Page 17 of Last Track

Galen said it without heat, which was worse than if he'd shouted it. "Everyone's always very understanding when I leave. Agencies. Venues. Landlords. Nobody's ever minded, not once, in ten years. I thought that was just how it worked. I didn't think it was supposed to feel like this every time."

Martin reached for the only honest thing he had. "I thought you were coming back."

"You never said that."

"Neither did you."

Both true. Both of them, Martin realised, had spent two weeks using silence as though it were a kindness, when it had only ever been a way of not risking the answer.

Martin had the rest of the sentence somewhere behind his teeth, but Galen looked away toward Nina and the lane before he found it.

Martin touched his face instead, once. Galen closed his eyes for exactly as long as the touch lasted, then stepped back.

Nina started on the first try.

Martin stood in the lane and watched her go, engine steady, exhaust catching pale in the cold morning air, the whole van moving under its own power precisely as she should. Two weeks ago she had failed him at the mouth of this same lane and given him everything he hadn't known he wanted. Now she worked perfectly, and that, somehow, was the problem. He watched until the lane bent and took her out of sight, and stood a moment longer after that, listening to an engine he could no longer hear.

He went inside once the yard had gone properly quiet.

The corner beside the stove was empty.

Martin left it that way.

9

GALEN

Nina held sixty-five on the motorway without complaint, temperature needle steady, engine turning over with the smooth indifference of a van that had never once given him trouble in her life. Galen kept glancing at the gauge anyway, out of habit rather than worry, and each time found nothing but good behaviour looking back at him. Ashcombe fell away behind him mile by mile, and for the first hundred of them he let himself feel nothing except the specific, uncomplicated relief of being competent at his own life again.

The work went well. It was meant to, and it did. He learned Dev's book inside a day, adjusted his fingerings to a bass player who liked everything half a step lower than sensible, and played six sets clean enough that by the third venue the promoter was asking Ferras whether Galen might be free for the autumn as well. A fiddle player in Stroud told him, with the particular bluntness musicians reserved for other musicians, that he played like a man who'd learned to listen before he'd learned to perform, which Galen chose to take as the compliment it probably was. He arrived early, packed down without being asked, took his fee without complaint, and left before anyone had time to notice him leaving. It was, by every measure that had ever mattered to him professionally, a very good week.

Somewhere around the fourth night, in a green room that smelled of someone else's cigarettes, Galen noticed the shape of what he was doing and did not much like it.

He arrived, became useful, played well, helped pack the desk, took the thanks, and left before anyone's face had time to change when he said goodbye. He had spent ten years perfecting the choreography and calling it a strength. Being welcome everywhere and belonging somewhere were not the same skill; he had practised the first until it looked like the second.

Martin's texts arrived just as sparse as Galen should have expected and read a dozen times more than their length justified. Glad it went well. Drive carefully, forecast's turning Friday. Once, after Galen sent a photograph of Nina parked outside a particularly ugly function room, three words came back — she looks pleased — which was as close to sentiment as Martin apparently allowed himself over a screen. Galen sent a joke about the tea in Cheltenham falling well short of Ashcombe standards and got no reply at all, and told himself that meant nothing, and read the silence four more times before he put the phone down.

He missed more than he'd expected to: working in a shared, unbothered quiet, Martin's face doing the small, private thing it did when a difficult passage resolved clean, Hazel's questions that never demanded a whole answer, being expected at a table at seven and noticed, however briefly, whenever he came home from wherever the day had taken him.

The Bristol room was precisely as he'd left it, and that was the problem.

Post sat neatly stacked where the landlady always left it. The bed was made under a thin layer of dust. His stored boxes waited in the same corner they'd waited in for three years, patient and undemanding, holding nothing he'd missed enough to think about in all the time he'd been at Ashcombe. Nothing was wrong with any of it. It was clean, functional, legally his, and entirely indifferent to whether he'd come home tonight or in another six months. Nobody here would notice if he never returned at all, and nobody would be wrong not to notice, because he had never given this room a single reason to expect him.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his coat still on. The room asked nothing of him. It had never expected him back.

Ferras rang the next morning with the offer of a longer continuation, more dates, a fuller autumn than he'd had in years, the kind of run his younger self would have accepted before she'd finished the sentence.

"I can do some of it," he said. "Not the whole run back to back. I'll need gaps."

"Define gaps."

"A week here and there. Maybe more."

There was a pause that had nothing to do with signal. "As long as you're where I need you when I need you, I don't much care where you spend the rest of it."

It had genuinely never occurred to him, in ten years, that the arrangement could be renegotiated rather than simply endured. He had built an entire identity on being endlessly, uncomplainingly available, and nobody, in the end, had actually required that of him. He had required it of himself.

He let himself sketch it out properly for the first time in the last quiet hour of the run, in the loose, unfinished way he sketched a new arrangement before committing it to paper. Ashcombe as a base rather than a stopover. The autumn dates Ferras had offered, taken selectively, with real gaps between them instead of a continuous chain. Seamus's Fridays whenever he was home. Perhaps lessons, eventually, if Wrenwood's children ever wanted them, or session work he could record and send rather than travel for. He would keep the Bristol room a while longer, if only because giving it up before he knew the new arrangement was real seemed like betting more than he'd yet earned the right to bet. None of it was decided. All of it was, for the first time, actually his to decide.