled."

"I don't remember that."

"I know. It was nothing." His voice is rough. "But I went back to my bunk and I couldn't sleep. For hours. I just kept thinking—so that's what it feels like. That thing everyone talks about. I'd been married for years. And I'd never felt it like that. Not once. Not until you smiled at me on a fucking tour bus in the middle of nowhere."

She doesn't say anything. Can't.

"I don't know what to call it," he says. "I just know I've never felt it with anyone else. Before or since."

The words settle into her chest. This is the closest he's ever come to naming it. To admitting that what exists between them isn't nothing, isn't imagination, isn't something she invented to torture herself with.

But it's not a promise, either. She hears what he's not saying underneath it all: I love you, but I'm going back to her. I feel this, but it doesn't change anything.

The silence stretches. She should let it stay there. Should swallow the words rising in her throat and let them fall asleep without saying anything else.

But she's so tired of swallowing.

"It hurts to love you," she says. The words come out quiet, almost conversational. Like she's commenting on the weather, or what she had for breakfast.

"It hurts," she continues, "and it's hurt for years. And I keep waiting for it to stop, and it just—" She exhales. Shakes her head slightly. "It doesn't. It's just there. This constant thing. Like a bruise that never heals."

Billy doesn't interrupt. Just watches her, intent in a way that makes her want to look away. She doesn't.

"And I can't get rid of it. I can't do anything with it. I can't even talk about it because you're—" She gestures with her free hand. At the ring. At the life. At the everything that exists outside this room. "And I've tried. I've tried to love other people. Tried to find someone who could make it stop hurting. But they just—" She thinks of Johnny, of all the others before him. "They're not you. Nobody's you."

"Daisy."

"I'm not asking for anything." She forces herself to keep looking at him. His eyes are bright in the darkness, shiny, fixed on her face. "I don't expect you to—I'm not trying to make you feel guilty or—I just needed to say it. Once. Out loud. To you.”

"It hurts to love you," she says again. "But I still love you. That’s just the way I feel.”

For a long moment, neither of them moves. The silence is so complete she can hear her own heartbeat, can hear the wind outside, can hear the creak of the cabin settling around them.

Then he reaches for her, pulls her into him, his arm tightening around her waist as he presses his face into her hair. She can feel his chest against her back, the uneven rhythm of his breathing. He's holding her like he's trying to absorb her. Like if he can just get close enough, he can keep her.

She lets him.

His hand spreads flat against her stomach, warm and heavy. His breath against the back of her neck. And she understands why he's not saying it back—because saying it out loud would make it real in a way they'd both have to deal with. And neither of them knows how.

But she feels it in the way he's holding her. The desperation in his grip. The way his arm tightens like he's afraid she'll slip away.

She already knows how this ends.

The sun will rise in a few hours. The light will come through these windows and the spell will break and they'll have to be real people again. He'll go back to his life—his wife, his daughter, his songs for other people—and she'll go back to hers. The empty house. Another day of being Daisy Jones, whoever that is.

She's not going to ask him to stay. She's not going to beg, or cry, or make him promise things they both know he can't deliver. She's going to leave first. That's the only part she can control. Making sure she's the one who walks away, so she doesn't have to watch him do it.

This night will become a memory. A beautiful one. The one time they stopped pretending and let themselves have what they wanted. She'll carry it with her like a scar, like the rug burn on her shoulders, like all the other marks she's collected over the years.

It's not enough. But it will have to be.

She curls into him and his arm pulls her closer. The last thing she's aware of before sleep takes her is the feel of his hand in her hair, gentle, stroking. Like he's trying to soothe her. Like he knows, somehow, that she's already saying goodbye.

**********

She'd meant to wake before him. Had planned it, somewhere in the hazy space before sleep took her. She'd slip out at first light, leave a note or maybe nothing at all, be gone before this part. The part where they have to figure out what any of it meant. The part where reality comes crashing back in. But her body betrayed her. Too exhausted, too warm, too unwilling to leave his arms even in sleep.

She feels the morning light against her eyelids. Keeps them closed.

If she doesn't open her eyes, this isn't over yet. If she doesn't move, doesn't speak, doesn't acknowledge the sun coming through the window, they can stay suspended in this moment forever. Two people in a bed in a cabin in the mountains, outside of time, outside of consequence. She could live here. In the space between sleeping and waking, where last night is still happening, where she can let his memory dance in the ballroom of her mind without it being a memory yet.

But Billy's hand is already moving. Slow strokes along her stomach, her waist, her hip. His mouth presses a soft kiss to her shoulder. Then her neck, the sensitive place just below her hairline that makes her shiver despite herself.

"I know you're awake," he murmurs against her skin.

She doesn't answer. Just lies there, feeling his fingers trace lower, over the curve of her thigh, then inward. Her breath catches when he touches her—still swollen from last night, still sensitive. She's sore in ways she'll feel for days, but her body doesn’t seem to care. Responds to him anyway.

She lets herself feel it for a moment. Him hard against her back. The want building low in her belly. How easy it would be to let him inside her one more time, to delay reality a little longer.

She catches his wrist. Stops him.

"Billy."

His hand flattens against her thigh, no longer moving, just resting there. "What's wrong?"

Everything. Nothing.

"Nothing's wrong." She turns in his arms, facing him now. His eyes search her face, worried. "I just—I should probably go."

"Go?" He frowns. "Why?"

"Because it's morning. Because—" She gestures vaguely at the window, the light, the world outside that's been waiting to crash back in. "Because this is the part where we go back to our lives, right?"

The expression on his face gives her pause. It's not the guilt she expected, the dawning horror of what-have-I-done. It's something else. Something almost like resolve.

"What if we didn't?" he says.

She blinks. "What?"

"What if we didn't go back to our lives. Not the way they were."

Her heart is pounding in her chest. "Billy, what are you talking about?"

He sits up, and she does too, pulling the sheet up to cover herself. The movement feels defensive, protective, like she's bracing for impact without knowing what's coming.

"I've been awake for a while," he says. "Watching you sleep. Thinking."

She waits. Watches his face.

"I can't do this anymore." He says it simply, like it's obvious. "Go home. Pretend last night didn't happen. Go back to—" He shakes his head. "I can't, Daisy. I've been pretending for five years. I'm done."

She stares at him. The words aren't registering. They don't fit the script she's been writing in her head, the one where he kisses her goodbye and drives away and she never sees him again.

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I'm going to leave her."

Daisy doesn't move. Doesn't breathe.

"I'm going to tell Camila," Billy continues. "About us. About—not just last night, but everything. How I've felt for years.”

She shakes her head, a small involuntary movement. Like her body is rejecting what she's hearing.

"I know it can't happen right away. I need to do it right. For Julia." He runs a hand through his hair, the words coming faster now, almost manic. She can see him thinking, planning, the way he always does, except there's a desperation to it, like he's been rehearsing this for hours. "After the holidays, maybe. Give her the fall with things normal, get through Christmas, and then—I'll tell her in January. Six months. That's enough time to figure out the logistics, make sure she’s okay, find a place to—"

“Billy.”

"—and we can still see each other. In the meantime. We could meet here, or somewhere else, I'll make it work—"

"Billy. Stop."

She looks at him—this man she's loved forever, offering her everything she ever wanted. And she feels it: the hope trying to sink its claws into her, desperate and hungry and so fucking dangerous.

She kills it before it can take root.

"You're asking me to help you have an affair."

"I wouldn't call it—"

"It doesn’t matter what you call it." Her voice is flat now. Detached. She can feel herself retreating into that distant place, the one she goes when things hurt too much to feel directly. "You're married. You'd be sleeping with me behind your wife's back. That's an affair. That's exactly what it is."

He's quiet.

"And you know what the worst part is?" She swings her legs over the side of the bed, stands, starts looking for her clothes. "You're not even thinking about what it does to me. You're thinking about what you get to keep. You get your family and you get me. You get to have everything. I get to rearrange my whole life around your schedule. Around your guilt. Around whatever scraps of time you can spare."

“Daisy." He gets out of bed, pulls on his jeans. Moves towards her but stops when she doesn't turn around. “I'm trying to do this right. I'm trying to give you—"

"You're trying to have it both ways." She finds her bikini bottoms on the floor, steps into them. Doesn't look at him. "You want to leave, but not yet. You want me, but only in secret. You want to be a good father and a faithful husband and also fuck me in a cabin when no one's watching."

She watches him flinch.

"That's not—I'm not—"

"You're not going to leave her."

He stares at her. "What?"

"You're not going to leave her, Billy. You're saying you will because it's morning and last night was—" She swallows. "But you're not. You're going to go home and see Julia and remember why you stay."

Something changes in his expression. Confusion, hurt. "You don't think I mean it."

"I think you mean it right now. Here." She gestures at the room, the rumpled bed, the cabin around them. "In this room, in this bed, with me. I don't doubt that for a second."

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is that right now isn't the rest of your life." She keeps her voice even. Like she's explaining something obvious to someone who doesn't want to hear it. "Right now is easy. Right now is just us. But in a few hours you're going to drive down that mountain and walk into your house and see Julia—"

"I know."

"—and she's going to run up to you the way she always does, and you're going to pick her up and smell her hair and remember why you stayed in the first place."

"Daisy—"

"And Camila's going to ask about your weekend. And you're going to lie—you'll have to, what else can you do?—and then you're going to eat dinner and do normal things and slowly, slowly, this is going to start feeling very far away."

"No—"

"Like something that happened to someone else." She's not accusing. Just stating facts. "Like a dream you had once. And then a week will pass, and you'll think about calling but you won't know what to say. And then a month. And then it'll be easier not to. And then—"

"Stop." His voice is sharp "Just—stop. Please.”

The silence that follows is brutal.

"That's what you think of me?" His voice is pained. "That I'd just... let it fade?"

"I think you'd survive. I think you'd do the right thing. I think you'd choose them, because that's who you are." She swallows hard. "You're a good man. Good men don't blow up their families."

"What if I'm not as good as you think I am?"

"Then you would have done something about this years ago."

It lands harder than she meant it to. She watches him absorb it, the inability to deny it.

"I was scared," he says.

"I know."

"I'm still scared. But I'm more scared of—I can't go back to pretending. I won't survive it."

"And I can't wait." The words come out cracked. "I've done the waiting. I've done the hoping and the checking my messages and the wondering if today's the day. I almost didn't survive that either."

She wants to reach for him. Wants to take it all back, tell him she believes him, she'll wait as long as he needs. But she's thirty-one years old and she's learned some things about hope. About what it costs when it doesn't pay off.

"There are other men out there, Billy." She says it gently. Not cruelly. "Men without baggage. Without wives. Men who would treat me well. Who would show up when they say they will. Who wouldn't make me wait six months wondering if they're going to choose me."

He's very still.

"And one of them might ask me to dinner. And I might say yes. And he might be kind and funny and actually free." She pauses. "And I might realize that being with someone uncomplicated feels... nice. Easy. Like something I didn't know I needed."

"And then what?"

"I don't know. That's the point." She looks at him. "I don't know who I'll be in six months. I don't know what I'll want. And neither do you."

"You think six months is going to change anything? For either of us?" There's a desperation to his voice now. "I'm not asking you to put your life on hold. I'm telling you what I'm going to do. You can believe me or not. But I'm going to do it."

He crosses to her. She doesn't step back, lets him close the distance until they're inches apart.

"I love you."

Three words she's waited years to hear him say—not implied, not almost-spoken, but actually said. Out loud. To her face.

"I love you," he says again. "I've been in love with you since that night on the bus when you smiled at me. Probably before that. And I've spent five years pretending I wasn't. I'm so fucking tired of pretending."

She can't breathe. Can't move.

"I'm telling you I love you." His hands come up to her face, cupping her jaw, making her look at him. "I'm telling you I want to be with you. Not for a night. Not in secret. For real. And I know I'm asking you to wait, and I know that's not fair, but I'm asking anyway because I don't know what else to do."

His eyes are shiny. Desperate. Honest in a way she's never seen them.

"Tell me last night didn't mean anything. Tell me that and I'll walk away and never mention it again."

She stares at him. This man who's broken her heart in slow motion without ever meaning to. This man who's finally saying everything she ever wanted to hear.

"That's not the problem," she says quietly. "That's never been the problem."

"Then what?"

"The problem is that you love me and you're going to go home. You love me and you're going to lie next to your wife tonight. You love me and in six months you'll have found a reason why leaving isn't the right thing to do." She reaches up, touches his face. "You can love me and still not choose me. You've been doing it for years."

"No." He pulls back from her touch. "I'll go right now. Drive straight home, tell Camila everything. Today. This morning."

"Billy—"

"I mean it. Julia has a sleepover—she won't be there. I can tell Camila before she gets back. Have a bag packed by noon." His voice is almost angry. "Is that what you want? Because I'll do it. I'll blow up my whole fucking life right now if that's what it takes to make you believe me."

He's not bluffing. She can see it in his face. He would actually do it.

"No."

"Why not? You just said—"

She shakes her head. "I don't want you to choose me like this. In a panic.”

"Then how? Tell me how, Daisy, because I'm running out of options here."

"I don't want Julia to come home and find out her father's gone! I don't want Camila blindsided because you made a decision at eight in the morning you might regret by eight at night!"

"I wouldn't—"

"I don't want to be the bomb that goes off in your family." Her voice cracks. She forces it steady. "I don't want us to start from this place. From you resenting me. From your daughter growing up knowing I'm the reason her parents aren't together."

"Then what do you want, Daisy?"

"I don't know!" It tears out of her. "I want you to have already left. I want a version of this where there's no one else to consider. I want something that doesn't exist."

She watches his face cycle through confusion, frustration, something close to anger and then land on nothing. He's out of moves. There's no argument left to make.

"I just know…I can't be the one waiting by the phone. And I can't be the reason your daughter's life falls apart. And I can't—" She stops. "I can't keep standing here or I'm going to let you talk me into something we'll both regret." She steps back. Out of his reach. "I want you to do what you're going to do. Leave her or don't. But do it because you're ready, not because you're afraid of losing me."

She waits for him to argue. Wants him to, almost. If he'd just say the wrong thing, it would be easier to leave.

But he doesn't. He just stands there, and the look on his face is the one she'll carry with her for years whether she wants to or not.

She makes herself turn away. Moves through the cabin—past the kitchen where she drank the whiskey and he kissed it off her lips, past the living room where they fucked on the floor like it was their last night on earth. Her caftan is crumpled by the couch. She picks it up, pulls it on over the bikini.

Billy follows her to the door but doesn't try to stop her. Just watches. She can feel his eyes on her back.

"Daisy."

She stops at the door. Turns.

He's standing in the middle of the room, morning light falling across his face, and he's never looked more beautiful to her. More impossible. More like everything she wants and can't have. Last night still written all over both of them.

"I'm going to do it." His voice is steady now. Certain in a way it wasn't before. "Whether you believe me or not. Whether you wait or not. I'm going to find a way."

She looks at him for a long moment. "Then you know where to find me.”

**********

The drive down the mountain is quiet. No radio—she can't risk hearing her own voice, or worse, something that reminds her of him. No thoughts she'll let herself finish. Just the road and the trees and the light getting stronger as the sun climbs higher.

When she reaches the coast, she pulls over.

Not at one of the thirteen beaches. Just a turnout, a place where the cliffs drop away and you can see the ocean stretching out to the horizon. She gets out of the car and stands at the edge, arms wrapped around herself, watching the waves.

The water is calmer today than it was yesterday. No whitecaps, no foam. Just the steady roll and retreat, the rhythm that was here before her and will be here long after.

Yesterday she drove north looking for something. She's not sure what. Solitude. An escape. A place where she could exist without being Daisy Jones.

She found Billy instead.

She doesn't know what last night means. Doesn't know if it was an ending or a beginning or just a single night carved out of time. Doesn't know if he'll show up in six months with divorce papers, or if she'll see his face in a magazine next year, still smiling beside Camila at some industry event, and have to pretend it doesn't gut her.

Maybe this is how it ends. Maybe they'll run into each other decades from now and share a look across a crowded room that says I remember and nothing else. A whole love story compressed into a single glance that no one else will understand.

Maybe she was right about him. Maybe she wasn't. She doesn't know anything, really, except that she's still here. Still standing. Still breathing.

She stays at the turnout until the sun is fully up, until the light loses its softness and turns ordinary. Then she gets back in the car and drives south.

The city will still be there when she arrives. The empty house, the unanswered questions, the life she's been sleepwalking through. All of it waiting. But she's not the same person who left yesterday. She's carrying something now. A small, stubborn flame.

Somewhere up there, past the county line, there's a cabin in the pines where the world drops away. Where no one can find you unless you want to be found. A place that's theirs now, whether they ever return to it or not.

You know where to find me.

It wasn't a promise. Wasn't an invitation, exactly. Just a door left unlocked. A possibility she's not ready to close.

If he comes for her—really comes with his whole self—she'll be there. Not waiting, just... living. Finally. For real this time.

And if he asks nicely enough, she might even let him in.