“You’re not making any sense.”

Will sighed heavily on the other end of the line, and Hannah knew his hair had to be mussed—she hoped he didn’t have any interviews today.

“‘If this doesn’t work out, I’ll have nowhere to go.’ That’s what you said. I know I came to you with the pact, but maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should’ve just asked you on a date like a normal person. Most people don’t need to keep a second apartment in case things go wrong. They risk everything on the chance that it will work out. I need you to do that now, and the only way I’ll ever believe you want to be with me is if we end the pact.”

Hannah blinked back tears. Maybe he had thought it through. Maybe he was right. If they got rid of the safety net the pact afforded—that they wouldn’t be jerks, would stay friends, and would be married for one year—they would either catch each other, or they would fall. Would their fledgling relationship survive without the pact tying them together? Were their hearts enough?

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Let’s end the pact.”  

Chapter 51Hannah

Hannah stared at the blank screen on her phone. Had that just happened? Will couldn’t have realized what day and time it was. He wouldn’t have knowingly called her during the biggest interview of her career. And yet she had picked up. Why the hell had she picked up? She forced the conversation out of her mind, straightened her shoulders, and tried to refocus her thoughts. Leonard Nulty was waiting for her. Literally.

“Everything okay?” He was also standing behind her.

Shit. Hannah whirled around, plastering a smile on her face. “Yes, of course. Sorry, that was my husband reminding me to get him an autograph.”

“Ah. Big fan?”

“We both are,” Hannah said. Maybe he hadn’t heard anything. She directed him toward a pair of couches where bottled water and wine waited on ice. “He introduced me to Wilderness, actually.”

Leonard squinted in concentration. It was a face she’d seen plenty of times on tour, but up close, it was completely different. “Let me guess. Your wedding song is... ‘Love Acts.’”

Hannah laughed. That would have most definitely been their song. “I wish.” She palmed her face. “It’s actually that new Ed Sheeran ballad, but I imagine under different circumstances, it would’ve been ‘Love Acts.’”

He raised his eyebrows. “Do tell.”

She shook her head—she shouldn’t be telling Leonard Nulty about her love life. “That’s a long story.”

“I love long stories.”

“I’m sure you do, but this interview is about you, not me,” she said, pointing her pen at him.

“Right, right. Ask away.” He sat back on the couch. His body language seemed open and relaxed.

“You haven’t given an exclusive or any long-form interviews in over two years.” Her hands shook as she spoke—Leonard wasn’t any other celebrity. He was her celebrity. She clasped her fingers, resting them on top of her notebook. “Why now?”

“I’m retiring.”

Holy shit. Another album, another tour, going solo—all of these she’d been prepared for. But retiring? The fangirl in her was screaming. Outwardly, she met his gaze with as professional an expression as she could manage. “Wow,” she said, letting out a breath. “That was hard to hear.”

He laughed softly. “I’m sure it was.”

“Why give this to Deafening?” The question was out of her mouth before she had a chance to think about it. It was a fair question, though hardly appropriate in this setting. News like this, even with his midlist career, was worthy of much bigger venues.

He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “When we first started, we went out to LA to hit it big. We played in God knows how many small venues and Battles of the Bands. We made no traction.” Hannah knew most of this, but she wasn’t about to stop him. “And then one night, Riley Anderson—hell, she was younger than me—interviewed us for Deafening Silence. I’d only ever seen that magazine on the windowsill of the old records store on Sunset, but Riley was the first person to interview us, and she kept at it. She found us again and again. She’s one of two journalists I trust.”

“Who’s the other?”

“My college roommate, Jackson Mendez.”

No freaking way. “The editor in chief of Talented.”

“The one and only. And I know your next question. Why not give this story to him, right?”

Hannah nodded.

“Well, as a fan, would you rather hear a filtered-down version of the story from an interviewer who drew the short straw over at Talented or, as Jackson put it, from ‘one of the most talented writers on the alternative music scene’?”

Jackson Mendez knew who she was. She felt faint. That would be an interesting turn of events. She scanned her list of questions, more to give herself a moment to process the knowledge she’d just received than because she needed to. She’d memorized her list backward. None of them seemed relevant now.

“Why are you retiring?” Simple but effective.

He shook his head. “Before I answer that, Riley said you’d do right by me. That’s why I agreed to the exclusive even though it wasn’t with her. But if I’m going to bare my soul, I want something in return.”

Had this been another artist, Hannah might have been concerned. As it was, Leonard was happily married. Nearly all his songs were about his wife. “What do you want to know?”

“For starters, you can tell me that story about your wedding song, and then we can talk about what really happened on the phone.”

It was a good thing acting wasn’t in Hannah’s future. There was no harm in telling him about Will, and if it got him to answer her questions, there were worse things than talking to her musical idol about her love life.

She sat back in her chair, her notebook still resting on her lap. “On graduation night—”

“College or high school?” He sank into the cushions, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes.

“College. Will and I made a pact to get married if we were both still single when we turned thirty. About four months ago, he showed up at my door with an engagement ring. Five days later, we had a ceremony.” The memory came back to her, the fear mixed with excitement. It felt like another lifetime, not four months ago. “We went on a honeymoon and crashed a wedding. Then we danced to that Ed Sheeran song.”

He gave her an appraising look. “That’s pretty badass.”

She’d never thought of it like that. The pact had been a weighty secret that they’d kept. A truth—her truth—that she hadn’t told. In a way, the secret had led to a sort of shame. Even if it worked out, they’d been stupid and reckless, and they’d hurt their families. But telling the story, out loud to an outside party, she felt exhilarated by that risk she’d taken.

“Why are you retiring?” she asked again.

“We started this band when we were nineteen—college freshmen at a school about as far away from the punk scene as you could get. You hope, but you never really expect to make anything out of a college rock band. But we went out to LA, and then we were signed. We had a hit here and there that broke mainstream. We toured all the time, and my wife, Veronica, had been there from the beginning. She traveled with us when she could. We made it work for a long time, but then we had Alicia.”

He pulled up a photo on his phone of his daughter—all dark-brown hair and hazel eyes, wispy like so many kids that age. She sat with a guitar in her lap, her fingers splayed over an E chord. “She’s four now, and every time I drag out the suitcases, she runs into her room and cries. She flops down on that little bed of hers and kicks her feet in such anger. This last time, she clung to my leg the entire time I packed. She tried to throw away my plane tickets. After that, it was an easy choice.”

Hannah’s heart swelled. This was why she loved Leonard Nulty and Wilderness Weekend. His love for his wife, his daughter, and his music came through in every line of every song. They were his inspiration, in the music and in ending it.

“You could stop touring,” she said, the journalist in her knowing this was a good follow-up question and the fan in her dying at the thought of the end of Wilderness Weekend.

“Making the music without the tour would be a half-life,” he said after a moment of hesitation. “That wouldn’t be fair to anyone. Fans would miss it, I would miss it, and my family would feel that tug-of-war in me. That’s not to say I’m done writing music. I’ll write and produce. I’m sure a tune or two will find its way into the universe. But I’m tired of missing recitals and sleeping alone on tour buses. It took me a long time to decide this, but now that I have... there’s no longer a place for Wilderness Weekend.”

His words rendered her speechless with their weight and truth and the responsibility that was placed on her. She imagined reading those words in an article or on his blog—there’s no longer a place for Wilderness Weekend. Tears would stream down her face while the angsty first Wilderness album played, followed by every album—with B-sides—in order. She would purge herself of the grief of never hearing those melancholic melodies again by hearing only them for a few hours. And Hannah had to be the messenger—her writing the channel to break hearts across the country.

“Will you do last shows in select cities?” It was a self-serving question, but she needed to say something, and all journalistic merit had left for the moment.