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I UNLOCKED THE front door and put the keys in the catchall tray on the sideboard as I walked in.

Sam and Frodo met me at the door, wagging their tails happily as they explored all the new smells on my shoes.

On the entire walk home, I went through my fight with Gigi again and again, things I should have said, things I shouldn’t have.

She’d kept Mitch’s proposal from me, but why ? I had a feeling he had already proposed when Mom first told me he’d asked for the ring. After she’d been so pointed about my own freedom, about having multiple guys interested—I put two and two together. I just wished I hadn’t been right.

But what about Mom? She was so excited when she told me that Mitch had asked for the ring …

I pursed my lips, slipping out of my Birkenstocks by the door. As I rounded into the kitchen, the distinct pungent smell of burnt plastic hit my nose.

Then Dad, softly muttering, “It’s okay. It’s okay, my heart. Lemme help.”

“I said I can do it, Hank.” Mom’s voice was uncharacteristically sharp. “I just forgot.”

In the kitchen, the oven was open, and there was burnt red goop all inside that looked … mysteriously like a Folgers jar. My parents were studying the damage, and then Mom took a spatula and tried to scrape at the melted plastic and roasted coffee, but it was stuck fast.

“It’s an easy fix,” Dad went on gently. “We’ll just get a new rack. Replace the heating element—”

“We don’t have that kind of money,” Mom replied frankly, and when Dad tried to pry out the rack, she snapped. “Just leave it! I’ll do it. I’ll figure it out.”

“Wyn—”

“Stop looking at me like that! I just forgot!” she snapped, and her voice cracked at the end. “I just …”

Dad saw me then, in the doorway, and his expression crumpled because I’d seen this part of their life, and this time he couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t. He looked like he wanted to say something, but then Mom sucked in a sob, and he quickly turned back to her and wrapped her in his arms.

I took a step out of the kitchen, and then another, and another, tracing my way back to the foyer.

The storm, the proverbial one in my head, was roaring closer and closer the more we refused to think about it.

I made myself breathe in and breathe out.

I made myself ignore the feeling in my chest, the way it twisted, the way it constricted.

I made my fingers curl around the keys to my parents’ Subaru.

I made myself leave the house, as fast as I could, down the driveway to the Subaru, where I strapped myself into the driver’s seat and tightened my fingers around the steering wheel. But I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do—

My spiraling thoughts froze.

I heard a song.

The melody—Sasha’s and mine. He was singing it, or trying to. Humming the song, and trying to fit lyrics into it.

‘‘It sounds like—no, shorter.” He sang the top of the chorus again. ‘‘Sounds like—like what? Hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, and blue moons. Bullshit.”

The more he tried, the more aggravated he became. How long had he been working on the song without me?

“She used to make this look so easy,” he lamented. Oh, I wish I did. Wait, used to ?

He wasn’t talking about me. His mother had been a musician, too. He must have been talking about her.

What kind of songs did she write?

I wondered, and sat, and listened, waiting for my heart to finally settle back into my chest. I just needed to calm down, and listening to Sasha helped.

“I feel you there,” he said.

At first, I thought it was a lyric. It was a nice lyric. Feeling someone near you, what a comfort that could be—like a friend you’ve always known.

Then I realized he was talking to me.

I sat ramrod straight in the driver’s seat. Oh! Oh god—sorry. I didn’t—I wasn’t—I mean we can’t really eavesdrop because we’re always in each other’s heads but …

“Do you have any suggestions?”

No , I admitted. I wished I could bottle up the feeling I felt while writing “If You Stayed,” the tug right at my center that drew me to every note, every harmony, every lyric.

It was the same feeling I felt when I listened to my favorite song at full blast, the way it reverberated through my body as I lay on my bedroom floor.

My heart floating in my chest. My soul so full it might burst. But how did you explain what it felt like to hear your favorite song?

An idea occurred to me. I sat up a little straighter. Where is your rental house, again?

FIVE MINUTES LATER, I pulled up to a yellow cottage on the beach about three blocks from my parents’ house. It was the Ashtons’ old place. Iwan had mentioned his mom had turned it into a rental. I’m here.

“Already?” Then he poked his fingers through the blinds in one of the front windows and scissored them open. “Is that you in the Mombaru?”

I beeped the horn in reply.

Two minutes later, he was hopping into his Vans and sliding into the passenger seat.

“Wow, this really is a Mombaru,” he said delightedly.

My parents had eclectic taste when it came to decorating their Subaru.

They always had a fresh Yankee Candle scent hanging from the rearview mirror (Macintosh, obviously) alongside a disco ball, and the sunroof had suncatcher stickers that, on sunny days when they opened it up, poured rainbows onto the seats.

I had it open now, and the windows rolled down, and the AC kicked all the way up.

Just like I used to.

Sasha buckled himself in. “I appreciate that I’m a bad influence on you,” he said smugly. “Here I thought you’d show up and ask to work.”

“We are working,” I insisted, “and besides, someone told me that when you’re stuck, sometimes you just need to do something else.”

He nodded sagely. “I agree with this wise, good-looking man.”

I rolled my eyes and ignored him fishing for compliments.

“So,” he asked, “what are we doing, then?”

“I think I know how to get us on the same page,” I said, and then turned in my seat to look at him honestly. “I want to show you why my favorite song is my favorite song.”

Up close, he looked like he hadn’t slept very well last night. There were deep circles under his eyes, and his half-up man bun had fallen a bit, dark curls framing his face. His Hawaiian shirt looked more alive than he did, a colorful teal peacock print. Finally he said, “I would like that.”

I smiled. “Amazing. I’m a pretty good driver, too, so just buckle up and—”

“But before we go,” he interrupted, fiddling with a silver ring on his first finger, “about last night … I want to apologize.”

Having put the car in drive, I returned it to park.

“It’s okay.” “It’s not. I …” He licked his chapped lips, and took a deep breath. “I don’t know who I am without my anger at my dad. At myself. I don’t know how else music is supposed to feel.”

I tilted my head, considering the man in my passenger seat. The first time I met him, I saw a glimmer of something more. He didn’t see it—but I felt it, that comfort in the back of my head where his thoughts met mine, warm and soft and golden. “I think I might.”

Then I put the car into drive again and pulled away from the rental property. The sun was bright on the pavement in the late afternoon. I fished out Mom’s aviators from the sunglasses compartment and put them on.

“Could you look in the glove box for a mixtape?” I asked him, motioning to the compartment at his knees.

“A burned CD?” he corrected me as he opened it.

“No, a mixtape.”

He found it—one of Mom’s old cassettes she kept in here for “emergencies”—and closed the glove box. There were songs listed on the side of it, but the ink had smeared with time, and he couldn’t read any of them, so he handed the tape over to me. “What’re you going to subject me to?”

I rolled up to a stop sign that let out onto the highway, popped open the clamshell, and inserted the cassette into the old stereo system.

“Magic,” I replied, and pressed play.

The speakers crackled, and I turned up the volume as loud as it could go, and as the piano began, I turned onto the only highway in and out of Vienna Shores.

The wind whipped through the old Subaru, catching in our hair like tiny fingers, and the guitar wailed through the stereo, and the car shivered at the thrum of the bass, and the beach rolled past—

And this was it.

What magic felt like. How it moved. How it persisted.

How it thrived. It lived in midnight joyrides with best friends, singing to stave off sleep after a night at a concert two hours away.

It lived in afternoon drives with parents, howling the guitar riffs at the top of their lungs.

It lived in weeklong road trips just at the corner of your memory, to places you can’t even remember.

It was in the commutes to work, the stuck-in-traffic nightmares, the trips to the grocery store, and the long plane rides home.

See? I whispered to Sasha, as one song folded into another. This is it.

He couldn’t take his eyes off me. “It is.”