“Well, it was generous of you to tell me the truth, even though it cost you,” Gwen said.

“I . . . ,” Claire said, staring down at the check. The strangest thought came into her mind. If she went out of town for so long, she and Amara would never have a chance to make things right between them. She shook her head. That crazy idea shouldn’t be a consideration.

“Please, Claire,” Gwen said, her voice catching. “I just want to make something good happen, after everything bad lately.”

“Then, wow,” Claire said. “Thank you. This is amazing.”

* * *

—

Claire took a bus to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. The rental place Gwen had found for her, a basement apartment in a turquoise-painted house, was a twenty-minute walk from the center of town. She laid down her luggage and her guitar in the bedroom, eyeing the twin bed, which was covered with a thin green-and-pink-flowered quilt. Well, she guessed she wouldn’t be having any overnight guests there. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

She went into town to get groceries and then stopped in front of a liquor store, ready to buy a few handles to get her through the week. She paused with her hand on the doorknob. Maybe it also wouldn’t be a bad thing to try a night totally sober. She could come back tomorrow. Her groceries were pretty heavy anyway.

By nine thirty P.M., she’d realized that she could only get intermittent access to the Internet by holding her laptop up above the bed in one particular patch of air, and she was desperate for a drink. She ran to the liquor store as a drizzle of rain turned into a downpour. Her stomach dropped as she approached the darkened windows, as she read the sign on the door announcing that they only stayed open until nine. Fuck, she’d forgotten that places outside of NYC closed at reasonable times. She wanted to cry. That, or break a store window, vault herself over the broken glass, grab a handle, and make a run for it.

Instead, she pulled out her phone to look up the nearest bar. Then she paused. She’d been so self-righteous with the playgroup women when she couldn’t even get through one night alone without drinking herself into a stupor? Screw that. She’d go dry for one week, like a mini Lent, just to prove to herself that she could.

The mini Lent week was awful. She alternated between feeling bored out of her mind and far too anxious. But once she’d waited one week, she decided she might as well wait two. And then waiting two weeks turned into a month. It turned out that when she wasn’t numbing herself with alcohol and the Internet and didn’t have any playgroup to take up all her energy, she had nothing to do except channel her feelings into songs. With no distractions from the terrible feelings that came up, she just had to sit with them and then turn them into something else. She was a useless lump for a while, and then she wrote and wrote.

At the end of July, she had a hundred false starts, and five full songs. She played them all through and knew in her bones that, even if she got really lucky with connections and timing, these songs would never make her famous like Vagabond. Her music didn’t have that sort of mindless catchiness, that danceability.

But maybe she liked what she had made anyway. Maybe she could be okay with a life in which Vagabond never watched her light up their TV screens as they choked on their own jealousy, a life in which the great wrong they’d done to her was never righted and karma never kicked them in the ass, a life where they had everything and she just had—what was it that the Rolling Stone profile of Vagabond had said, with a certain degree of scorn?—a solid career of quietly doing what she loved. Maybe that would be amazing.

But to do that, it would help to have the money she deserved. She thought of Amara, the way she’d said, “You wrote the only good part of the number one song in the country?” Claire had, and it was about time she got some credit. Once the idea came into her mind, she couldn’t get it out, so she bought a bus ticket out of Jim Thorpe a month earlier than she’d originally planned. Gwen might be upset at the squandering of her gift, but Claire didn’t have to tell her. On a sweltering Saturday morning in August, Claire came back to the city and met up with Thea.

They made the mistake of going to Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, under the incorrect assumption that August in New York City was a nice time to be outside, instead of a time when the trash reeked more than it ever could any other month. (They’d lived in New York for years now and should have known better, but each long winter created a kind of memory wipe. Claire thought she should get a Memento-style tattoo to remind herself.) They sat by the lake on a bench, glistening, and fanned themselves. To Claire’s slight surprise, Thea wore a loose white shirt and athletic shorts, different from her normal, structured wardrobe.

“So,” Claire said, “if I wanted to ask Vagabond for my share of the royalties for helping to write ‘Idaho Eyes,’ would you be my lawyer?”

“Oh, hell yes, I would,” Thea said. “It would be my pleasure. If they don’t cooperate, I will help you sue the pants off of those bastards.”

“Thank you,” Claire said. “Obviously, I’d want to handle it all quietly, if we could, but I think they would too. And I’d like for us all to be in the same room as little as possible. And I don’t need a lot from them, just what’s fair.”

“We’ll start out by asking for a lot, though,” Thea said, and Claire could almost hear the whirring inside her brain as she calculated percentages and profits. “I’d want to get this hammered out soon. Because, actually, I have something I want to talk to you about too.” She leaned forward and folded her hands on her lap, an unfamiliar note of uncertainty and excitement coming into her voice. “I know I’ve been hard to reach lately. That’s because Amy and I are having a baby. I’m pregnant.”

For the briefest moment, Claire felt a pang of sadness at how things would never fully be the same between them again. And then joy came and kicked that pang out the door. “Thea!” Claire screamed, and threw her arms around her.

“You’ll be Aunt Claire, of course,” Thea said, and then they went off on a spree talking about baby names and how this was the first morning in weeks that Thea hadn’t thrown up, and although she didn’t want to jinx it, she thought she really might make it through the day vomit-free.

Then Claire’s phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen, a thrum starting in her chest as she registered what she was seeing. A message, with Amara’s name at the top: Hey there. Any chance that you’re free? Can we meet up and talk?

“What?” Thea asked. “Is it a man?”

“It’s nothing,” Claire said.

“That is not the kind of face you make when it’s nothing.” She plucked Claire’s phone away from her, entered the pass code (they’d long known each other’s passwords by heart, like neighbors exchanging spare keys in case of emergency), and looked at the screen. “Who’s Amara?”