Page 56 of Crescendo

Ella

Lydia was magnificent. She was vital and real and inspired. She was the exact person she’d always been while playing with me, only bigger, more. She was doing it with other people now. This was the Lydia she’d always been, the one she’d somehow lost along the road.

She raced around the music room playing different instruments, calling instructions to Natália, composing, directing, conducting—and she had to leave.

I knew it. Deep down, she knew it too.

She was trying. She hadn’t slept. I’d found her in the music room, on the phone with Natália, and, an hour later, we were still here. It was getting late in LA. Were they both going to work through the night? Were they ever going to sleep?

Maybe there was a way to work that out, but there wasn’t a way to work out the frustration at not being in the same space, the way she kept complaining about needing Natália to be in the room with her.

The call couldn’t pick up the intricacies of every bit of music Lydia played.

It couldn’t capture the vibe of being in the same place, composing together.

They couldn’t rewrite an entire score like this. Especially not on the deadline they had.

She was so beautiful, and this was her whole life.

London had been a momentary distraction, an attempt to find her way home.

And she’d done it. She didn’t need Crescendo.

She’d done it all by herself, and, now, she had to put her career first. She couldn’t choose another couple of weeks at Crescendo over her job, her life, her pounding, driving heart that needed her to compose.

You didn’t get to the level Lydia was at without making difficult decisions. And you didn’t get to love her without making them either.

I choked back tears, pretending to still be focusing on my piece on the laptop in my lap, and I pulled up a search page. Flights. London to LA. Today.

I sighed. She’d never make them. Too early. And we were already too late.

Tomorrow, though. I could get her on one of those.

It would cost a small fortune but I hadn’t been doing much with my money—working all hours of the day and living very little. I could do this one thing for her. Business class from London to LA. Tomorrow.

I slipped out of the room, leaving the door open so I could hear her, and found her passport on the bedroom sideboard where it had been sitting this whole time, just waiting for this moment.

Taunting me like it knew this moment was always coming.

Fitting, really, for the haunting, breaking march she and Natália were sounding out in the other room.

If they didn’t win an Oscar for this score, I didn’t know what would, and it wasn’t even finished yet—had barely even started.

I entered her details and bought the ticket, tears flowing freely where she couldn’t see me. I couldn’t stand to look at the bed we’d lain in together. I’d known we only had so long; how did we end up with even less than that?

I wiped my face clean and went back to the music room, walking to the piano where her phone was propped up. “Sorry, Natália, Lydia will call you back in a minute.”

“Hey, Ella!” she called, so happy, so cheerful. Why wouldn’t she be? She was getting everything. “Don’t you love the music?”

“It’s really great,” I said quickly, seeing the puzzled look Lydia was giving me. “See you in a sec.”

I hung up and turned to Lydia, who held a hand out towards me. I shook my head, moving half a step back. Watching her freeze, her hand in the air, reaching for me, was heartbreaking, but I wouldn’t get through this the way I wanted to if she held me.

“Ella?” she asked, unsure and too emotional. She knew what was coming, of course.

I tried to smile, the look ruined by hot tears running down my cheeks. “You have to go home,” I said, my voice hitching and breaking.

“What?” But she didn’t really mean it. I could see the understanding on her face. We both knew what had to happen.

“You came here for this.” I gestured to the piano. “This score beat you down and sent you here, but you figured it out, you defeated your block. And now, you have to go home so you can finish the score.”

“There’s only a few weeks left—I can do it from here.”

I watched her with a heartbroken smile. “I guess if anyone could, it would be you, but let’s be real, Lydia, you don’t have all the instruments or equipment you need here. You don’t have Natália in the same room. The time, the distance, all of it… You need to be back there.”

“But we…”

“I know.” I nodded, barely able to see her through my tears. “I know.”

“Ella,” she said, breaking too, tears thick in her voice, and I couldn’t refrain from touching her any more. I moved to the piano stool, sobbing when she wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed her face into my stomach.

My dad had said something to her about grief being like rooms inside your heart where all the sadness lived. How many rooms did I have to build before I couldn’t go on anymore?

But letting her go was letting her live—a huge, vibrant, fantastic life. Just like the rooms she’d live in in my heart. Even sadness couldn’t beat her magnificence.

“I booked you a ticket for tomorrow morning, out of Heathrow,” I told her.

“You didn’t need to do that.”

“I wanted to.” I tried to laugh and failed. “Business class and everything.”

“Oh, my god, Ella. I’ll pay you back.” She shook her head and I felt how wet my shirt was with her tears. At least that made them real.

“Please don’t,” I hiccuped through a sob. “You’ve done so much for me. Let me do this one thing for you.”

“You have no idea how much you’ve done for me too, Ella Hendrickson.” She leaned back, looking up at me, and I didn’t think I’d ever had anyone look at me with so much unsaid. “My whole world is better because you are in it.”

I held her face, swiping uselessly at her tears. “You have no idea how beautiful you are.”

“You too.”

No self-assured comeback, no witty remark. Everything was already different.

She pulled me down into a kiss and my breathing stopped. I wanted everything to stop, wanted to stay there with her forever. We’d known we only had two months, but I still didn’t know how to say goodbye to her.

We settled on the piano bench together and I hadn’t had enough time to enjoy how she felt pressed up beside me there.

If I did that every day of my life, I didn’t think it would be enough.

Sitting together on that bench had changed my whole life.

I was a different person now and it was so much thanks to her, and I hated that we only had so long left.

Two months. A promise it was only casual.

Trying so hard to make that be true, prevent myself from falling in love with her.

But almost two months living with Lydia, basking in the exquisite pleasure of every little bit of who she was—it had been a fool’s errand.

I loved her and I had to let her go home.

I’d lost my time to figure out how to make this thing work.

And I felt all of it sitting on that bench with her, holding her so hard she might leave an imprint on me that would never leave.

She already had.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, Ella Hendrickson!” she said, trying for amused and missing by… a lot.

I looked at her, still perfect even in her sadness. Maybe sadness wasn’t the curse I’d told myself it was. The sadness made it real. She’d brought me back to life and she deserved to be so adored that the sadness hurt this badly. “Very inconsiderate of me. But if I hadn’t—”

“I know.”

I nodded. All of the time in the universe would never be enough to appreciate this woman. “You’ll have to go tell everyone—Olivia, Clara, Bansi…”

“Come with me?”

“Of course.”

“Not yet, though.” She looked over my face, drinking every inch of me in.

She looked at me like she loved me. But we couldn’t do that.

Couldn’t go there in an emotional moment where we were being pushed to the edge and reality was more complicated than just being in love with someone. “Play with me?”

The tears rolled thicker and faster. I could barely see her or the piano, couldn’t speak, but I nodded and my fingers found the keys.

And I couldn’t tell her I loved her but I put it into the music, put everything I knew about her and everything I felt for her into every note, and maybe she knew it anyway.

We always had seemed to speak a musical language together, just the two of us.

∞∞∞

I’d moved through the last twenty-four hours on some weird autopilot, taking in nothing other than Lydia. Every touch, every word, every look—they were the only real things.

I’d forced a smile as we’d tracked everyone down and she’d told them all she had to go home, that her inspiration was back and she had a score to write, but that she’d miss them all.

I’d forced a smile when they’d all looked at me, worried for me, and I’d pretended not to see it.

And I’d forced a smile when Olivia told her to do the ugly things and Hannah told her not to forget the rock in favour of the classical.

We’d barely been a foot apart, the whole day filled with tears and laughter and words that wanted to be something else—platitudes that needed to be declarations.

And we’d made love that was beautiful and broken, soft and desperate, and a goodbye neither of us wanted to give. Until we were here, Lydia’s luggage waiting in the hall, her car on the way.

She pulled her coat on and met me by the door.

“You’re going to do amazingly,” I whispered.

It was all the voice I had. “The score will be incredible, win praise and awards, and everyone will know that Lydia Howard Fox never lost her touch. And, maybe one day, you’ll be back here, playing it in the Royal Albert Hall, and I’ll get to watch you soar. ”

She let out a wet laugh. “I’m not usually there when they’re playing my stuff, you know?”