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Chapter Text

“I give my heart and no one knows that I do
It’s for you…”

August 1965

He’d been in a strange mood all day, unsure of the reason why. It started when they woke up that morning, in another nondescript hotel room in another nondescript American city. There’d been the usual mad scramble to eat breakfast, pack their things, run to the car, speed to the airport, fly somewhere else (seated next to Paul, who had been an even more nervous flier than usual), dash to a different hotel, endure a microphone shoved in his face and a pointed question meant to force him to give them some witty Lennonism they could use to sell their papers tomorrow; then they had to suffer some undignified means of transport to whatever venue they were in that night. John wasn’t even sure if the concert had been any good – he strongly suspected that at one point he might have been playing a different song from Paul and Hazza entirely, since he couldn’t read his handwriting on one bit of the set list he’d taped to his guitar. He’d definitely hit more than one bum note during “I Wanna Be Your Man.” Such was the jet engine-like shriek of the audience, though, that he was pretty sure not a soul had noticed.

Frankly, he couldn’t stop thinking about Elvis, and he wondered if the others still were too. When Brian had first told them that the visit had been arranged, John was so excited he could hardly stand it. He’d bounced around their hotel room, swiveling his hips and singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” at the tops of his lungs. Paul, laughing hysterically, had joined in, and soon George was dancing around with them too, strumming his guitar. Ringo grabbed his drumsticks and battered any flat surface he could find, bringing up the tail end of their impromptu conga line. Eppy had endured this with the most patient of paternalistic smiles, until John swung wide and nearly knocked over a heavy lamp. Then that’s enough now, lads, and the fun was over.

The night of, as their rented limo had climbed into Beverly Hills, John couldn’t keep his knee from jumping with nerves. Paul was nibbling away at his thumbnail like he’d skipped a meal. Ringo and George were talking about something too loudly, their words fast and distracted.

And then, in no time, they’d driven up a winding private drive, pulled up in front of the main door – and there he was. The King himself. The man whose image had hung above John’s bed for years, lip curled in a permanent sneer, legs and hips twisted in a way that defied gravity. The singer whose voice had followed him ever since that night he happened to catch “Heartbreak Hotel” off a pirate radio station, and realized that he wasn’t the only person on earth who sometimes felt so lonely he could die. Standing right in front of him, a speccy kid from Liverpool.

Elvis’s mere presence was overwhelming, his physical beauty so breathtaking he almost didn’t seem real. The poster on John’s bedroom wall hadn’t nearly done him justice.

“Well come on now,” his highness said, sounding irritated, after a long interval, “I ain’t got all night to stand out here on the front step, shit.” Even annoyed, his speech was exactly how John had thought it would sound: deep, gently rolling, with that classic Southern twang. With a giddy smile, John ducked his head a little and followed Elvis (Elvis!!) into the house’s grand foyer; he heard the click of the others’ bootheels following behind him.

Elvis led them to the very back, where a massive living room took up nearly the entire width of the house. A dozen-odd men and women sat scattered on the L-shaped couch and armchairs, watching the biggest color TV John had ever seen, though he noticed that as soon as Elvis walked in the others lost interest in whatever was on. One guest grabbed a small rectangular device, pointed it at the screen, and suddenly the sound was muted. At least there’d be no chance for any further awkwardness, he supposed – Elvis had obviously invited some friends over, so maybe they could make a real night of it. John started thinking of what he could tell Cyn about tonight, taking in as many details as possible.

“Here’s everyone,” Elvis said through a sigh. He cocked his hips, waving his arm carelessly towards a girl at the center of the couch, seated next to a bass guitar. “This over here’s my girl, Priscilla – say hello, honey.” Priscilla – who on first glance looked like Elvis’s sister, and on second glance looked appallingly young – waved and said hello to them all, though she didn’t come over to shake their hands. The four of them stood there in the doorway still, waiting for their cue. Elvis gestured to a few others, giving names that John didn’t bother to remember, but lost interest halfway through and returned to the couch, where he took up the bass and started fiddling with it.

With Eppy and Neil hovering in the background with Colonel Parker and the others still stuck in place, John stepped forward and perched on the edge of the couch, his blood thrumming through him like an electrical charge. Ring sat beside him. As if to show how much cooler they were, Paul and George sat closer to Elvis, allowing their bodies to sink into the couch cushions like they came to visit all the time. Still Elvis stared at his bass, playing along with the record that was going in the corner; after a few moments John thought he recognized “Mohair Sam.”

No one moved. John exchanged a look with Richie, who had lit a cigarette. Now what?

A man with curly blond hair, on the far end of the couch, hitched forward in his seat. “Did y’all want something to drink, EP?” he asked.

John froze, disturbed by something in the man’s voice. His eyes darted around the room, reinterpreting the scene before him.

“Well, Jerry,” Elvis said, not taking his eyes off his fretboard, “these proper British fellas probably want some proper British tea, and I dunno if we have any.”

It was a weak joke by any standard – John didn’t get anywhere close to amusement. And yet as if on cue, all of the others laughed as if he’d done a bit on Morecambe and Wise.

John looked down, brushing imaginary lint from his trousers to hide the crestfallen expression he knew was on his face. Jesus fucking Christ these weren’t Elvis’s friends, they were his lackeys. His yes men. The room was full of them! After a short exchange with Paul – who was saying something polite about how they’d be happy to have whatever he was drinking, leading Elvis to order some cold sodas brought in – Jerry and another man jumped up to do as bidden.

He watched them go, wide-eyed, horror seeping into his bones. Every bit of John’s soul cringed inside him. This wasn’t what he wanted. Where was Elvis?

Johnny Carson was on TV, mouthing something from behind his desk that none of them could hear. Then he gestured and Michael Caine appeared from behind the curtains, waving to the audience and walking up to the stage to take the seat beside him. Someone at the other end of the couch pointed at the TV and made a comment, which got the group chuckling. Then Elvis mumbled something only half audible and the room cracked up like he was the long-lost Marx Brother. John couldn’t bear to look at him, and kept his eyes firmly on Michael Caine’s grainy face.

After a few minutes of this, as the others chatted behind him, Ringo nudged his shoulder. “All right, love?” he said low.

“It’s a mess, Rich,” John muttered, keeping his head turned away from his teenage idol. “It’s all plastic.”

Ring looked around. John wondered if he could see it too. “Yeah,” Ring mumbled back, around his cigarette, “I think you’re right.” From there, the night hadn’t gotten any better.

And here he was days later, still thinking about the terrible evening they’d spent with Elvis, as he trudged back to the hotel room following their performance at the… wherever. The Cow Palace. What the fuck was a cow palace anyway. George had thrown a casual girls, Mal in the direction of their faithful roadie sometime earlier, and not ten minutes after they arrived back, still a bit sweaty and weary in their stage suits, a bunch of girls streamed into the room, their hair long and their skirts short, as the current fashion dictated.

John was pouring himself a drink, wondering if he really was desperate enough for a double, when a flowery breeze brushed past him; he looked up to see a petite blonde at his elbow, gazing up at him with promises in her eyes. “Hello, John,” she said in a sultry voice. “You sounded really fab tonight.”

“Surprised you could hear us over the screaming,” John said.

The girl artfully tossed back her head and laughed. “Oh I’ve got great ears,” she replied. And was his mind playing tricks on him, or did she sound exactly like Jerry and all the rest of Elvis’s entourage?

Whatever interest he might have had withered and died in an instant. “Sorry,” he mumbled into his glass, “I’ve got to, um…” He decided she didn’t warrant an actual excuse so he just booked it from the room without another word.

Fifteen minutes later he was propped up in his twin bed, acoustic guitar in his lap, idly picking random notes that eventually turned into the new song he was struggling through. He was alone in his room, but out in the common area of the suite he could hear feminine giggles, a record player, a few shouts of laughter. Dulled by the walls, dulled by the shut door. Separated from him by miles.

“Do you – oh.”

John looked up from his guitar to see Paul and a statuesque brunette with too much makeup stumble in through the bedroom door, with amorous intentions in the works. They stopped when they saw him there. “Occupied,” John said flatly, and turned back to his strumming.

Paul turned on a dime, his attitude shifting in the matter of a split second. “Sorry love,” he said to the brunette, “creative meeting. Private, you know.” Without further ado he closed the door in her face. John heard the click of the lock go soon after.

“Don’t let me rain on your parade, Macca,” he muttered, not looking up from the fretboard. When Paul said nothing, John glanced up in time to see him seat himself beside him on the bed, John’s notebook in his lap to read the lyrics.

“This the one you started in Switzerland?” Paul asked, looking up at him through his eyelashes. John swallowed and looked away.

“Yeah,” he rasped. “Having trouble getting through the second bit.”

“All right then,” Paul said, businesslike, “play it for us, love.”

He didn’t need to be asked twice. John adjusted his guitar in his arms and started strumming the intro he’d already formulated, letting the chords vibrate in his bones. “I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me…”

Paul was obviously frustrated by his own lack of instrument – they both knew that Paul’s guitars were on the other end of the suite and everyone else was too soused to grab one for him – but they powered through anyway. The song didn’t need proper verses and choruses, they decided, just a second bit that sounded a little different to break up the repetitiveness, and they could switch between them, the A-part and the B-part, with an instrumental middle eight for George to mix it up even further. Paul tilted his head back, eyebrows up as he sang the high harmony, “She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere…” It was the perfect marriage of their styles: Paul’s tendency to tell a little story with characters, John’s need to expose some piece of his soul in waltz time, which he was particularly fond of at the moment.

The curtains were drawn over the room’s two windows, so he had no sense of what time it was or the outside world. Vaguely he knew there was a clock radio on the little bedside table between the two twin beds, but its face pointed in the other direction. John didn’t care. For the first time in days – weeks? – he felt like he could actually breathe. He was an actual person, not Beatle John.

“How should their one-night stand end?” Paul mused aloud, when they got to the last section of the song. “She turns him down and he spends the night in the bath, so…”

He thought of Elvis, lost and alone up on his pedestal. “He burns the motherfucker to the ground,” John said. Paul laughed with his whole body, pressing his shoulder into John’s, and it was the most real thing he had ever heard. “Write it,” Paul said through his laughter, and he wouldn’t have disobeyed that order for all the tea in China.

The last part sorted, John picked up his neglected drink, sitting in its own sweaty puddle on the nightstand. The clink of the half-drowned ice cubes was the only sound as he swallowed mellow scotch and Paul read through the lyrics one last time, humming the melody under his breath. When John made to return the glass to its spot, Paul reached over and plucked it from his hand. “Share the wealth, love.” He drank from John’s glass, his mouth where John’s had been, his eyes never breaking contact. John flushed, lips parting with a shaky breath.

The dance was new, still. Fraught with uncertainty, with so much left unspoken. Sometimes he worried he’d miss his cue, come in on the down beat, sing his part off-key and ruin the whole thing. When John leaned in, hand carding through Paul’s dark hair and kissed him, his first thought was fuck, I’ve still got the guitar here, and the curved edge of it dug into their chests as Paul nibbled on his lower lip. He drew back clumsily to pull the guitar strap over his head and dump the thing onto the carpet, and the discordant protest of the strings convinced him that the moment was over before it had hardly begun, wasn’t that a shame. But then Paul grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him back, and the scotch John tasted on his lips was the sweetest he’d ever had.

He pushed the boundaries Paul had tacitly laid out long ago, holding out hope that one day he’d relent. They lay on their sides as he held Paul’s face in his hands and he kissed him, as filthily as he could want, marking up every whimper and groan as a tally in the win column. But as soon as his hand wandered lower, plucked at the top button of Paul’s shirt, Paul himself went into action, brushing him aside to undo his own trousers, slide a long-fingered hand into his own pants. John had no line of sight down there, only the rhythmic noises of Paul’s hand, the grunts as he worked himself over. Another of Paul’s limits.

John kissed him harder, on his mouth, the edge of his jaw, the scratchy spot Paul had missed with a razor that morning. No one knew about this spot here, on his pale throat, and the thought led him to palm himself through his own trousers. No, not enough – he followed Paul’s lead and unbuckled his belt, slid a hand down to where he was hard and needy.

Paul gasped into his ear, moaning something that sounded like his name. John shivered as he imagined giving him a hickey right there on his neck – over the place where his blood was hottest, the tempo of his heart strongest, a place too high above his collar to hide. He groaned Macca into his damp flesh and felt Paul twist helplessly, closer, closer, whimper as he spilled at last over his hand. John was only a few seconds behind him, turning his face into the pillow to muffle his agonized shout.

In the afterglow, when the only sound was that of their belabored breaths, John thought he felt the pads of Paul’s fingers on him. Tracing the shell of his ear, the angle of his chin, the curve of his lips. Touching him like a lover would do. And for a moment he forgot, and let himself imagine – let himself kiss gently at the tips of Paul’s fingers, hoping the message was clear to him. I’d let you have so much more if you wanted it.

Paul went completely still.

John leapt into action, knowing the moment was now ruined forever. “I’ve got the loo first,” he mumbled, and he got up from the bed and strode into the en suite with far more lazy confidence than he felt. For good measure, he locked the bathroom door behind him.

At first all he could do was hunch over the sink, wiping at his mess and then washing his hands, washing and washing; yet here’s a spot, he thought, out, damned spot, a bit panicky. With the water rushing loudly he looked up at the mirror, at the hair sideswept and stuck to his forehead, the look of shellshock in his eyes. The harsh fluorescent light above him washed him out in pale yellow and green, making him look a bit sick.

So now, Lennon, he thought at the confused lad in the bathroom mirror. Aren’t you happy yet?

Well? Aren’t you?

February 2007

Lydia got back first, as she’d expected to, and found the penthouse dark and silent when the elevator dinged and the doors slipped open. She dumped her purse on a side table, kicked off her shoes, and left her luggage leaning to one side. Humming to herself, she made her way up to the kitchen, turning on lights as she went, and started rooting around in the fridge for something to eat. As one of Paul’s premade meals heated up in the microwave she checked over her texts again. Hurry home, I miss you, had been the second-to-last one from Paul, who was now stuck in a meeting with his team about the production schedule for some documentary project MPL was developing. Something about the world tour he’d done last year, the making of his last album – a solo effort, not McCartney/Hayes – and the question of whether he’d go on the road again this year. As always, she was sure the subject of another Monty Hayes collaboration would come up too.

Home, she texted him. Eating dinner. I’ll wait up.

In minutes he responded Leaving now xo.

She grabbed a Coke from the fridge and, when a song she didn’t like as much anymore came on her iPod, she clicked through the next few until she hit on a good one. Nodding her head in time with the beat, she ate her meal standing at the countertop, too energized to sit.

It had been a long two weeks. She had flown down to Washington with Orsatti to cover massive new developments in the war in Iraq, which meant being on top of her game 24/7, speaking with officials on and off the record, hopping around town to every hotel and restaurant and watering hole to see what the word around town was. It really felt like the tide was turning – while most of the world already knew the justifications for the war had been bogus from the start, it seemed like Americans were finally catching on too. Too late to keep Bush from being elected to a second term, unfortunately, but there was hope that someone like Hillary Clinton or that junior senator from Illinois might get elected on an anti-war platform.

Lydia was distracted then by the sound of her own voice coming through on her headphones, and she smiled and closed her eyes as “I’ll Get You” began. Without a thought she sang along with the words, between bites of veggie lasagna and sips of Coke. She was starving, having declined to stay for dinner at her mother’s invitation. Her Washington trip had flowed straight into a weekend at her parents’ house, to celebrate her dad’s sixty-sixth birthday with the extended family. As much as she loved her parents, though, she’d been eager to get back to the City. To Paul.

She tugged off her headphones and took her dish to the sink. “Well there’s gonna be a time,” she sang, scraping her plate clean, “when I’m gonna change your mind, so you might as well resign yourself to me—oof, man. Self-esteem, try it sometime.”

“I’ll do that.”

Lydia spun and saw Paul in the doorway, gazing at her with a fond smile. Shrieking in excitement she dumped her plate and ran to him, throwing her arms around him as he picked her up and spun her. She knew her greetings were ridiculous and over the top, anytime they were apart longer than two days, but she didn’t give a gold-plated shit and Paul didn’t seem to either. “Hi,” she murmured against his mouth, after kissing him breathless, “so I’m back now.”

“Yes you are,” he said, his hands at her hips. He pressed her closer to him. “Did you miss me as much as I missed you?”

“More,” she said, twining her arms around his neck, “definitely more,” and she kissed him again. “Ooh, wait,” Lydia said, stepping back. “Important news, before I forget. Don’t let me get sidetracked.”

Paul stepped away from her to grab a drink from the fridge and they sat at his dining table, hands clasped between them. “So,” she began, “you know that both my brothers flew in for my dad’s birthday.”

He nodded. “I bet it was great to see them.”

“Yeah, but here’s the kicker: my older brother, Scott? He let us know that he’s actually planning to propose to his girlfriend,” Lydia said, smiling hugely. She adored Andrea, who had been dating her brother a little over two years at that point, and was excited to have a sister-in-law. “He’s already done the whole talk-to-her-parents thing, picked out an engagement ring. He’s going to pop the question in the next month or so.”

“That’s wonderful!” Paul declared. “But he didn’t want to propose on Valentine’s? Plan something romantic?”

She shrugged. “Andrea is an administrator at the hospital where Scott’s a cardiac surgeon,” she said. “They’re both very busy, very practical people. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if they just decided to have a small wedding at the end of this summer, rather than spend a whole year planning something big and elaborate for next spring. Much more their style.”

“Makes sense,” he said, nodding. He winked. “I think I know where you’re headed now, love.”

“Yeah so… here’s where we come in,” Lydia said, sitting up in her seat. “Scott wants me to be a bridesmaid. And… I want you to be my date. At the wedding. I figure, you know, we already kind of talked a little bit about going public at some point this year, and my family needs to know before total strangers do, right?” She felt like she was babbling, but she still had to get it all out: “My mom wants to host an engagement party in a month or two, after Andrea says yes, so at some point before then, I think. We should all have dinner at my parents’ house, so they can meet you. They should find out before Andrea’s family does, at the least.”

Paul had nodded along with her, every step of the way, a slow grin coming to his dear face. “I think you’re right,” he said. “Dinner with the parents is the way to go.”

Lydia felt so light she thought she might float away. “Yeah?” she said. “I’ll call my mom and ask her, then.” She released a relieved laugh. “Oh my god, it’s happening.”

“It’s happening!” He tugged on her hand, and they both leaned towards each other. He paused, inches away. “We’re done talking about your family now, yeah?”

“Oh yeah, all done for the night,” she said, and she closed the gap to kiss him again.

Chapter Text

A week passed with no news from Scott about an engagement – and when Lydia texted him, he said he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. They’d been busy, he had a complicated surgical procedure coming up, Andrea was feeling under the weather, etc. When he asked her why she was so interested, Lydia simply texted back Reasons and left it at that.

He was allowed to drag his feet, but Lydia wasn’t going to grant herself the same permission. She had been waiting for this moment for four long, torturous years – four years of sneaking around, of keeping walls up around herself and her private life, of watching Paul go on fake dates to take some of the media pressure off.

Ugh, that was another thing. If Lydia had to see one more paparazzi photo of him sitting at a street café table and laughing with Renee Zellweger, she was going to fucking scream. Didn’t matter that Paul immediately gave her a rundown of what had happened, each time he went out with someone else – Lydia was realizing that her jealous tendencies had only been slightly tamped down, which she really wasn’t proud of. The one thing that made it okay, or balanced, was how jealous Paul got when she went on fake dates, though those were all with her co-worker Matt, who wasn’t ready to be out at work yet and needed a beard for company holiday parties and events. So, not quite the same thing.

Regardless: it was time, and she wasn’t fucking around.

But despite her impatience, she was still going to do things the right way. She called Paul during her lunch break on Friday to remind him that she was heading straight for her parents’ house after work that night, and she wouldn’t see him until Sunday. “This is it, then,” he said.

“Yeah.” She released an anxious breath. “Then I figure, um, we both go up there for dinner in say, a few weeks, if that’s okay.”

“We’ll make it work,” he said, which was Paul-speak for my calendar is filling up fast. “But tell them, and tell your friend Nicole and whoever else is important this weekend, because I’ve got plans for us next week.”

“Mm? What kind of plans?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, teasing. “You, me, some antique books and prints. Nothing fancy.”

Lydia hunched her shoulders, too delighted to speak for several moments. “Are you – are you taking me to a bookstore?”

“I – that was the plan,” he said, suddenly sounding nervous. “But we can do something else if you—”

“Oh my god.” She laughed helplessly, pressing a cool hand against her hot cheek. “Oh my fucking god. Dude, I’m kind of freaking out right now. A bookstore date is literally my perfect date.”

“I know,” Paul said, with a relieved chuckle. “I remember, love.”

“You mean you remember what a big dork I am about books?”

“I remember how your eyes light up and how fast you talk when you’ve found something interesting,” he said, his voice warm. “Been looking forward to seeing that again.”

“If you take me to a bookstore for our first date, I swear that afterwards I – wooow, I’m still at work, holy fuck,” she said, bursting into giggles. “I almost said something racy.”

“Behave, you!”

“Then stop promising to take me to bookstores! You know hardcovers make me weak in the knees!”

“That’s the hope, my love,” he said through an audible smile.

It was with that in the back of her mind that she went up to Westchester for the weekend, fantasizing about their first public outing and where, exactly, he would take her. New York City was home to so many wonderful old bookstores and antique dealers in prints and ephemera, up and down Manhattan, in storefronts great and small. Once, when she and Paul had been fighting (over something very stupid, in retrospect), she had treated herself to an entire day of just browsing through stacks of first editions, inhaling that wonderful lignin scent old books emitted to get herself centered again. Books made sense to her. Maybe one day she would write another one, but for now, simply being in their presence soothed her wild soul.

Even though she had just seen them the prior weekend, her parents were thrilled as always to see her. As soon as she had dumped her overnight bag in her old childhood bedroom, they whisked her off to dinner at their favorite local restaurant, a trendy gastropub housed in a colonial-era inn. While they ate they all caught up, the big news being that her mom was going to start substitute teaching in the school district. Lydia was so excited, seeing how excited her mom was, and made sure Carol knew how happy she was for her. Her reactions were probably a little too manic, though, layered as they were atop her building excitement over her announcement and what would happen the following weekend. Lydia knew she was laughing a bit more, smiling a lot more than usual, and she caught her parents sharing a private look when they thought she wasn’t paying attention.

Finally, when the waitress brought out their desserts and left them to it, Lydia took a deep breath. “So I actually came back up to see you this weekend for a reason,” she began.

“We thought as much,” Alan said, grinning at her. “Good news, it seems like?”

Lydia ducked her head, knowing her face was flush with joy. “Yeah. Really good news. Um… I’ve been seeing someone. And it’s serious. And… it’s going really well. Like really, really well,” she emphasized with a nervous laugh. “He wants to meet you and I want you to meet him.”

“Oh, Ladybug, that’s wonderful!” Carol reached across the table and squeezed her arm. “He sounds lovely.”

Her dad tilted his head to the side, thinking. “Is this the guy you’ve been seeing for… how long?”

“A few years now, yeah,” Lydia said.

“But it only recently became serious?”

“No… it’s been serious for a while,” she said, shifting slightly forward in her seat.

“Why haven’t we met him then, if it’s been serious for years already?” Alan said with a frown.

“I think he works a lot,” Carol said to him. “I remember Lydia saying he travels for his job.”

“Yeah, he does,” Lydia said, nodding at her mom. “He’s kind of a workaholic.”

“Can he come to the wedding?” Carol asked. “I assume that’s why you brought him up, because we’ll finally get to meet him then?”

“Hopefully yeah,” Lydia confirmed, “but I, um.” Her heart leapt into her throat, and she had to sip some of her wine before continuing. “The thing is,” she said, “I think he should meet you before then. Before the engagement party and bridal shower, and whatever else goes on. If they can get back out here, I want Scott and Travis to meet him beforehand too. Just us, maybe at your house or at his place in the City.”

“Of course,” her mom said, nodding. “It’ll be better to meet him outside of all the wedding events, once that all gets going. You don’t want to steal Scott and Andrea’s thunder.”

“Well. Yes. But not only because of that.” Lydia inhaled and exhaled slowly. “My boyfriend… he’s famous. A celebrity.”

Both of her parents’ eyebrows shot up. “Oh,” Alan said. “Uh. Okay?”

“My goodness, look at you.” Carol’s eyes sparkled as she reached out and squeezed Lydia’s arm again. “A famous boyfriend! Did you meet him through the paper? Were you meeting with him for an interview and it was love at first sight?”

“That would be highly unprofessional and unethical,” Lydia pointed out, blushing nevertheless at her mom’s enthusiasm. “No, I met him… before then, outside of work. And I don’t believe in love at first sight, you know that.”

“Oh, you.” Carol waved a hand through the air. “Where’s your sense of romance?”

“I have plenty of romance in my life, Mom,” Lydia said dryly. “I just don’t think you can get all the information you need to make a decision about someone merely by looking at them.”

When her mom opened her mouth to take the argument further, her dad interjected “Now wait, back to the celebrity thing. How famous are we talking?” He joked, “Are we going to have to make accommodations for his team of bodyguards?”

“Probably,” Lydia said, with total sincerity. “An event like a wedding, with a lot of people he doesn’t know personally, he’ll want them nearby just in case.”

Her parents blinked, taken aback yet again. “Oh,” Alan repeated. He cleared his throat, dumbfounded. “Well.”

“He must be very famous, then,” Carol mused, glancing at Alan. “Will it be okay to even have him at wedding events?”

“It’ll be fine as long as we’re smart about it,” Lydia assured them. “Most of the guests outside immediate family won’t need to know in advance that he’ll be there.”

“I don’t know,” Alan said thoughtfully. “One of our interns once showed me a picture of fans who came out to see that kid, what’s his name, from that Disney movie? It was a total madhouse, thousands of screaming teenage girls everywhere.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Dad, I promise you I’m not dating Zac Efron,” she assured him, doing her best to hold a straight face. “Look – I really don’t want to detract from Scott and Andrea. It’s their big day, not mine. But I also want to be able to celebrate them with someone I love. You know, get dressed up nice and eat good food and dance? I hope I’m not asking too much here, but it would mean a lot to both of us if we could do that together.”

“Of course,” Carol said. “I think we can make that work.”

“Good,” Lydia said, heaving a sigh of relief. “He’ll be thrilled. I can’t wait for him to meet you.”

“Who is he? Have we heard of him, or is he still – I don’t know how you say it, up and coming? Recently famous?”

Lydia dug her nails into the palm of her hand. “Yeah, you know him,” she said. “You met him, actually, Mom, a few years ago. Um. It’s Paul McCartney.”

Both of her parents froze, staring at her like she had three heads. The silence stretched on so long, Lydia felt tears in her eyes with a sting of foreboding. “Not…” Her dad shook his head, an awkward smile on his face. He exchanged a look with Carol, one Lydia couldn’t read. “Not the Beatle Paul McCartney.”

“Yeah,” Lydia said. “Him.” When they just kept gaping at her, she rushed into the background story she and Paul had concocted earlier that week: “After I met him at the Concert for New York in 2001, I stayed in touch. Networking, you know, since he really liked the story I wrote about the Concert. I met him again in person a couple years later, after that whole big breakup with his fiancée, and…” Lydia shrugged. Her arms felt numb. “I flirted with him and he flirted back. And here we are.”

“Sweetheart,” Carol said. Did she sound disappointed? “Ladybug, I don’t… he’s got to be forty years older than you, my goodness—”

“Thirty-eight,” she said dully.

“He has grown children, even, years older than you.” Carol covered her mouth with her hand, looking worried. “How… I mean a man like that, at his age—”

“Don’t even say the words ‘midlife crisis,’ Mom, I mean it—”

“But what else am I supposed to think, when a man with grandchildren is dating a girl right out of college?”

Lydia wilted in her seat. “Oh my god, Mom—”

“Ladybug,” her dad cut in, “we love you very much, all we want is for you to be safe and happy.”

“I’m both!” she insisted. “I’m so safe and so happy! We’ve been together over four years now, and it’s—” She threw her arms in the air. “I already told you, it’s serious, and it’s amazing—”

“For you it might be,” Alan said, “but a famous man like that, he must have women throwing themselves at him all the time—”

“God, please don’t start,” Lydia groaned. “He doesn’t have a girl in every port.”

“Then what about his kids?” her dad asked. “Do they know about you?”

Fuck, she thought, fuck fuck fuck. “Yeah,” Lydia said, reluctantly, running a hand through her hair.

“And? How do they feel about you?”

She looked down at her plate. “His three daughters have met me. They keep trying to set him up with other women,” she said. “His son refuses to meet me at all.”

“Oh, Ladybug,” Carol murmured sadly, shaking her head. “That doesn’t sound so happy to me.”

Lydia looked away, wiping the corner of her eye and blinking until her vision was clear again. “Paul’s a grown man,” she forced out, “he knows what he wants, and what he wants is to be with me.”

“But he’s also a dad,” Alan said. “Surely he wouldn’t just ignore how his kids feel about the whole thing.”

“He doesn’t,” she said, “and he’s not. It’s been really hard, and we’re trying to – I’m trying to win them over. But… Mom. You listen to his solo stuff, right? Did you hear the album he put out last year, New Messages?”

Carol frowned. “Yes I did, what—?”

“Mom,” Lydia said, holding out her hands palms up. “All the songs on that album? Were written for me. About me, about us, our relationship. And more on other albums, besides. He and I, we’re both in this thing wholeheartedly. All you have to do is listen to those songs and you’d know that.”

Carol and Alan exchanged another look, even more concerning than the ones before. “That’s all very well and good,” she said, “and I know it’s probably very flattering to have a famous rockstar claiming to write songs about you—”

“No, Mom,” Lydia whimpered, tears rushing up again as she realized her misstep, “listen to me, I’m not some starry-eyed girl getting taken advantage of—”

“But that’s exactly what it sounds like!”

“Will you let me speak?” Lydia hissed, clenching her fist. Some people at the nearby tables were beginning to glance sideways at them. “I didn’t plan this. Neither did he. We’re very aware of the difference in age, of our place in life, our professions, our backgrounds – but this is what it is. I’m not asking for your permission or your approval, because I’m a grown adult too, and I know what I want. I’m here tonight informing you that we’re together and I’m happier than I’ve ever been.” Lydia choked up, realizing that she was about to say something she’d wanted to speak aloud for decades: “I love him. I love him to the moon and back. And I have zero doubts that Paul loves me the same way. Please, please do me the courtesy of believing me, and trusting that I know my own mind.”

Cowed into silence, her parents just sat there on the other side of the table, looking like she’d just told them she was going to swim in nuclear wastewater for fun. Lydia leaned back in her seat, breathing hard, heart pounding in her ears. “Paul wants to meet you, if you’re both free in the next couple weeks, and he wants to come to Scott’s wedding. That’s all that’s on the table right now.”

Her dad picked up his wine glass and swirled it a moment, before draining what was left. “Okay, Lydia,” he said calmly. “Let’s meet him.”

“I suppose I’ll have to look up some vegetarian recipes,” Carol said, hands fluttering around her silverware. All of their previous interest and eagerness had evaporated.

It was the answer she’d wanted. Yet the victory felt so unbelievably pyrrhic.

The drive back to the house was almost completely silent. In an obvious attempt to break the quiet, her dad put on the radio as he drove – and chance of all chances, the station was playing “Emeralds.” Lydia thought about telling them that this song was written for her too, especially since she was pretty sure those green stud earrings had been given to her by her mom in the first place, but the words stuck in her throat. She curled up against the car door and said nothing, pulling as much comfort as she could from the sound of Paul’s voice.

She went straight up to her room when they arrived home, and had him on the phone in minutes. “Hi,” she said. “So… good news and bad.”

“Oh no,” Paul said. “Lay it on me.”

“The good news is that they’re open to meeting up for dinner,” she said, tears welling in her eyes again. “Bad news is they don’t – I mean, they have all kinds of problems with, you know. Everything, just about.” They had already discussed all the possibilities, so she didn’t need to elaborate.

“Ah.” He paused. “We’ll just have to bring our A game to dinner, then, won’t we?”

Lydia buried her face in her free hand, seated on the edge of her bed. “How did I know you were going to say that?” she joked weakly.

“Bah, lucky guess,” he joked back. “Reliable pessimist, that’s me.”

The longer they spoke, the more it felt like the storm clouds around her dissipated. His voice warmed her, making her smile and laugh as it always did. After about fifteen minutes, though, Lydia had the creeping feeling of being watched – and when she looked up, she realized that she hadn’t completely closed her bedroom door when she’d first entered. Her mom stood out in the hallway, watching her through the crack in the door. On making eye contact Carol quickly stepped away, and Lydia heard the faucet turn on in the bathroom.

“You sound tired, love,” Paul was saying. “I think I should let you go.”

“I think I should be let go,” she agreed. “But…” Lydia sighed heavily. “Why can’t I just have what I want?” she whispered. “First it was an issue of gender, now it’s age. Why does the universe hate me so much?”

“Mm. Asking the wrong person,” Paul said. “I don’t presume to know how the universe works. Except that it’s brought me to you twice now, and that’s pretty fantastic, you know?”

“I wish I could bottle up some of your optimism sometimes,” she teased.

“But then you wouldn’t need me around as much.”

“You’re right, forget I said anything. Doom and gloom, that’s my lane. Okay now I really should hang up.”

“Sleep well, my love. I’ll see you Sunday.”

She echoed his farewell and flipped her phone shut, tossing it onto the bedspread. For a moment she just stared at it, replaying dinner. Wondering how on earth she could convince everyone that she knew exactly what she was doing.

“Ladybug?”

Lydia looked up and found her mom at her door again, pushing it slightly open. She exhaled, overwhelmed with weariness. “Yeah, Mom.”

Carol nodded at her cellphone. “Was that… him?”

“Was that my boyfriend Paul? Yes, it was.” Lydia chewed on the inside of her cheek. “I’d promised to let him know how tonight went.”

Her mom sat down beside her on the bed. “You must understand our reservations about this,” she began.

“Yeah, and I don’t care, it’s still upsetting that you think I’m naïve enough to fall for just any smooth operator who crosses my path,” Lydia interrupted. “Over the past four years, have I ever seemed to you like I was being conditioned or groomed to be a certain way? Have I ever flashed any expensive gifts at you, or started expressing opinions that don’t sound like my own?”

Carol huffed in frustration, looking around at Lydia’s childhood bedroom. Her old Alanis Morisette and Foo Fighters posters still hung on the walls, interspersed with pictures torn from magazines of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Swiss Alps, and various New York landmarks. “No,” her mom admitted. “You’ve seemed more or less the same.”

“Good, because I feel more or less the same. Better, though. Because I’m with someone who loves me just the way I am.”

“Don’t say that,” Carol said quickly. “We heard you earlier. Just—” She huffed again. “I’ve texted your brothers, so you’ll probably hear from them tomorrow. I don’t know if they’ll be able to fly back for another dinner, but they might. Let us judge for ourselves what’s going on.”

“Fine,” Lydia said. Hesitating, she leaned in and put her arms around her; Carol returned the hug immediately. “I love you, Mom,” she murmured. “I promise I’m not trying to be obstinate on purpose.”

“No, I know you come by it honestly,” Carol said. “You’re like your dad. Lord knows the things your grandmother told him when he said he wanted to marry me.”

Lydia pulled back, thunderstruck. “Excuse me, what? You’re a catch, Mom!”

Carol laughed. “I was also a spinster with an advanced physics degree, which apparently meant in her mind that I didn’t know how to cook or keep a house,” she said dryly. “Your grandma tried to scare Alan off by telling him I wouldn’t be able to make his favorite foods.”

Lydia sat back. “But – but you’re a great cook,” she said. “I’m the one who can barely make pasta on a good day.”

“Priorities were different then,” Carol said, shrugging. “It’s a whole new world now.” She paused. “I hope you haven’t had to live up to the memory of Linda McCartney.”

Lydia rolled her eyes and pulled her sweater closer. “We talk about her a lot,” she said, “as part of, I don’t know, Paul’s grieving process. I’ve never shied away from talking about her with him. Less and less often now, though. But he well knows I’m no domestic goddess like she was. He actually has a private chef that makes the two of us precooked meals, since neither one of us wants to cook from scratch, or has the time to, really.”

Carol laughed again, covering her mouth. “Good lord, I’m hosting Paul McCartney in my house in a few weeks.”

“He’s a normal person,” Lydia insisted. “Don’t make a big fuss.”

“If you say so, Ladybug.” Carol stood up from the bed and kissed her forehead. “I’ll also neglect to mention I had photos of The Beatles on my wall, when I was in college. And I bought every one of their albums. And John was my favorite.”

“Good plan.” Lydia watched her mom walk towards her door. “Night, Mom.”

“Good night, Ladybug. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

Once all the lights were out, and silence reigned in the Montrose household, Lydia found herself staring at her ceiling. Sleep proved elusive. She couldn’t stop thinking about several years earlier, when her mom had met Paul at Madison Square Garden, and the giggling girl Carol had turned into in his presence – and that was without the knowledge of what he meant to her daughter. When Lydia was growing up, her parents had always seemed to be steady, calm, intelligent people, who didn’t get flustered about silly things like celebrity; the thought that they might get starstruck around Paul was a worrying one. To say nothing of her brothers, who might be the same way. Lydia just didn’t know.

And her other big revelation, about her identity? Well. She’d tentatively planned on waiting for the dust to settle after this first reveal before dropping that second bomb, and that now seemed like the only way to move forward. One thing at a time.

Lydia burrowed further into her bedcovers, trying to get comfortable, but it was hard without the comforting presence of Paul beside her. Strange to think that she used to believe everything would move faster once they could reveal their relationship – and now that things were in motion, they still felt as slow as ever.

Chapter Text

"…feeling fine, well well well he’ll make you…”

Lydia wrinkled her nose and drew her shoulders up to her ears, annoyed by the rude awakening. Who the hell was listening to music at this unreasonable hour? The song cut short, and she sighed in relief at the welcome silence.

“Well well well you’re feeling fine…”

Slowly she remembered, the pieces coming together in her sleep-addled mind bit by bit. A few years ago, as a joke, she had given Scott a “Doctor Robert” ringtone for whenever he called her. Her cell phone was ringing. He was calling her. He wanted to talk to her, even though it was still a bit dark outside, and she couldn’t even smell coffee coming from the kitchen like she would if her dad was up.

She dragged herself over to the side of her childhood bed and fumbled with her phone on the nightstand. “Yeah, what?” she sighed, irritated.

“What the fuck, Lyd,” Scott said at once.

Groaning, Lydia unplugged her phone from its charger and fell back onto her pillows, eyes closed. “It’s way too early for this shit, dude.”

“I’m already at work, lazybones, deal with it.”

“They’re called Saturdays.”

“I got a text from Mom last night that you’re dating Paul McCartney, and have been for multiple years already?” Scott said. “I think that wins the award for the single most random message I’ve ever gotten in my life.”

“Oh god,” Lydia mumbled.

“Is this some obscure joke that Mom and Dad are too old to understand?” he asked. “Like, I know you millennials have it out for boomers or something—”

“First of all, I am not a millennial,” Lydia said crisply, or as crisply as she could while feeling like she needed to sleep at least three more hours. “I am Gen X, thank you. Secondly, our parents aren’t boomers, they’re the tail end of the Silent Generation.”

“Way to focus on the important part of what I said. Also you’re Gen X by two weeks, so you’re basically a millennial. Is this a joke or for real?”

She rubbed her eyes, trying to wake up a little more. “Real,” she said. “One hundred percent real. Paul and I are dating. It’s going well. He wants to be my date at your wedding, assuming you ever get your head out of your ass and propose to Andrea. Hint hint.”

“So like… fuck.” Lydia heard him chuckling humorlessly on his end. A small part of her – a very small part – empathized with him and what must have been running through his head then. The rest of her still wanted to go back to sleep, because none of this was that pressing and needed to be dealt with right this minute. But Scott, like their parents, had always been a disgustingly early riser. “Lyd, why are you dating a guy old enough to be our dad?”

And here came Dr. Scott Montrose who had had a psych rotation that one time in med school, which obviously made him an expert at fucking everything. “I don’t have daddy issues, if that’s where you’re heading,” Lydia said. “I love Dad very much, he was a good dad to us growing up.”

“He’s a great dad,” Scott countered. “And he’s only like one year older than your boyfriend. So again – what the fuck?”

“It just happened!” she said. “I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

“How about, maybe you shouldn’t be with a creepy old dude who hits on college students—”

“Fuck off, Scott,” Lydia spat, sitting up in bed. “I mean it. For your information, he didn’t hit on me, not once. He was a perfect gentleman in every one of our interactions, and was never alone with me or made me feel uncomfortable in any way. I made a pass at him first.”

“What? Why?”

She rolled her eyes. “Um, I don’t know, the usual reasons why people flirt with each other? I thought he was smart, funny, attractive.”

“You were looking for a sugar daddy,” Scott said triumphantly, like he’d finally cracked the case.

“I’m going to give you exactly five seconds to rethink that one,” she said, her voice going as frosty as she could make it. “Think about what you know about me, and how hard I work at my career, and reassess the situation.”

“Shit,” Scott muttered. “You’re not a gold digger either, so that’s out.”

“Good call,” Lydia snapped. Realizing how loud her voice was getting, especially in the quiet stillness of the house, she rolled out of bed and headed downstairs. Her parents weren’t up yet, though they would probably be waking in the next ten minutes or so. She started getting the coffeemaker set up for them. “Any other bullshit theories I can shoot down for you?” she asked Scott while she puttered around the kitchen. “I can tell you right now that Paul’s not having a midlife crisis, and I’m not a rebound after the death of his wife, either.”

“Okay…? So why are you still together though? Your experiences in life have been totally different, you can’t have all that much in common.”

Lydia paused, sorely tempted to tell him her other truth. But it wasn’t the right time yet. “That’s where you’re wrong,” she replied instead. “We’re actually pretty similar, the two of us. Same sense of humor, same interest in current events.”

“I don’t get the impression Paul has read a newspaper in ages,” Scott said, sounding doubtful.

“Yeah, well, that’s because he doesn’t feel the need to comment on it in public,” she replied dryly, “unlike me. I read the news cover to cover and then immediately have to tell everyone what I think about it. And Paul isn’t always patient enough to listen when I really get going. Lucky for him I work in the news and have other people I can vent to.”

Her brother snorted. “God is this weird,” he said, heaving a sigh. “You’re dating someone whose records I have in my stereo cabinet.”

“Mm, that copy of Ram is mine,” Lydia said. “Uncle Jim gave it to me for my birthday and you just appropriated it after I went to Coney Island with my friend that one summer in middle school.”

“Allegedly,” he said. “I was never indicted. For real, though. Like, what… how do I wrap my head around this?”

She rolled her eyes at the kitchen ceiling. “That’s not for me to say,” Lydia drawled. “I’ve told you what you need to know, now figure it out for yourself.” She walked around the island in the kitchen, her bare feet hitting the floor in even, slow strides. “Look – I know it’s a lot. He’s older. He’s famous. But he’s just a person, Scott. I love him and he loves me, and I want him to meet my family. That’s all this is.”

His exhaled breath poured down the phone line. “Yeah I guess,” Scott said. “Let me know when this dinner is happening, I’m clearing my schedule to drive down to New York for it.”

Lydia blinked. Now that was a shock. “You don’t have to—”

“Oh yeah I do,” he insisted. “Who else is going to tell Paul—oh my god, Paul McCartney,” he repeated with a laugh, “Paul McCartney is going to be sitting at our dining room table eating Mom’s food, fuck.”

Fuck indeed. “If you only want to show up so you can tell him embarrassing stories about me as a kid—”

“Obviously I’m doing that,” Scott said. “What, like I’m going to just leave that important job to Travis alone.”

She couldn’t talk him out of it. And when Travis himself called, at a far more decent hour later that morning, to have basically the exact same phone call with her, he too was committed to flying out from Chicago for the dinner. “It’s going to be a total shitshow,” he said. “I’m not missing that.”

“No it’s not, come on,” Lydia insisted.

“Sure it is,” Travis said. “You know what Mom texted me when she told me last night? She said, and I quote, ‘Your sister is dating Beatle Paul McCartney for some reason’.”

“Ugh!” she cried, throwing her hands in the air. She shot a dirty look at her parents, seated in the breakfast nook with their coffee and toast and morning papers, but they both missed it. “Not the way to frame this.”

“Don’t blame me. I’m not the one dating someone Mom and Dad aren’t on board with.”

“So much for keeping an open mind until you can meet him, Trav.”

“Not my fault this is a weird situation, Lyd.”

The rest of the day was much the same, with her mom pinning her in the living room before lunch to beat the topic to death. The only thing that got her away was the fact that Lydia had arranged to meet several of her high school friends for lunch at a local restaurant – where she also told them her relationship status. One friend could not be swayed from the idea that Lydia was dating a millionaire “for the perks,” one was grossed out by his age, and one came up to her afterwards and whispered, “I didn’t want to say this in front of everyone else but – who is Paul McCartney? Is he related to Jesse McCartney?” It was about as good a reaction as she could’ve expected to get, Lydia figured.

While she was gone, her dad had apparently called his sister and brother-in-law, and Aunt Debbie and Uncle Jim drove down from White Plains and were there at the house when Lydia returned from lunch. “What’s this I hear about who you’re dating?” Aunt Debbie said, the second Lydia walked into the kitchen.

“Oh my god, Dad,” Lydia said at Alan.

“What, it’s not a secret anymore, is it?” he said, shrugging.

Lydia dumped her purse on the kitchen counter with a loud groan. “Yes, the stories are true!” she said sarcastically. “Aunt Debbie, my boyfriend is the Cute Beatle. Yes he’s too old and famous for me, no his kids haven’t warmed up to me, and no I’m not taking any further comments, suggestions, or questions at this time.” With that, she marched past them and up to her room.

She white-knuckled her way through the rest of her visit, enduring all kinds of attempts to start up further discussion on the one topic suddenly everyone wanted to talk about. When she left to return to the City on Sunday afternoon, she hugged both her parents but then made sure to look them both in the eye. “Give it a chance,” she pleaded. “Meet him. See what he’s like, see what we’re like together. Please reserve your final judgment until you have all the facts.”

Carol bit her lip, exchanging a look with Alan. “We’ll try, Ladybug,” she said, which was probably the best she could get right now. Lydia accepted it. She didn’t really have a choice.

On her way home she stopped at Nicole’s apartment in Lenox Hill first, since Nicole had been watching Jeff for her. After getting her fill of kisses and cuddles from her condescending cat, she looked up at her friend. “You’re a life saver,” she said. “I know he barely tolerates you.”

Nicole waved a hand. “Eh, I let him climb up on the fridge and jump on me. We’re BFFs now.”

Together they coaxed Jeff into his carrier, and once he was situated, Lydia braced herself. “I have something important to tell you,” she said. “It might be in the papers or on the Internet soon, and I wanted to tell you beforehand because you’re my girl and you deserve a heads up.”

Nicole’s eyebrows shot upwards. “Okay, weirdo,” she said, crossing her arms and canting her hip against the kitchen counter, “that didn’t sound ominous at all.”

“Yeah, well. You know that older man I’ve been dating for a while? We’re going public next weekend. I was just up in Westchester telling my parents about him, it was a… whole big thing.”

“Going public?” Nicole parroted. “That means he’s famous.” She playfully smacked Lydia’s arm. “Bitch have you been dating some smoking hot celeb all this time and not telling me?”

“We wanted to see how things worked between us without fans poking around and getting all in our private business,” Lydia said, “which you have to agree was the right call.”

“Of course, yeah, but – damn, girl.” Nicole shook her head and looked at her admiringly. “You’re kind of my hero, Lydia Montrose. Holy shit. Who is it?”

“It’s Paul McCartney,” Lydia said in a rush, ripping off the Band-Aid.

Nicole gaped at her, in a shocked silence that stretched on. “You—”

“Yep.”

“But he’s—”

“Very.”

Nicole slapped her hand to her forehead, eyes wide. “Holy shit. What did your parents say when you told them?”

“They think I’ve fallen under the influence of a charismatic older man,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes. “They’re probably reaching out to cult deprogrammers as we speak.”

“That’s flattering,” Nicole said with a snort, “immediately assuming a guy would only be interested in you because he could manipulate you. You’re a dish, babe. Any guy would be lucky to have you.”

Lydia barked out a laugh, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Thanks, I guess.”

“I’ve got you,” her friend declared, stepping forward. “Your parents have a problem? They can deal with me.”

Unexpectedly moved by her declaration of loyalty, Lydia barreled towards her and gave her friend a tight hug. “Thank you,” she whispered, getting teary. “That means… so much to me, you don’t even know.”

“Yeah, well.” Nicole squeezed her before letting her go, giving her a sly smirk. “It’s a pretty easy call to make. You told me you love him, right? And I’ve seen you with other guys like Danny, you’re clearly head over heels for Paul. Good enough for me.”

Lydia blushed. “Yeah, and… no offense to you, Nic, but… Paul’s my best friend, too.” She shrugged, and toyed with the ends of her hair, feeling shy out of nowhere. “I’m just so happy, Nicole.”

“Oh my god, stop it.” Nicole brushed at her eyes. “If you fucking cry you’ll get me going too, and I’m going out with Tim tonight, so don’t even!” They both laughed. Lydia felt carefree for the first time since Friday.

She toted Jeff and her overnight bag back to Turtle Bay, back to her second-floor apartment with its big windows and hardwood floors, and found Paul in her kitchen unbagging vegan Thai food from a place down the street. He smiled as soon as she shut the door behind her. “Hello, my old friend,” he said warmly.

“Hello, my love,” she said. She paused a moment just to take him in: his long hair, casually swept to one side. His t-shirt with an outline of the New York skyline across the chest, the dark jeans that hugged his narrow hips. His bare feet, as they padded on her kitchen tile. Aware of being watched, he glanced up at her and winked, before returning to the food on the counter. They had been in a hundred kitchens together, from Mimi’s fussy little one at Mendips to generic hotel kitchenettes to sleek and modern Cavendish Ave. Paul had looked different then – so had she, for that matter – but where it was important, they were both still the same.

Right. This was what she was fighting to keep as her own.

She quickly hung up her coat and let Jeff loose from his carrier. After he went streaking under the couch, Lydia strode to her kitchen, carded both hands through Paul’s hair, and kissed him with as much passion as she could muster. His hands came around her at once, all of her fervor returned with interest. “I’ve had well-meaning people pecking at me all weekend,” she murmured against his mouth, kissing him through her words, “making me feel like I’m a silly girl making bad decisions.”

“False,” Paul murmured. “You’re one of the cleverest people I know.” One of his hands dragged up to her shoulder to hold her in place as he pressed hot kisses under her ear, down her neck. She shivered against him, making sure he could feel what he was doing to her.

“I want you,” she whispered, “right now.”

“What do you want, love?” She felt him pull her hips against his, one hand sliding under the back of her shirt.

Lydia looped one arm around his neck. “I want to remember how much I love you.”

“Are you in danger of forgetting?” he asked. His pupils had blown out black.

“Never,” she promised. “But after the weekend I’ve had…”

“I’ve got you, love,” he said, kissing her again.

When she’d been a teenager, dating teenage boys, sex had been a headlong race to an eagerly anticipated finish line – an awkward, sweaty, grunting chore to be endured before she got to the good part. Sometimes it happened and sometimes it didn’t; sometimes she had to finish herself off quietly in the bathroom while her boyfriend was already falling asleep in the bed. There was never any art or grace to the activity, and how could there be, the way they were performing it? Rank amateurs, all of them, herself included.

Lydia knew she still lacked patience in a lot of things, the stamina to allow things she enjoyed to last longer, but fortunately for her Paul didn’t. Once she’d shed her clothes and joined him in her bed he held her and kissed her like he had nothing else on his mind, nothing more he wanted to do that afternoon. The humming need in her blood plateaued as he skimmed his hands across her skin, carded his long fingers through her hair, pressed his mouth where she wanted it. He got her so used to that state of being – of unsettled, unquenched lust – that all it took was for him to push one of her knees to the side and she moaned in surprise, eyes rolling back in her head.

“Fuck, Paul,” she whimpered, writhing on her pillow, “oh fuck—”

“Eventually,” he teased her, only sounding the slightest bit out of breath.

She could never just lie there, even when he wanted to do most of the work – she ran her hands over him too, through his thick hair, over his shoulders, down his hairy arms to his big hands with their musician’s calluses. He knew by now her tenderest areas, where to kiss and touch to maximal effect, and he thrived on positive feedback; he liked when she was vocal. Whatever hangups she might have had when they started dating, about being too loud and needy, had fallen by the wayside years ago, and now she reacted immediately with moans, sighs, whispered encouragement. And when she least expected it, with her brain almost melted into mush, he then pushed her other knee to the other side, so she was now spread out helpless beneath him.

“Damnit,” she hissed, tossing her head back on her pillow. “Paul, Paul, Paul.”

“I know, love,” he said.

He slid one of his arms underneath her shoulders, pulling their bodies even closer. She looped her arms around his neck, hanging on for dear life, and buried her face in the crook of his neck to smother her yell when she felt his hand between her legs, winding her even higher with the tips of his fingers and the heel of his hand pressed hard against her. “Oh god I can’t,” she moaned, “I can’t, fuck, it’s too much.”

“For me, love,” he groaned. Finally she felt him press at her entrance. “Yes, you can.” With almost no resistance, he pulled her legs where he wanted them and pushed inside her in one smooth thrust. Lydia had barely taken in a breath before she was whiting out with desire, digging her nails into his back and shoulders and screaming. “Come on,” he urged her, thrusting through her waves of pleasure, drawing them out to an obscene degree, “come on, fuck, Lydia, my love, I can feel you love, I can, keep going for me, oh god look at you, my Lydia—”

Every part of her seized in ecstasy, pulled out beyond limits she hadn’t known she had. And when she was so wrung out she didn’t think she could endure another moment, Paul cried out and pushed deep inside her. He collapsed atop her and she clung to him, holding still as her body shuddered and shook through the last aftershocks.

Once she felt human again, and once he’d withdrawn and rolled to her side, Lydia gave him a smirk. “Now I remember how I feel about you,” she joked.

“Good,” he said with a breathless laugh. “And there’s a bonus side effect, besides.” Paul leaned in and buried his hand in her hair, pulling her close to kiss her, his tongue hot as it curled against hers. “I remember how much I love you, too,” he murmured, grinning.

She giggled, in sheer uncomplicated happiness. “Do you love me enough to take me to a really awesome bookstore?”

“Dinner—” He wound his arms around her and drew her close “—then a bookstore, and then drinks after. This Friday night. You and me.”

“Perfection,” Lydia sighed. She closed her eyes a moment, letting herself calm down further, but all the tangled anxiety in her mind came rushing back first. Everything that had occurred since Friday night played in a frustrating clip show across the back of her eyelids. “Paul.”

“Yes my love.”

“The next few months are going to suck, aren’t they.”

He was quiet long enough that she looked at him, trying to read his face. At long last, he merely shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said, his natural optimism not allowing him to say anything worse.

“Would it be okay…” She paused, not sure yet what she wanted to say. He ran a hand through her hair again, his blunt fingertips lightly scratching at her scalp in a way that sent tingles down to her toes. “I’m not a fan of big public displays,” she began, her words coming slowly.

“Are you sure?” Paul teased. “Of the two of us, you’re the one who posed starkers on—”

“I know I sound like I’m lying,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes, “but I only did all that stuff to feel less invisible. I needed attention to know that I still existed. But I’m not like that anymore – I know who I am.”

“Fair enough,” he said. He left his hand buried in her hair, and Lydia allowed his touch to settle her.

“When things get hard, over these next months,” she said, “can I – I don’t want to make a whole scene, but if I reach for your hand—”

“You don’t even have to ask that, love,” Paul insisted. “Grab hold of me whenever you need to.”

“And you’ll know that I’m upset, or need… I don’t know, reassurance.”

He framed her face in both his hands, meeting her gaze with a steady one of his own. “We’ll be fine, Lydia,” he said, his voice strong and even. “Everything will work out, you’ll see.”

Despite herself, despite everything she’d dealt with from her family and friends over the past few days – she started to hope he might be right.

Chapter Text

With Nicole’s help, Lydia spread the word about her relationship and its impending public debut to the rest of their Columbia crowd, which led to Lydia’s phone getting filled with texts like lol wut and wait the Beatle?? Then, once it was made clear that she was dead serious, the texts just got ridiculous. Several girls insisted that they needed to know intimate details about Paul’s body and bed skills, including her friend Jackie who texted her So is it true what they say about men with big feet? ;)

Yeah, Lydia texted back, frowning down at the phone screen, they wear big shoes.

She’d thought, naively, that maybe her guy friends would be more accepting. Boys didn’t like drama, that was just one of the inviolable rules of the universe. But she’d forgotten that boys also loved to gatekeep their three favorite things – sports, video games, and classic rock – and their responses made Lydia realize that they actually thought her “unworthy” to date Paul, as if they were also gatekeeping his personal life. They pointed to the fact that Lydia had never expressed an opinion on the Beatles (in their presence, at least), and probably didn’t even know what Paul’s exact, second-by-second contributions to each song were. How could she be a good girlfriend if she didn’t know the story behind how he’d written “Hello Goodbye” and “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be”? (One of them then started telling her all about that fucking dream, as if she hadn’t heard the story a thousand times since 1969.) Besides, if she really wanted to date a guitar player, her guy friends argued, why hadn’t she picked one of them?

At that point her friend Victor, who had never flirted with her before in the seven years they’d known each other, revealed his longtime crush on her – as if she were just settling for Paul, and now would dump him because miracle of miracles, Victor was single and interested! It was a very close thing, Lydia not flinging her phone against the wall after those texts.

She vented to her mom about it on Tuesday, pacing furiously up and down her apartment while Jeff watched her in silent judgment. “And the crazy thing is that I can’t tell how much is sparked by his age, and how much by the fact that he’s famous,” she ranted. “Why do people always get so nutty around celebrities? I’ve never understood that, they’re people just like us!”

“I don’t know, Ladybug,” her mom said. “I’m afraid I’m one of those people who gets flustered around celebrities too. It’s just excitement, people getting excited by seeing someone they idolize up close.”

Lydia’s heart sank. “You’re not going to be like that when we come over for dinner, are you?”

“I – well, you know –” Carol stuttered out an answer that made Lydia feel like yeah, that was exactly what was going to happen. Fucking hell.

“Mom,” Lydia said, “before I let you go, Paul and I are going out Friday night. In public. I’m hoping nobody will care, but just in case it ends up on Page Six I thought I should warn you and Dad.”

“Oh? Where are you going?”

“He’s taking me to a bookstore.” Lydia wasn’t able to keep the happiness out of her voice.

“Well at least he knows what you like.”

Lydia frowned at Jeff. “Of course he does, Mom. We talk about a lot of stuff that’s important to us, and have really gotten to know each other. What did you think we’d been doing the past few years?”

Again Carol spluttered out an awkward half-answer, one which made Lydia end the call as quickly as she could so that she could cuddle Jeff for the rest of the night.

Her outing Wednesday night with Julian was a delicious break from all of that nonsense. One of Julian’s musical heroes, jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, was performing at Carnegie Hall that night, and Julian had snagged tickets the moment they went on sale. He met her outside the Post’s offices in the Flatiron District after her day ended, and together they made their way uptown on the train. She knew Julian had been a fan of Jarrett since he was a teenager and Lydia, whose knowledge of jazz admittedly began and ended with Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis, was happy to have him guide her through his favorites.

It was always interesting being out in public with Julian, and always different: some people definitely recognized him, and for the most part respected his privacy by staying away, while some folks asked point blank if they’d met before or if he was somebody famous. If they weren’t in the mood to be disturbed, Julian usually replied “No, I’ve just got one of those faces,” in a passable American accent. Mostly they were left alone. Julian seemed unperturbed either way, and didn’t seem to care if anyone knew him or not, which Lydia admired greatly.

After the show had ended, and Carnegie Hall spilled its enthused audience out into the cold, wet streets of New York, they headed across the street to a diner for a bite to eat, and Lydia sat back as Julian lovingly rehashed the entire concert, highlighting the best parts for her. It was thrilling to see him in his element like this, and she enjoyed just taking it in and being on the receiving end of it. Even to be here, sharing this experience with him, was a marvel: she’d told him she didn’t want to be his parent and that still stood all this time later, but over the past few years it really felt like he’d become something more than a friend. She secretly hoped he felt the same way about her, but was far too scared to ask him outright. Maybe one day.

An hour in, when Lydia was approaching the bottom of her second glass of wine, Julian stopped abruptly and laughed at himself. “I’m sorry I’m so carried away tonight,” he said, making a face. “I just haven’t seen Keith Jarrett perform live in quite some time, so—”

“Nope, no apologies,” Lydia insisted. “You’re continuing my musical education. I’ve loved every minute of it, the performance and your critique.”

“I feel like I’ve done enough talking for tonight, though,” he said, sipping at his own wine. “Let’s switch topics. I think you said before that this weekend’s the big launch.”

Lydia snorted. “Yeah, the USS McCartrose is setting sail Friday night from the New York Harbor,” she joked. “Dress uniforms and cocktail attire requested.”

“Oh boy,” Julian said, laughing. “Are you ready?”

She opened her mouth to respond in the affirmative, because obviously it was just a date night that might get crashed by some fans and photographers – but then a sudden chill swept over her. Lydia set down her glass and clasped her hands in her lap to hide how they’d begun to tremble. “Um…”

Julian’s eyes widened. “I’m sure it will all go perfectly smooth,” he said at once. “Paul won’t allow anything less, you know that.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding, as her gaze wandered outside. “It’s just that… wow, fuck.” Lydia turned her stare back to him. “I’ve been a face in the crowd for the past twenty-six years,” she said, “and I’m kind of going to be losing that? At least a little, to start. And… if you think about it, which I apparently haven’t until right this second…” She looked down at the table. “The last time I wasn’t just another nobody, someone shot and killed me.”

“Shit,” Julian muttered. “Forget I said anything, please.” He leaned across the table, one hand outstretched. “You know nothing will happen. You’ll have a wonderful evening, I’m certain of it.”

Lydia smiled up at him briefly then looked away again. “No, I know you’re right,” she said quickly. “I’m just being… yeah.”

But the subject was still heavy on her mind the following morning, during their foreign affairs internal story meeting. As they were pitching articles and getting their assignments for the day, someone came in and whispered something in the ear of Tom, their senior editor. He nodded a few times and then his gimlet eye swung between her and Dave Mansfield. “Your story on the Kabul suicide bomber is getting a lot of traction on the cable news shows today,” Tom told them. “We’ll need one of you on air for a good chunk of the day.”

“I’m out,” Mansfield said, shaking his head. “I’m doing follow up on the Gitmo detainees court decision, I’ve got an interview scheduled two hours from now that I practically had to pull teeth to set up.”

“Montrose, you up for it?” Tom asked her.

Lydia leaned forward in her seat, her mind an absolute blank for a split second. Was she up for it? Was she up for being on national television for the entire country to see, for a tiny piece of her anonymity to be stripped from her? Going on air once meant possibly doing it a second time, and a third time, until she became known to people and occasionally stopped in public. She’d seen it herself, when she spotted Phil Donahue at Duane Reade one memorable day several years earlier. Though he apparently had just run in to grab some toiletries, he shook hands and exchanged words with a dozen or more people between the shampoo aisle and the checkout counter. That, for him, had just been a regular Tuesday.

But this wasn’t about her, she reminded herself. People needed to know what had happened with that bomb in Kabul, set off less than a mile away from where the vice president was visiting. The Middle East conflicts had to stay foremost in Americans’ minds, so that they didn’t become complacent. If she needed to elaborate on the story she’d written with Mansfield yesterday—

“Yeah, I can do it,” she told Tom.

“She’s ready,” Mansfield said to the unasked question. “I have every confidence in her.” Which was nice to hear, of course, but Lydia wished there was slightly less condescension in his voice.

Unfortunately, she’d chosen that day to wear one of her quirkiest blouses – one that had a pattern of red cherries on it, which she’d bought to tease Paul – which absolutely did not fit the tone of her talking about the Taliban. With a few discreet inquiries around the bullpen, Lydia found a coworker with a thick navy blue sweater she kept on hand for when the office was too cold, and when Lydia pulled it on over her head it fit well enough to look okay on camera. Their in-house producer stopped by her cubicle and Lydia followed him back to the soundproof room used for TV spots, listening with half an ear as he gave her some tips. To her pleasant surprise, being on camera hadn’t changed all that much in forty years. As he spoke, Lydia discreetly pulled out her phone and texted Paul and her mom to give them a heads up.

“Let’s see, I think we’ll have you wear your hair down too,” the producer said, eyeing her ponytail. Lydia promptly pulled out the hair tie and arranged her long hair around her shoulders. An assistant came in to blot her forehead as she took the chair in front of the camera, and Lydia held still and focused on her breathing as someone clipped a lavalier microphone in the knit of the sweater. She accepted the spiral earpiece they gave her and stuck it in her right ear, then used her hair to hide it from view. On the other end she could hear the CNN producer speaking, somewhere in their studios on the other side of town.

“Talk so we can check your levels,” their producer told her. Lydia counted slowly while they fiddled with the audio settings. Her phone buzzed and she looked to see a message from Paul: Break a leg!! Tracking down a TV so I can watch xo. Lydia knew he was at the MPL office today, so presumably finding a spare television somewhere wouldn’t be a challenge. “You’ll need to put that on silent while you’re on,” the producer warned her, so Lydia did so and held her phone clamped between her knees, out of frame.

Weirdly, after the initial unexpected jolt of being asked, she felt very calm. Her heart beat was strong and steady, her breath slow and even. Mentally she reviewed the information given in their article, the interviews she and Mansfield had conducted and the in-depth research they’d done, any points they had made that she could elaborate on and expand. It was about the work, she reminded herself; she was proud of her writing and wanted to make it as accessible as possible to the public at large. This was all a part of that.

Because there was nothing in the world that she could do to totally eliminate risk, she realized. No one was completely safe from the vagaries of the world: random car accidents, fatal illnesses, lightning strikes, simple old age. Getting shot by a stranger out of the blue one night in 1980. Everything was a crap shoot. If she never put herself out there, for anything, she wouldn’t get all of the things she wanted and deserved. If she had played it safe, she wouldn’t have said yes when Travis offered her his extra ticket in the year 2000. She wouldn’t have gone to the Beacon Theater that night. She never would have reconnected with Ringo or, by extension, with George or Paul. None of it would have come to pass, and her life would have been so much poorer for it.

But the crux of the matter was this: she wanted to have a romantic date night with Paul, had wanted it so badly for so many years that, now that it was imminent, she could hardly think about anything else. The harsh spotlight of the media might swing towards them and stay there for some time, leaving them exposed to the world – but they weren’t like Elvis, alone atop a high pedestal that no one else could climb. They had each other. That made all the difference.

The flatscreen beside her was switched to CNN. The anchor had just begun talking about her article, according to the closed captioning at the bottom of the screen. Their producer reached forward to smooth down a few flyaway hairs on Lydia’s head, gave her the thumbs up, then stepped back behind the camera again, just as bright hot lights flicked on and illuminated her.

I’m Lydia fucking Montrose, she thought, lifting her chin a little, and I’ve got this.

She stopped by Tom’s office before she headed out that night, after a long day of doing multiple rounds on all of the news networks. “You wanted to see me?” Lydia asked. She was beat; she hoped this would be quick.

Tom glanced up at his desk and gestured to the chair across from his. Not a quick word then, much to her dismay. Lydia sat in the chair but left her coat on and purse in her lap, hoping he’d get the message. “Mikhail tells me you were great on camera today,” he began. “Is that something you’d be interested in doing for us going forward? Talking about your work on camera, in case someone like Mansfield isn’t free to do it himself?”

Lydia tightened her arms around her purse. “Sure,” she said. “That wouldn’t be a problem.”

“The Post has joined this new website, YouTube, and wants to generate more video content to engage with younger readers,” Tom said. “We need people to make videos that augment our articles with visuals, charts, whatever.” He looked at her over the tops of his glasses. “I’ll just say it outright: Montrose, you’re young and attractive and well-spoken. You’d be ideal for doing voiceover or appearing on screen for these videos.”

Well, fuck.

Lydia chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment, gathering her thoughts. “There’s a reason why I didn’t major in broadcast journalism,” she said. “I’m a writer, I want to write. I’m happy to jump in now and then with the occasional TV spots, but full-time… If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to focus on my written work.”

Tom shrugged, and she felt a profound tension leave her body at once. It was hard saying no as a female journalist, because you never knew when someone might get offended or angry over nothing more than establishing a work boundary. “That’s fine,” Tom told her. “I figured you’d say that, but my boss wanted me to ask anyway.” He turned back to the computer on his desk. “That’s all. Have a good night.” Lydia echoed his farewell and walked out before he had second thoughts.

As she made her way to the Upper East Side, she checked her texts and saw that her mom had been out most of the day, and so had missed Lydia on TV. I’m sure you were great Ladybug! Carol wrote. There were no more texts from Paul, other than the one confirming that she was coming over that night and asking what she wanted for dinner.

She was blowing it out of proportion, she decided, shoving her hands into her coat pockets and tucking her chin into the folds of her scarf. Here she’d been obsessing over her TV debut as if the sky were falling, and wouldn’t you know it, the world kept spinning. No one had stopped her on the sidewalk to ask if she was that reporter on CNN, and she was fine. Everything was fine.

When she arrived at the penthouse a little later, she found a large frame propped up on the kitchen counter, displayed in such a way that she saw it as soon as she came upstairs from the foyer. Blushing furiously, she moved closer to see the series of three photos it held.

Someone – an MPL employee? – had snapped Paul standing beside a flatscreen TV with her face, name, and title on it, mid-interview. Both Paul and the TV were framed in such a way that neither was the main focus of the photo; their connection to each other was laid bare and made obvious. In the first two Paul was his usual corny self, reaching out to touch part of the TV screen in one, pointing to her and mugging for the camera in the other. But the third instantly became her favorite: him just watching her with a proud smile, a hand pressed to his heart. And she didn’t look so bad in that one either.

Paul was whistling as he descended from the music room, pretending badly that he didn’t know she’d come back from work yet. “There she is!” he cried, clutching his chest at the bottom of the stairs, “in the flesh, the star reporter for the Washington Post!”

“You are such a dork,” she said, knowing her face was bright red in delighted embarrassment. “This thing is not going anywhere guests can see it.”

He laughed as he pulled her into his arms, rocking back and forth on his feet. After a very nice snog, he pulled back and pointed his finger decisively at the ceiling. “I know, we’ll hang it in the loo!” he declared, which made Lydia burst out giggling.

Chapter Text

Friday arrived feeling like her birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas morning rolled into one. And just like a Friday, the minutes seemed to tick by with all the haste and speed of paint drying. There was, as ever, the possibility of late breaking news upsetting their plans – for one, Scooter Libby’s trial in Washington was on the brink of being decided, for his part in leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame – but by the time Lydia glanced at the clock and saw it was already five PM, she figured she was in the clear.

She texted Paul to let him know: We’re still on babe!

Wonderful can’t wait xo, he wrote back.

At the stroke of six, Lydia took her bag into the bathrooms on her floor and changed out of her sensible work blouse in favor of a deep violet turtleneck sweater. Paul had given her dangly multicolored earrings last Christmas that she loved, so those went in her ears next. After touching up her makeup, reapplying bold lipstick in a color she usually didn’t wear, fixing and smoothing out her ponytail, and exchanging her comfortable low-heeled shoes for black stilettos that made her legs look a mile long, she was ready to go.

Her heart was almost jumping out of her body by that point. With her work clothes stuffed into her purse, she made her way through the office, aware of every eye she snagged on her way out. Matt, her fake work date for the past year or so, whistled low when she stopped by his cubicle.

“Knock him dead, Montrose,” he said with a grin. He knew exactly who she was going to see in a few short minutes, since he’d become a good friend and part of her inner circle.

“I plan to,” she said, smirking.

Coordinating the start of their date had, unexpectedly, prompted a minor argument the night before. Paul wanted to pick her up in his hire car and bring her to the restaurant with him, while she wanted to meet him there. “But I’m the man,” he’d said, in what was already a losing argument with her, “and I should escort you to—”

“Nope,” she said, “nope nope nope. I’m taking my own transportation and meeting you there.”

Paul threw his hands wildly in the air. “But why?”

“Because as an enlightened and liberated girl of the twenty-first century, when I’m going out with a guy for the first time, I’m not getting into a car with him until I know him a lot better.”

“Liberated,” he echoed, with a derisive snort. “Girls in the Sixties got in my car all the time, why is that suddenly not good enough—”

“Because we’re more on the alert for date rape and assault,” Lydia said. “Didn’t you ever wonder what this thing on my keychain is?” She held it up. “It’s a rape whistle, in case a guy won’t take no for an answer. Girls in the Sixties didn’t have these.”

Paul’s eyes had gotten huge with horror, flicking back and forth between her and the aluminum whistle in her hand. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Have you ever had to use that thing?”

Lydia paused. “Do you really want to know?”

“Christ,” he said again. Then, louder: “But this isn’t really a first date, love. You’ve been in a hundred cars with me.”

“The public will treat it as a first date to start,” she said, “since no one has seen us together before this. Ergo, it’s a first date.”

He made a moue of displeasure and bit on the inside of his lower lip, lost in thought a moment. “What if we treated it like an actual first date then?” Paul suggested. “Ask each other sort of first date, get-to-know-you questions, you know. Might be fun?”

“Might be,” she said, with a smile. “Give me the address and I’ll meet you outside the restaurant. I’ll even be on time.”

“That’ll be the day,” Paul had said, winking at her.

When she walked up to the Italian restaurant he had chosen a bit before seven, her spidey senses started tingling before Paul even came into view. She watched as an older couple left the restaurant, and something about the look on the woman’s face hinted at something irregular having just happened. Smothering a grin, Lydia grabbed the door and let herself into the waiting area.

He was already there, standing by the host stand, speaking with two middle-aged women who each had big eyes rounded with awe. Or, more accurately, he was being spoken at, because Paul himself was just standing there on the receiving end of something Lydia couldn’t quite hear over the general white noise of a busy restaurant. She stayed back for a moment, watching the scene play out. They must have wanted autographs, when she knew Paul had instituted a policy of not signing any more posters or albums or CDs a few years ago, except at official events. Sure enough, he had one hand up, palm out, as he must have repeated to the women that he regretfully couldn’t sign a brochure one of them had clutched in her outstretched hand.

In Paul’s other hand, he was holding two long stemmed red roses.

Whether it was by chance or because she moved in his peripheral vision, Paul’s eyes eventually flicked towards her and held. “Ah,” she heard him say to his two fans, “my dinner companion is here. It was lovely meeting you, enjoy the rest of your evening.” Despite their protests, he gently extricated himself from them and stepped towards Lydia, beaming at her.

They had been together now for four years this time. She knew most everything there was to know about him, and none of this was new in the strictest definition of the word. And yet seeing him across a crowded restaurant entrance, or entering a room where he already was, still made her feel like she had butterflies in her belly.

“I’m on time,” she insisted, smiling like a big old idiot.

“Barely,” he teased, with a glance at his watch, “but I’ll let it pass.” Grinning back, he offered her the roses. “These are for you, love.” Lydia accepted them with a quiet thanks, twirling them a little, as he leaned in and pressed a kiss to her cheek. Her skin tingled in his wake.

His hand at her lower back, they both followed as the host led them to their table. With the way the dining room was setup as one large space, there were unfortunately no quiet corners totally hidden from the view of the street, but they were given a small square table in the middle close to the side wall. Paul held out her chair for her and took the one beside her, both of them with their backs to the entrance and front windows. The host gave them the menu, the specials, and the cocktails card, then left them to it.

Every single eye was on them as they made themselves comfortable. She could feel it acutely, even if when she looked around everyone ducked their heads or avoided her gaze. Lydia took a deep breath and tried to tune it out. “You’re wearing my favorite shirt and blazer combo,” she said instead, because he was – a bright Liberty floral print Oxford under a black velvet jacket.

He tossed his hair back with a smile. “And you’re wearing my favorite sweater and earrings,” he said, “but I wouldn’t know that if this were really a first date, you know.”

“Whoops, I’ve already broken the rules,” she joked. “Okay – so Paul,” she said, sitting up straighter, “I’m so glad we could meet up tonight, I’ve really been looking forward to doing this with you.”

“Me too, love,” Paul said, without an ounce of insincerity. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.” Lydia couldn’t hold back the massive smile that split her face, and was ecstatic to see it mirrored back at her.

Whatever nerves or jitters she was feeling had settled somewhat by the time their waitress came around and they placed their entrée and drink orders. They were left a basket of fragrant bread and small dish of olive oil, so they picked at that as they talked, recapping the days they’d had. But Lydia noticed after a while that Paul’s eyes kept darting somewhere below her face – not to her chest, but somewhere in between. After the third time she caught him she casually wiped at her chin, thinking she maybe had a bread crumb there. When it kept happening she then brushed against the neck of her sweater, wondering if she had a hair or a thread dangling.

When he still kept staring, she sighed. “Paul,” she said, interrupting her own story about something that had happened at work, “what are you staring at on my neck?”

He blinked at her, all wide-eyed ignorance. “On your neck?”

“You’re giving me a complex. I’m about three seconds away from heading to the ladies’ room to see what’s wrong with my chin or my neck or—”

“No it’s—” He made a face and leaned back in his seat. “It’s silly.”

“Now I have to know.”

It took him a few moments to work up to the admission. “I just… I’m remembering that I’ve always sort of fancied you, in rollneck sweaters,” he said, not making eye contact.

Lydia clapped a hand over her face to hide her goofy smile. “Aha,” she said, nodding, attempting severity. “I see. And how long have you had this preference?”

Paul tore his chunk of bread into tiny pieces. “Oh… you know. Since ‘65.”

Whatever answer Lydia had been expecting, that was not it. She was stricken mute, and couldn’t even muster a thank you when their waitress brought out their meals. Lydia just stared at her plate of veggie agnolotti as it was set in front of her on the table. Which was the more amazing thing – that Paul had actually admitted it, or that he’d been attracted to her back then? Because she had been so sure that he didn’t physically want her, not in the way that she had wanted him, in light of all the hard red lines he’d thrown up between them. In fact, she’d convinced herself very thoroughly of this in the wake of what he’d blurted out in India – that there were some intimate actions that just made you feel good, no matter who was doing them to you. They didn’t mean anything real. They didn’t signify love.

Except maybe they had.

He was squirming now in the face of her extended silence, so she took pity. Lydia leaned towards him, lightly squeezing his forearm, and shifted her left leg so that it was pressed knee to ankle against his right under the table. “I love that I know that,” she said. “Thank you for sharing it with me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go buy about twenty more turtleneck sweaters—”

Paul snickered, wrinkling his nose at her. “Only twenty?” he teased. She elbowed him in retaliation.

Once they began working on their food, Lydia had a brainstorm. “Okay, new game,” she announced. “Let’s say things we haven’t shared with each other before.”

“Spill all our secrets?” Paul said, sounding guarded. “What, right now?”

“No, not necessarily. It can be something you’ve told other people or said in an interview, but felt like you couldn’t tell me directly in person, for whatever reason. I’ll go first.” When he gestured at her with his fork, signaling assent, she thought for a moment. Most of the things she hadn’t been able to tell him back in the day had come from a place of competition and insecurity – or just garden variety toxic masculinity. All of those things seemed so trivial in light of everything that had happened between them. “Easy one to start. Paul, I don’t believe you for a second when you say that you’re mainly a melody guy. When you really want to, your lyrics are fucking great.”

Paul blinked at her, taken aback. “Oh,” he spluttered. “I – oh.” He pursed his lips but she could see his thrilled smile anyway. Lydia hid her answering grin with a sip from her wineglass. “When we first met,” Paul said, “I was so scared of you, I thought for sure you could see me shaking. But I was so determined to join your band that if you’d rejected me, I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

“Mm, I was bad news then,” she agreed, and they both chuckled. “Um. Mimi had a lot of class prejudice – more than most people realize, I think, and definitely more than what comes across in the biographies. You appalled her. I don’t know how much of that you felt when you came over, but it was pretty bad. I guess I’m sorry you had to deal with that from her, because I never saw you that way at all.”

“Wasn’t aware,” he said breezily, which Lydia took to mean that he’d sensed at least some of it. “My dad told me straight up once that you were headed for either reform school or prison, and I’d be right behind you if I didn’t look sharp.”

Lydia snorted. “Lot of that going around, I guess. Let’s see…” She ate some of her food, thoughtful. “Okay, something I’ve never told anyone. The night we first kissed – at the Plaza – that wasn’t accidental. Not even a little. I had come up with a whole elaborate plan weeks earlier that ended with us in that room together, alone.”

“You schemer!” he said, gaping playfully at her. “Taking advantage of my innocence!”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh you haven’t been innocent since the Suez Crisis, you bounder.”

He doubled over at that, laughing with his whole body in that way she loved beyond comprehension. It felt like ages before he could get another word out. “The Suez—!” he managed, before descending back into inarticulacy. Lydia giggled too, at how helpless he was to his amusement.

Finally, once he’d wiped at the corner of his eyes, coughed, drank some of his wine, speech returned. “There was I,” he said hoarsely, “all open and trusting—”

Lydia guffawed. “Blitzed on scotch, you mean—”

“—and you put the moves on me.”

“You loved it, troublemaker,” she accused him.

“Yeah,” he said. When she looked up at him, he grinned. “I snogged you back. And don’t you forget it.”

“Never,” she declared. He just smiled at her, shaking his head slightly, until she said, “What’s that look for? Pining after my sweater again?”

“Oh nothing,” he replied, in a silly accent, “it’s just ‘cause I like you so much.” Lydia leaned in towards him and he met her halfway, because what was she going to do, not kiss him for that? But when her lips brushed against his, she became aware of a flurry of flashing lights coming from over her left shoulder.

She turned away from the front of the restaurant immediately, gripping the edge of their table, her shoulders coming up towards her ears. Now she could hear what she had shut out before: the subtle hubbub out on the sidewalk, the sound of a few too many people hovering just outside the restaurant façade. Somehow, some way, she resisted the temptation to turn around and actually look straight at them, but as a result they loomed behind her, just out of eyeshot, becoming something sinister and grasping. “It’s fine, love,” Paul said, his voice low. “We knew this might happen.”

Lydia nodded, still too alarmed to move any other part of her body. “Well, might just became is.”

“I know,” he said, soothing. “But it’s all right.” Paul looked to their side and jerked his chin; two men dressed in all-black suits abruptly stood up from their nearby table and headed out to handle things. Lydia, reeling, was grateful that his bodyguards were present, even though she’d completely forgotten they’d be there in the first place.

Paul’s arm dropped to the back of her chair, putting a barrier between her and the rest of the room – making her feel protected. She released a deep breath. “They aren’t there,” she said.

“Not if you don’t want them to be.”

“We’re on a date,” she said, looking sideways at him through her eyelashes, “and I’m having a really good time.”

Paul smiled, though unlike earlier it was now tinged with more than a little sadness. “I am too, love. The best time. And we’re still only on the first part, you know.”

Tentatively, she smiled back. “Jeez,” she said, “how could I have forgotten about the bookstore?”

“Not too late to cancel the whole thing,” he kidded, “if you don’t want to—”

“You’ll have to pry those books out of my cold dead hands, Macca,” she vowed, and their laughter did a little bit to lighten the mood between them again. They returned to what remained of their meals.

But something had gone, she couldn’t help but feel. Now that she was aware again of the outside world, it was hard to block it out a second time. A fellow diner in the corner slyly took a digital camera out of her purse, positioned it at them, and tried to take a photo without using the flash to keep them from noticing her; Lydia guessed by the look on the woman’s face that she wasn’t getting great results. Someone else across the room was digging through her purse, taking out crumpled pieces of paper and examining them while darting looks at Paul – another would-be autograph seeker, probably. Waiters put their heads together, looking openly at their table, and someone who looked like restaurant management (his suit was a nicer cut) had entered and was conferring with the host. Meanwhile every now and then another burst of flashes filled the dining area, every time Lydia turned her face even slightly towards Paul, or he leaned in towards her. On his part, he ate one-handed, not removing his right hand from the back of her seat.

The manager came up to them ten minutes later, looking apologetic. “So long as the media stays out on the public sidewalk, we can’t make them move,” he was saying to Paul. “I must apologize for the—”

“That’s all right,” Paul said, in his coldly polite voice. “We weren’t staying for dessert anyway. Could we have the check? Lovely, ta.” He looked away, dismissing the manager before he’d even left their table.

“Way to go,” Lydia muttered, once he’d walked away, “that guy’s going to cry himself to sleep tonight.”

“If my date night gets ruined, I’m going to cry myself to sleep,” Paul declared dramatically.

“And if I don’t get to look at at least one cool book tonight, I’m going to cry myself to sleep,” Lydia shot back. They both snorted into their drinks.

As soon as Lydia ate the last bite of her dinner – with one longing look at the dessert menu propped at the center of her table – they both stood and put their coats back on. Paul added a dark green Jets baseball cap pulled low over his eyes to obscure his identity as much as possible, and Lydia grabbed her roses. One of his bodyguards came up and, after a whispered conference with Paul, led them to the back of the restaurant and through the kitchen, to a rear exit that spilled out into an empty alleyway.

“What now?” Lydia asked. “Taxi? Hire car?”

“It’s just a few blocks this way,” Paul said with a jerk of his head, “so we’re going on foot.” He stuffed his hands into his coat pockets and extended one elbow out for her to take, and with that they were on their way.

They merged seamlessly into the foot traffic on the crowded sidewalks. Despite the wintry weather, the slushy mess underfoot, the occasional gust of arctic wind, it was still a Friday and people were out and about, determined to have fun. Lydia hung onto him tightly, snuggled into his side even though she was able to walk just fine in her stilettos, and smiled to herself after a few minutes. They were out in the world. Together. Holding each other for everyone to see. It somehow felt like both the most daring thing she’d ever done and the most wonderfully obvious. To cover up her sentimental train of thought, she said to Paul, “I feel like we’re on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”

He glanced sideways at her and chuckled. “Right,” he said, “which is the best track on that album, and why is it definitely ‘Girl From the North Country’?”

Lydia gasped. “Heresy,” she cried, “nothing definite about that, especially when the best track is ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,’ duh.”

They argued cheerfully for the next block or two, and while Lydia was absolutely invested in telling Paul how wrong he was about Dylan’s best pre-electric work, she was also wondering where they were headed. She knew a lot of the trendy bookstores in Manhattan by now, having lived here for nearly seven years, but she just couldn’t think which one they were headed to. They weren’t all that far from Central Park, or her apartment now.

Paul stopped after a handful of blocks, and Lydia looked up from the sidewalk to find that they were in front of Argosy Book Store.

He laughed as she gaped at the storefront in speechless excitement. Argosy was one of the best bookstores in the City, selling not only books but also autographs, letters, maps, prints, first editions… “I take it I chose wisely,” Paul murmured in her ear, amused, as her silent awe stretched on.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered, tears stinging her eyes. It wasn’t that she’d never been to Argosy before – of course she had, it was mere blocks away from her home – but the fact that he’d brought her here for them to have a shared experience… “I—” She laughed, covering her mouth with one gloved hand. “Okay, let’s go in, oh my god, have you been here?”

“No,” he admitted, following behind as she pulled him towards the front door.

“I have,” she said, “so I know we’re in for a treat.”

The crowd inside was sparse, since she supposed most people didn’t think of a bookstore as being the place for a fun Friday night. No one looked at them more than a second as they entered, and if anyone recognized Paul they didn’t let on or didn’t care, more wrapped up in whatever books sat on the shelves before them. She led Paul deep into the store, past the huge executive desk where a store employee sat, and into the back section. “Argosy is the oldest bookstore in New York,” she said in a soft voice, to match the quiet atmosphere, “and I know that’s not saying much to a Brit, but here that’s a lot. Things change so fast in New York, with real estate being at such a premium, but Argosy hasn’t.”

Paul looked around, lifting up the bill of his baseball cap. “What’s your favorite section?” he asked, and she took him off to look at first editions.

She was aware of nerding out pretty hard – talking fast and smiling a lot, just like Paul had predicted – but she didn’t give a shit. Holding his hand, their fingers loosely entwined, they explored every inch of the place, pulling out books that looked interesting and discussing ones they remembered liking years earlier. A few times she saw a head pop up, when someone recognized Paul’s voice or face, but only one person came up and bothered them. Lydia stood back, flipping through a copy of Camus’ The Stranger in the original French, while Paul politely but firmly said he was having a nice night out and didn’t want to be disturbed. That person was the only one who approached them – Lydia definitely heard the fake shutter sound of a digital camera from the other side of the store at one point, though whoever was taking pictures of them ducked away before they could see who it was.

Lydia had been in raptures for close to forty-five minutes, having picked out three books she planned to buy, when Paul nudged her. “Come ‘ead for a mo, want to show you something,” he muttered, and he led her to the staffer who sat at the desk close to the front.

The staffer, an older woman with long snow-white hair, looked up at them through thick glasses and smiled when she recognized Paul. “Mr. McCartney,” she said in a low voice, “I thought that was you. Did you want to look through the items we pulled for you now?”

“Yes, that’d be lovely, thanks,” he replied, in his warm-polite voice, and the woman stood and disappeared into a staff room. Lydia gave him a look, eyebrow raised. “Was curious about some specific titles,” Paul said casually, though he ruined it by grinning at her. “Rang them up a few weeks ago.”

Lydia shook her head. “How long have you been planning to bring me here?”

“Long time,” was all he said, for the woman had returned and led them to a long table illuminated by green-shaded lamps, and started laying out her selections.

She was going to cry. For real this time. This was not a drill. As Lydia watched, the Argosy employee put down several rare old copies of James Thurber books – novels and collections of his drawings – a first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a compendium of Ronald Searle’s St. Trinians series, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce… everything she had ever remembered telling Paul she liked and there it was, recalled by him.

Down at the very end of the table, Lydia watched as the woman carefully set down a first edition of In His Own Write. The woman tapped it with her finger. “This one I was surprised,” she said to them, “it turns out it’s an autographed copy.” Lydia opened the cover and sure enough, John Lennon was scrawled on the endpaper. Distantly, she heard Paul thank the woman, who left them to it, and then he was behind her with his hand pressed again to the small of her back.

“Want to know a secret?” Lydia whispered. She pointed to In His Own Write. “I’m like ninety… eight percent sure I didn’t sign that. I think Mal did.”

Paul snorted, lowering his face to her shoulder to cover the noise. “But wait, how can you tell?”

“Black pen. I don’t remember signing these other than at the Foyle’s Luncheon, and Cynthia pulled a blue pen from her purse for me to use that day.”

“Hm,” he said, and he looked carefully at the autograph himself. If there were anyone who knew if she were right, it would be someone else who had also frequently had his signature faked by Mal. “Yeah, not yours,” Paul murmured. “It’s too tight. Your signature was all loose and loopy.”

“Should we tell them it’s fake?”

Paul shrugged. “I’m not fussed about it.” They snorted and shared a look, partners in crime. Lydia set the book down and looked over the rest of the offerings.

He was watching her more carefully now, Lydia realized after a few moments, tracking her reactions and listening to everything she said about each title. She tried to temper her responses but how on earth could she, really, when the book of Poe poetry was such a gorgeous art nouveau relic, with illustrations by Robinson, or the first edition hardcover of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was in mint condition? Lydia looked carefully over every book, examining the Thurber drawings and the marginalia in the Kerouac from whoever had previously owned it. Once she’d gone thoroughly through them all, she turned to Paul with a contented sigh and a smile. “I believe you said phase three was drinks. I’m parched.”

Paul’s face fell. “Didn’t one of these stand out to you? I don’t know, maybe…” He picked up the Thurber. “You spent a lot of time with this one, love.”

“You’re not buying me anything,” she declared. Lydia held up her roses and the three books she’d picked for herself earlier. “You already got me flowers and dinner. I couldn’t possibly ask for anything else.”

“Are you sure? This copy of—”

She cut him off then, by stepping forward and kissing him. He returned it after a moment, hands at her hips. “I’m having an amazing time,” Lydia said, smiling at him. “You’re doing great so far. But I’m getting really curious to see what bar or lounge you’re taking me to.”

He playacted being upset, heaved a sigh, but allowed her to lead them to the register, where she bought her books and got a bag for them. Lydia had made it outside when she realized he wasn’t right behind her, and waited while he spoke with the cashier and handed something over.

When he joined her outside, she gave him a look. “Which one?”

“The Edgar Allan Poe collection of poetry,” he said with a smirk, not bothering to dither over it. “You liked that one best, I could tell. It’s being delivered to my place on Monday.”

Lydia rolled her eyes, but chuckled as she took his arm and allowed him to steer her down the street. “I do like those art nouveau drawings,” she admitted.

“I know,” he said, replacing his Jets cap, “I saw how your eyes lit up. Besides…” He paused, and was quiet long enough that Lydia looked at him as they walked. “I was thinking the other day about that copy of Alice’s Adventures that I gave you,” he said slowly. “How… I don’t know, I suppose it’s at the Dakota, somewhere. Best I can hope is that Sean somehow gets it after Yoko passes, I reckon, which would be all right. But I got upset thinking about how you didn’t have it anymore.”

Lydia burrowed closer to him, clinging to his arm. She swallowed and waited until she was sure her voice wouldn’t wobble. “You going to inscribe this one too?” she asked.

“Sure.” He smirked and winked at her. “Won’t say what, haven’t decided yet, have I?”

Whatever bar they were headed to wasn’t close by, so Paul led her down to the train at 59^th Street and they hopped aboard, Paul keeping his chin and his hat brim low in the harsh fluorescent lights. Lydia was proud of her fellow New Yorkers: no one bothered them for the duration of their trip downtown, even when Paul said something to her loudly enough that his identity was surely made plain. They were able to stand in a back corner of a train car, chatting and observing people around them, unmolested.

The two of them alighted at Astor Place station and walked a few blocks east, until they were standing outside a lower-level taproom that said BURP CASTLE on the awning outside.

Lydia looked at him. “You brought me to a place that has the word burp in it,” she deadpanned.

“I heard of it and instantly thought of you, my love,” he joked, and led her inside.

Unlike Argosy, Burp Castle was packed yet oddly quiet, the patrons’ conversations down at a pretty manageable level. With uncanny timing, someone left one of the tables positioned around the outer edge of the room, so Paul nabbed it and Lydia went to the bar to grab their drinks. It was a pretty quirky place, but despite her initial misgivings she quickly found herself falling for its charms. Medieval chants played over the sound system, and two of the three bartenders were garbed in monks’ robes while they served imported beers on tap. The best part, though, was that – as she waited for their order – one bartender stood upright and loudly shushed everyone there. The noise level immediately dropped.

Oh man, Lydia realized, looking around. This place was perfect for actually going out and being able to talk to people without having to yell over loud music or noise. She wondered how Paul had discovered it.

Lydia returned to their table with cold drinks for them both, waving away Paul’s protests about paying. “Modern girl, remember?” she said. “I never expected you to pay for everything tonight.” He grumbled for awhile but shut up before long.

They sat on the same side of the table together, with their backs to the door. Pressed against Paul practically from shoulder to ankle, Lydia suggested they continue their game from the restaurant, and so in the oddly reverent atmosphere of a place called Burp Castle, they continued sharing untold tidbits with each other. The noise level in the bar would rise inexorably, and every fifteen or twenty minutes or so one of the bartenders would shush everyone again. And the lights were low enough that no one appeared to recognize Paul, and no one came up to them or tried to take their photo.

It was magical. Lydia wanted to bring everyone she’d ever met back here.

She’d managed to pull several interesting facts out of Paul that night. In addition to his thing for turtleneck sweaters, he’d confessed that he liked how she looked in her thick Buddy Holly glasses too. “I also loved it when you sang the middle eight of ‘This Boy,’” he told her. “That was the best part of that song, the way you just poured your heart into it, you know.”

Lydia’s eyes widened. “That part specifically?” she asked.

“Sure, yeah. Why?”

She drank some of her beer before answering. “Oh, no reason,” she said, “other than the fact that that’s the part I wrote about you. The first line of the middle eight, anyway.”

Paul stared at her. “You what?”

“Yep.”

“You never!”

The bartenders shushed at that point, so she paused until everyone was quiet again. “Why is that so hard to believe? You just said you liked that bit, so I’m telling you, it was for you. Maybe that’s why you liked it so much – you could hear that I was singing it to you.”

He looked away, shock written all over his face as he slowly turned his glass in circles on their table. She let him work through whatever was turning in that brain of his, taking another sip of her drink, which was partly why she was unprepared when she felt his arm wrap around her and he drew them close together, with his lips pressed to her ear. “I give my heart and no one knows that I do,” he sang softly, “it’s for you.”

Lydia felt her heart swoop down somewhere near her stomach. “But – but you gave that one to Cilla,” she whispered.

“So I wouldn’t have to sing it while looking at you, of course.”

For the fourth time that night she felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes. She smiled down at her drink a moment, thinking. Then, mimicking his position, she sang in his ear “But of all these friends and lovers, there is no one compares with you.”

“If I were you,” he sang back, “I’d realize that I love you more than any other guy.”

“Fuck, that’s the best part of that song,” she groaned. He gave a little bow from the waist and she giggled, feeling like she was high on the most potent drug known to mankind.

Their game shifted over completely to singing snatches of lyrics at each other, snippets of songs written years ago that had lost none of their immediacy or meaning. They sang Beatles songs, demos they’d never recorded, early stuff that had been lost to time (and Jane Asher’s cleaning), solo material. She blushed, and was grateful for the low lights overhead when she sang him part of “Jealous Guy,” which she’d always insisted was about Yoko; and blushed further when Paul sang the chorus of “Let Me Roll It.” It was so blatant, spilling out over every word and phrase and line of their work for years and years. Did this make them blind idiots, or just love-struck idiots?

“We have to stop,” she said before long. “Because I’m on the brink of not being able to keep my hands to myself anymore and causing a public nuisance.”

Paul’s eyebrow darted skywards, and his expression showed that he was definitely interested in seeing exactly that come to pass. But with a toss of his hair and a wink, they untwined themselves and stood. She grabbed his hand and her Argosy books, the roses poking out from the top of the bag, and tugged him outside.

They still had a train ride ahead of them before they returned home, but she stopped him on the street corner and just kissed him, unable to contain herself any longer. In her heels she was of a height with him, and with his hat brim pulled low they were just an amorous couple, having a moment. “I love you,” she said, “and I’m happy to announce that this date is now in my top five all-time.”

Paul chuckled. “I can’t imagine how your best date could’ve been better than this one.”

Kissing him again, “Oh this one’s number one. Not even close, no competition.”

They made their way uptown in a haze; later Lydia couldn’t remember a single specific thing from either the train car or from 53^rd Street Station, where they alighted. They were outside her apartment in the blink of an eye. “Are you the kind of person who has partners come up on the first date?” Paul said, teasing her.

“No,” she said, “but there are always exceptions to that rule.” With that, she firmly clasped his hand in hers and took him upstairs.

Paul was in her kitchen noisily making breakfast and talking to Jeff the next morning, when she heard her phone buzz with an incoming text. Moaning in complaint, Lydia flopped around in bed until she could reach her bedside table, awkwardly disconnect her phone from its charger, and bring the screen up to her face to peer fuzzily at the new text.

It was from Nicole: Bitch, you guys are so in love I’m going to be sick. But do me a favor and don’t read the tabloid coverage. Have Paul pay somebody to do it. Trust me.

Lydia sighed and let the phone fall onto the pillow beside her.

Well, fuck.

Chapter Text

Lydia clutched her bathrobe close as she shuffled down the hall, dialing Nicole’s number. “Hi baby boy,” she cooed to Jeff, who stood still long enough to be petted and scratched under the chin. Paul kissed her cheek and they murmured good morning to each other just as Nicole picked up. “So,” she said into her phone, sitting at her tiny dining table, “I know you said not to read the coverage—”

“You really shouldn’t,” Nicole emphasized.

“But like…” She huffed in annoyance, though muttered a thanks when Paul set a cup of coffee and a plate of toast and perfect scrambled eggs in front of her – the McCartney Breakfast Special, or the only meal he knew how to make. “Okay then tell me what photos they got of us. Just from the restaurant, right?”

Paul gave her a curious look.

“Um, no babe. They got you at the restaurant, on the street, on the subway, and at that bookstore.”

Lydia went cold all over. “Wait, what? How – but I didn’t even see—”

“I did,” Paul murmured, as he dug into his own breakfast.

“And you didn’t say anything to me about it?” Lydia said to him, lowering the phone slightly.

He shrugged. “I thought you were doing a brilliant job ignoring them, you know. I was impressed.”

“Did he stay for breakfast?” Nicole asked, with a snicker.

“Yeah he did, not important,” Lydia said into the phone absently, as Nicole gave a little excited get it girl!. “Okay, wow. Can you see my face at all? Like if I hadn’t told you in advance, could you look at those photos and know it was me?”

Nicole hummed a little, and Lydia heard the clicking of a computer mouse. “One or two of these definitely,” she said. “Most of them, no. You have an uncanny knack for tilting your face away from the camera lens at just the right moment. But apparently the paparazzi have a phone tree or something, because they all knew within a half hour or so that Paul was in Midtown wearing a Jets cap and a black coat. It seems like they tracked your movements through that.”

“Motherfucker,” Lydia said feelingly. She sagged in her chair. “Do I at least look cute?”

“What kind of question is that?” Paul asked, just as Nicole answered her “You look amazing, babe. The picture of the two of you kissing in the bookstore is giving me the vapors.”

“There’s a picture of me making out with a guy where my parents can see it?” Lydia whimpered.

Paul snorted hard enough into his coffee that he almost did a spit take. While he was coughing into a napkin, Nicole said with a cackle “Happens to the best of us.”

“What about my identity, did they print my name?”

“They wouldn’t,” Paul rasped out.

“The captions just say you’re a ‘close friend,’” Nicole confirmed, “though obviously the kiss photo says something different. The only people who’re going to know this girl is you are people who actually know you in person.”

Lydia nodded and took a bite of her toast. “About what I expected, I guess. I can live with that for now.”

“There you go!” Nicole said. “That’s the spirit.”

“And the captions, and the actual reporting—”

“Nope, we’re focusing on the good parts today,” Nicole said quickly.

Lydia looked at Paul, who suddenly seemed a bit too innocent as he spread marmalade on his toast. “See, when you say that it makes me low-key panic,” Lydia said slowly. “Scratch that, high-key.”

“No reason to panic,” Nicole soothed. “Just… have someone who works for Paul read it, summarize it if need be, and let them figure out how to address it. You’re a bad-ass bitch journalist, Lydia, not a public relations expert. Let the pros handle it.”

“Can’t you summarize it for me?”

Nicole sighed down the line, and paused for a long while. “You’re crazy about him, right?” she said, instead of answering at first. “You’re in this for real?”

“Of course.” Under the table, Lydia shifted her knees until they were touching Paul’s; he nudged back.

“Okay. Well… Ugh. He gets off pretty light. The censure is all for you. Everything you’re probably expecting, since the New York Post is pure trash and the British tabloids are even worse than American ones.”

Gold digger. Sugar baby. Sleeping her way to the top. Slut.

“Cool,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes. “Have I ever mentioned before how much I love misogyny? Because I love it so fucking much, I can’t even.”

“Preach, girl,” Nicole said with another sigh.

Lydia thanked her and promised to talk soon then hung up, tossing her phone to the tabletop. She attacked her food with a vengeance, eating as if she were starving, barely pausing to swallow before forking up the next bite. Paul watched her for a moment, sipping his coffee. “My people were only allowed to call you a close friend and not give your name to the press,” he said quietly. “If there’s anything we should be concerned about, they’ll tell us.”

“Isn’t my reputation something to worry about?” she snapped.

“I meant things like your name, your employer, your parents’ home address and your flat here,” he said, rapping his knuckles against her table. “Your physical safety is the most important thing.”

She tossed her fork to her plate, letting it clatter loudly. “I just don’t understand how they managed to track us for most of the night and I… what, didn’t see them? How the fuck have I gotten out of the habit of not being aware of where the media is?”

“You haven’t had to do it in awhile,” Paul said, still keeping his voice calm and even. “It’s fine. I’m used to it now, you know. Hardly have to think about it anymore.”

“Especially since 1980,” she said sourly.

“Especially since 1980. It is what it is, my love.”

As if sensing her distress, Jeff put his paws on her chair; she picked him up and let him climb up onto her shoulders, wearing him like a neck pillow as he purred. “I’ll need to build up a thick skin,” she murmured, half to herself. “I didn’t really have one before, but I’ll need one now.”

“What do you mean?” Paul said, frowning. “We were in front of cameras nonstop for a decade, practically, how couldn’t you have—”

“And it was all fawning, positive stuff back then. ‘John, you’re a once-in-a-generation songwriter!’ ‘John, you’re the next James Joyce!’ ‘John, I hear you can cure cancer!’”

“Not all, you know. No one thought we’d be coming after Kubrick’s job after Magical Mystery Tour aired, that’s for certain.”

Lydia drank some of her coffee. “Have you ever heard that Steely Dan song ‘Only a Fool Would Say That’?” she said, giving him an arch look. “Were you aware that the ‘fool’ in that song is me? And did you know that after hearing it I shut myself in my music room blasting Led Zeppelin while I cried, because I was so proud of ‘Imagine’ and thought everyone else just loved it—”

“Oi.” Paul reached over and grabbed her hand, squeezing it; only then did Lydia realize she was talking loud and fast, getting more and more upset. “You know how many people have called me names over the years?”

“Zero,” she spat. “Wait, sorry – one. That restaurant manager last night was definitely calling you a prick once we left.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Have you ever heard that John Lennon song ‘How Do You Sleep?’” he said, lifting one eyebrow. A smile quirked at the corner of his mouth. “Were you aware that the ‘you’ in that song is me? And did you know that I took a long walk alone on my property after hearing it, trying to work out if it was meant seriously or not?”

Lydia snorted, but squeezed his hand back. “I didn’t mean it seriously,” she whispered.

“I know that now,” Paul shot back, his words tempered with a smile. “We knew this wouldn’t be a stroll in the park, love,” he said after a quiet moment. “Will you trust my people to know what they’re doing, and have it all handled?”

Lydia frowned, and reached up to pet Jeff. “Yeah, fine.”

“And will you also trust that we both look dead sexy in those photos?” he said, winking.

“You always look dead sexy, that’s not exactly breaking news.”

“Oh really?” He dragged her chair closer to his, making her yelp in surprised glee and causing Jeff to leap and run away from their amorous hijinks. “Tell me more about this sexy business, I need to hear all about it.”

“Paul!”

The rest of the weekend was weirdly normal. Scott let their family know that he’d finally proposed to Andrea, who had of course said yes, so Lydia called them both to offer up a heartfelt congratulations. She half-wondered if Scott had picked his moment on purpose, since the engagement news definitely pulled the family’s focus away from her and Paul’s paparazzi photos, but when she texted him about later it he’d only responded Nobody needs to see pictures of my little sister macking on a guy in public. When she’d asked her mom if she saw the New York Post photo spread, Carol had texted back Yes, your dad and I saw.

Full stop. No follow up. Lydia was ready to throw her phone across the room.

Saturday they laid low, but late Sunday afternoon she and Paul went to a movie theater to see Zodiac. Afterwards, they went out to dinner and dissected the film in detail, like they used to way back in the day when they’d see films like Ben-Hur and Some Like It Hot at the Gaumont in Liverpool. “I guess Robert Downey, Jr. is attempting a comeback,” Lydia said. “Good for him. He was great in this, wasn’t he?”

“Really fantastic,” Paul agreed. “I hope it’s the start of something for him. Turning over a new leaf.” He lifted his hand then to wipe at the corner of his mouth, and totally by chance Lydia happened to see his ring finger. It was bare.

“You—” He froze, and just watched as she reached across the table to touch his left hand. “You took off your wedding ring,” she said, looking at him with wide eyes.

She didn’t know what to think. She’d noticed from the day they reconnected that he still wore a plain gold band on his finger, but it wasn’t anything they’d ever talked about or even mentioned directly. It was just there, a part of his wardrobe as much as his watch or his Chuck Taylors. Everyone mourned in different ways and at different speeds, as she’d told him once, and so she had merely accepted that this was part of how he remembered Linda and their marriage and life together. And now the ring was gone.

“Oh, yeah,” Paul said, sounding painfully casual. He glanced down at his hand briefly then turned back to his food. “It was time. I actually took it off before Friday night, you just didn’t notice, I reckon.”

“Seems there was a lot I missed that night,” she said dryly. “I was distracted by my date.” He winked at her. “But… Are you okay? Should we talk about it?”

“I’m great, love,” he said. He reached across the table and took her hand; as if on cue, there was a flickering flash outside as the assembled media took photos from the sidewalk. “Linda’s been gone… Christ, it’ll be nine years next month.” He shrugged. “I miss her, but… it was just time,” he repeated, not making eye contact.

Lydia ate some of her food before speaking again. “I don’t know if this will mean anything to you,” she said, “but I’m proud of you. Moving on is never easy.”

“Why wouldn’t that mean anything to me?” he said, perking up a little at her compliment.

“Coming from me. I wasn’t exactly nice to Linda back in the day—”

Paul waved a hand. “I told her you didn’t mean it.”

“Still.”

“Still,” he echoed. “I took the ring off and sent it back to England. Told James he could have it when he gets married, you know, keep it in the family. But I’m looking forward now, into the future.”

“Do you think you’ll ever get married again?” Lydia asked before she could think better of it. As soon as it was out of her mouth her heart jolted a little in panic. She’d never had a relationship that lasted long enough for the big words to come up: Future. Marriage. Family. She’d never thought before about things like mortgages or filing taxes jointly, going down to city hall for a license and deciding who would be in the wedding party – she was twenty-six and still had so many other things to do. And yet…

Paul looked at her through his eyelashes, a slowly growing smirk on his face. That damned eyebrow shot upwards. “That’s the hope, love,” he said, his voice low. “Someday.”

Lydia grinned at him, knowing her cheeks had gone bright red. “It’s good to have goals,” was all she said.

Monday morning when she went into work, she was almost immediately called in by her editor. Lydia grabbed a pen and reporters’ notebook, thinking she was getting a special assignment, only to discover that Tom was in his office with Janine Lopez from Arts and Culture and several other men she only knew by sight: more senior editors at the Washington Post.

“Close the door, Montrose,” Tom said, waving her in. “Have a seat.”

The two worst sentences in the English language. Fuck. Lydia sat down on the very edge of the only free chair, her notebook digging into her palms.

“I spotted this on Saturday morning,” Janine said, handing over a folded paper that looked like it might be the New York Post.

Lydia glanced at it just long enough to see that damn photo of her kissing Paul at Argosy Bookshop before she looked up at Janine. She knew what this was all about now. Lydia was no idiot, even though she felt cold sweat drip down her back. “You want to know if I committed an ethical breach,” she said. Thank god her voice came out steady.

“When we went to that music video shoot back in 2003, you told me you only knew Paul McCartney in a business capacity,” Janine said. “You said you met him while working as Monty Hayes’s assistant.”

“Yes, that’s what I said at the time,” Lydia said, nodding. “And that was an accurate description of our association in August 2003. It’s obviously changed since then.”

“You were part of the team working on that profile piece for several weeks afterwards,” Janine said. “When did you start dating Paul?”

Lydia sat up straight. “I want to make sure you know I’m only answering that because my professionalism is under question here,” she said, as evenly as she could manage. “When that profile piece was finally published in September 2003, I wasn’t dating Paul.” Except for the part where she really was, but no one needed to know that.

But that wasn’t good enough for them. “I know this is annoying,” Tom said, waving a careless hand through the air. “You understand we need to be more vigilant about this stuff, especially after Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.”

“They were accused of plagiarism and fabricating sources,” Lydia said, clenching one fist in her lap. Damnit, she had asked to be removed from that story at the very start – it was Janine who’d insisted on keeping her on it! “You’re accusing me of something slightly different, I hope.”

“Not accusing,” Janine clarified. “We just want to make sure that everything is above board and beyond reproach. If we need to print a retraction or addendum of any kind…” Lydia didn’t really care anymore what the reasons were; she’d gone into protection mode and her brain was going a hundred miles a minute. She thought back to the music video shoot, the last and only time she, Paul, and Janine had been in the same room together. Janine had assigned herself the interview, instead of handing it off to another experienced arts reporter, and had fangirled over him that day, giving him softball questions he’d been asked a thousand times before.

This would be easy. Lydia wasn’t afraid to play dirty when important things were on the line.

While Janine was still going on and on, Lydia reached into her back pocket and pulled out her personal phone. “If we’re going to have a conversation about him, Paul will want to hear it too,” she said, before she hit the call button. For good measure, she put it on speakerphone.

Janine cut herself off abruptly as the sound of the phone ringing filled the small office. The senior editors were looking at each other nonplussed, while Tom gave Lydia a look over the tops of his glasses that she recognized as unamused but tolerant. She was so lucky Tom was her editor and willing to put up with her shit.

“Hello, love,” Paul answered. He sounded wary, since she rarely called him from work except during their lunch breaks. “All right?”

“Hey Paul, I’ve got you on speaker,” she warned him, holding the phone out in the center of the room. “I’m in my editor’s office with several people who have been asking me some questions, and I thought you should be in on this since they have to do with the both of us.”

“Of course.” She could hear it at once – how he shifted straight into the outwardly-facing version of himself, the one he presented seamlessly to strangers, fans, and the press. It was like a suit of armor he could call up at will, saying what needed to be said, giving only the barest amount of insight or personal detail, and protecting what needed to be kept from the nosy public. Lydia had interviewed many famous people by now and nobody did it better. “Anything I can help out with,” Paul said, fully in PR mode, “I have a few moments between meetings.”

Janine leaned forward. “This is Janine Lopez,” she said, sounding a little giddy. “Arts and Culture editor. I interviewed you back in August of 2003, when you were filming your music video for ‘Emeralds’ in Brooklyn?”

“Ah yes, the day the power went out,” Paul said in a dramatic voice. “How could I ever forget? Hello, Janine, how can I help you?”

Janine would be talking about this phone call for the rest of her life, Lydia realized: the day she had a personal conversation with Sir Paul McCartney. “We just had a few questions for you,” she said. “We wondered, um, what your relationship to Lydia Montrose was at that time.”

Lydia’s heart jolted into overdrive when Paul didn’t answer right away. “This isn’t like how the media usually asks you about your relationships, babe,” she translated, her eyes running around the room. “This discussion isn’t about our private lives, it’s about journalistic ethics.” Lydia stressed the last two words, saying them more slowly.

“Ah, I see,” Paul said, unruffled. He’d gotten her implicit message. “Well Janine, at that time – during the music video shoot – Lydia Montrose was my collaborator’s very capable assistant. She worked for Monty Hayes and was helping us with some, you know, little administrative duties and errands as we wrote the music for our album The Great Hiatus.”

“So you weren’t dating at that time, in August and September of 2003,” Janine said.

“No, that came later,” he said. “Lydia emailed me after the profile was published – around when the album came out, actually, in November, which set the ball rolling. Was that all you needed, Janine?” he added, which was Paul-speak for We’re done here.

“Yes, thank you Mr. McCartney,” Janine said in a rush, and Lydia said she’d see him soon before hanging up.

Later – once she’d been told she could go, and was assured that everything had been cleared up – Lydia headed back to her desk. She waited until she was seated to text Paul: You just totally saved my ass. Holy shit!

I had no idea your job would be on the line!

Me neither!!! But we’re good now. I’ll see you tonight and tell you the whole story. Love you.

Love you, see you tonight xo

As she got down to her work for the day, she mused that there were two things she wouldn’t let anyone ruin or take away from her: her career, and Paul. She would do whatever was necessary to protect them both. But all the same maybe it was time that she, like Paul, should start looking to the future. Her original dream of one day covering the foreign affairs beat for the New York Times had not changed in all the years she’d been at the Washington Post. Getting to the Times, putting in her years on the job here at the main office in New York, and then getting transferred to their London bureau was still the main objective.

Lydia made a mental note to reach back out to her contact at the Times while on her lunch break, to see if maybe now was a good time for a change in scenery.

Chapter Text

So much had happened since their first public outing – between the media attention, texts from people who knew her, and odd looks from her coworkers – that the antique book Paul had purchased for her at Argosy had completely fled her mind. When she went to his penthouse Thursday night, after they ate dinner he had handed her a beautifully wrapped package that, for a moment, she couldn’t identify.

“Oh!” she said after a moment, looking up at him. “Is this the Poe book?”

“None other,” he said, grinning. Paul watched with obvious pleasure as she tore open the paper to reveal the gray-green cloth-bound hardcover she remembered from their date, still as stunning now as it had looked last week. She flipped through it a little, the gorgeous art deco drawings leaping off the pages at her, until she reached the title page, where she found a plain white card tucked into the spine. Just like with Wonderland, Paul had written on that instead of in the actual book:

I love you, I love you, I love you!
That’s all I want to say.
Paul xo

Lydia looked up at him, grinning. “Good inscription,” she said, “somebody should set that to music or something.” Paul chuckled as he leaned in and she thanked him further with a lingering kiss.

“Lydia,” he whispered, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I think you should—” He paused. He’d gotten better over the years at asking her about things instead of telling her what he thought they should do, so as a reward for his restraint she nodded and smiled, toying with a curl of hair at the base of his neck. “Would you consider… moving in? With me?”

She’d thought about it before, of course. Those four years of staying in every night, pretending not to know each other, visiting under cover of darkness, had led her more than once to long for a reality where they could both live in the same space, and everything wasn’t such a big hassle. If she were really honest, hiding their relationship and staying apart was probably the root cause of quite a few of their arguments, lending a base layer of frustration and anger to a number of other sore spots. Even so, some of her clothes and toiletries had migrated up to his place, just as many of his personal items had wound up in Turtle Bay, since neither one of them could resist little rebellions. But living together for real…

“Yeah,” she said, nodding and smiling like crazy. “I will. Jeff and I would love to.”

“We wouldn’t have to live here, if you don’t want,” he said quickly, tossing back his hair. “We can find another place we both like, one where we can’t see the Dakota from the window—”

“Why bother?” she said with a shrug. “We’ll only be here a couple more years, right? Or however long it takes for me to get a transfer to London.” When he just blinked at her, his mouth a round O of surprise, Lydia ran a hand through his hair. “What? I know how many legal issues have come up in the past few years: you trying to stay in this country for me as much as possible, navigating all the visa applications and renewals, and owing American taxes on top of everything else – I’ve heard the phone calls with your lawyers, it’s a nightmare. I’m so thankful for everything you’ve done on that front, but it doesn’t have to be this way forever.” She wound her arms around his neck, pulling them close together. “Let’s go home,” she murmured.

“But London isn’t your home anymore, I thought,” he said slowly.

Lydia looked away, biting her lip. “I only became a New Yorker because of Yoko, if you think about it,” she said, “and when we went to visit Dhani and Olivia last year… you know, I still have very real, very strong feelings about England.” She neglected to mention the fact that since Yoko had learned of her return, the City had felt too small to contain both of them. That was a subject she’d been avoiding a long time, though she knew Paul had his suspicions.

“What’s she done?” Paul said right away, his voice hard, because he could always tell when it came to that topic. Lydia winced. She didn’t want to have that conversation right now. “If she’s done or said anything that upset you—”

“No, nothing like that. Everything’s fine, I just know that…” She sighed, and tipped her head forward until her cheek rested against his. “Even more than what my passport says, Paul… home is wherever you are, really.”

He wound his arms around her, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “That’s why I do it, love,” he said. “All the immigration nonsense. To be near you.”

“That settles it then. Jeff and I are moving in, though only I’ll be splitting the rent and bills, the freeloader.”

Paul slid his arms away from her. “Don’t worry about that—”

“Oh I know, the mortgage payments on this place are probably half my annual salary,” Lydia said. “But what’s the usual formula – thirty percent of your monthly income should be spent on housing? So I’ll pay that and somehow I’m sure you’ll make up the difference.”

“No, you see,” he said with a little laugh, “I bought this place outright. No mortgage. So.” He shrugged, looking embarrassed.

Lydia threw her head back and laughed. “The electric bill!” she joked, “please tell me there’s an electric bill I can split with you!”

“Water, electric, trash, Internet, and local taxes,” he said, laughing with her, “and nothing else!”

“Now how’s that for romance?” She twined her arms around his neck, kissing him. “I’m gonna split those utilities so hard with you, babe—”

“Ooh, tell me more,” Paul played along.

“Jeff’s cat castle is going to take over the living room.”

He kissed her neck with an exaggerated groan.

“My favorite movies and TV shows will be all up in your TiVo.”

“The DVR,” he corrected.

“Whatever,” she mumbled, going back to the kissing. “I’ll give notice to my landlord tomorrow, since he needs thirty days, and I can start bringing my stuff over… this weekend?”

“Brilliant.” He smiled down at her, his face full of something impossibly soft and fond. “You’re moving in,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, so excited she could burst. “I’m moving in.”

After much back and forth, lengthy phone calls to Chicago and Boston, nonstop monitoring of the price of plane tickets, rearranging schedules – plus a last-minute rain check when breaking news held Lydia in the office late – they finally picked a date for the big Meet the Family dinner towards the end of April. Scott and Andrea’s engagement party was a mere two weeks after that, so it was cutting it a bit closer than Lydia would’ve liked. She wanted everything comfortable and settled between them all before getting Andrea and her family into the mix, but oh well. With Paul’s busy schedule and everything else going on, this was the best she could’ve hoped for.

It was with great trepidation and reluctance that Paul – who didn’t like driving on the “wrong” side of the road – consented to have Lydia drive them in a rental car up to Westchester. “I’m the only one of us who has a valid US driver’s license,” she argued for the umpteenth time, “and I’ll have you know I got a perfect score on my road test based on my own ability, not because I bribed the tester with autographs for his daughters and nieces.”

“I knew bribery had to be involved,” Paul said, “you were a really shit driver back then.” She tossed a couch pillow at him that he didn’t duck.

Lydia had only recently fully moved into the East Side condo, but it was just in the nick of time – someone had figured out where she lived, and during the last week of her residence in Turtle Bay there was a clutch of determined paparazzi posted outside her door day and night to snap her as she went in and out. On the day she handed over her keys to the landlord, she made a great show of bowing to the photographers, who all furiously yelled intrusive questions at her.

The pictures ended up in People Magazine, next to some copy wondering (in so many words) why Paul was dating such a weirdo. “You’re not weird, you’re eccentric,” Paul said, “and I love it so who cares what they think.”

“Yeah, that’ll show ‘em,” Lydia drawled.

On the Saturday morning before the big dinner, Lydia packed Jeff into his carrier, stuffed some clothes into her overnight bag, grabbed the good bottle of wine they were bringing, and then left the condo to go pick up her rental car, a nondescript blue Toyota. When she pulled up outside Paul’s building and stopped with the hazards blinking, he emerged in full Celebrity Incognito Mode, the doorman helping him with his stuff: a bag, a guitar case, a bouquet of flowers for her mom, and—

She craned her head as he gestured for her to pop the trunk and put whatever it was inside. Once he’d taken his seat and done up the seatbelt, “What the hell was that? A folding cot?”

“You told me I’d be sleeping on a fold-out sofa downstairs,” Paul said, waving his thanks to the doorman, “and I didn’t like that plan.”

Lydia rolled her eyes as she signaled and merged back into traffic. Behind her, a black sedan with Paul’s bodyguards turned into the lane with them. “I told you, it’s only because the bed in my room is a twin.”

“We’ve squeezed into plenty of twin beds before!”

“Not that my family knows about. They don’t know that part yet, remember.”

“Right,” he said, with a nod. “No references to that bit. So if someone brings up how odd it is that your birthday is in December 1980—”

“What a strange coincidence!” Lydia said in a fake voice. “The world is so random like that sometimes, isn’t it?”

Paul chuckled. “And we started dating in November 2003, not August 2002, if anyone asks.”

“Very important. And I’m not Monty Hayes, I just used to work for him sometimes,” Lydia said, before she could think better of it.

Paul went quiet at that, as they made their slow way uptown, the only noise in the car the radio playing music at low volume. She could guess what he was thinking about, so she tried to head him off at the pass. “And I haven’t met George or Rich – shit, I should call him Ringo while we’re there. I don’t know anyone else except your kids. I think we can tell them we’re living together now too, that’s fine.” She shot him a brief look. “Obviously Americans tend to be puritanical about relationships, but I like to think my parents are more open-minded than most. My mom was really frank about sex and birth control and all that when we were teenagers – me and my brothers. We of course were embarrassed as all get out, but appreciated it as we got older.”

“Good to know,” Paul said, his smile forced.

“Just don’t mention that thing we did in the shower together last weekend.”

“But that’s one of my best anecdotes, I was planning on leading with it.”

Lydia couldn’t hold her deadpan; she cracked up at that. She reached over the center console and squeezed his hand. “You pervy bastard,” she said with nothing but affection in her voice. “If only your fans knew how twisted you can be.”

He hummed a little, sounding distracted. She hadn’t pulled him away from his original train of thought. Sure enough, after a few moments had passed: “Speaking of Monty Hayes,” he said, overly casual. “I got another offer from the record company last week.”

Lydia clenched her jaw. “Oh?”

“Full creative control, no oversight, whatever producer and engineering team we want, and an even bigger advance. The number’s massive, not that either of us cares so much about the financial incentive, you know. It’s…” He sighed and tossed his hair, looking out the side window, away from her. “It’s like the sort of arrangement we had before. As Lennon-McCartney.”

She frowned, and nibbled on the inside of her cheek. “Why do they have such a hard on for the McCartney-Hayes byline anyway?” she groused. “I loved your last solo album. Yes, I’m biased because a lot of the songs are about me, but—”

“Don’t change the subject, love. What do I tell them? They need an answer by next week.”

Lydia opened her mouth and closed it a few times. She didn’t want to have this conversation now, not when they were stuck in a car for the next hour or so and she couldn’t avoid him. She definitely didn’t want to talk and get all worked up about it right before introducing him to her parents for the very first time – she was desperate for this weekend to go perfectly, and if they started it on this footing…

When the silence just stretched on, Paul turned his body in his seat to face her head on. “Love, our album three years ago was absolutely brilliant,” he said, in complete earnest. “I play ‘Emeralds’ and ‘The Mountain’ and ‘Coming Home’ on every tour now and they get an incredible response. Then ‘Per My Last Message’ was used in that advert for, what was it, some computer company.”

“You mean Microsoft?” she said dryly.

“And ‘Early in the Morning’ was used in that thriller film last year. To say nothing of the Grammys! I know you still have all of the nominee medallions, I spotted them just the other day in one of your moving boxes. No, we didn’t win any of our categories, but I didn’t expect to. They don’t really give Grammys to old farts like me,” Paul said, with perhaps a bit more self-pity than he’d intended to show. He cleared his throat, pushing on. “We had an amazing time making The Great Hiatus,” he insisted. “Why wouldn’t you want to do that again?”

Lydia used turning onto the highway as an excuse not to answer for a few moments. Despite her absolute confidence in her driving skills, New York drivers were still nuts even on a good day. “Reframe,” she said, once they were on a straight stretch of I-87. “Don’t ask me why I keep saying no, ask me why I can’t say yes.”

Paul stared at her. “You feel like you can’t say yes?” he murmured. “Why, love?”

She squeezed the steering wheel, her knuckles whitening. “New Orleans, 1975,” she said.

At that, Paul suddenly got very serious, shifting in his seat. “What did she say to you?”

“Nothing—”

“You know, you said that before and I didn’t believe you then either,” he snapped. “What’s Yoko bloody done?”

“Do you really want to get into this now?” she shot back. “Because I sure don’t. You need to focus on impressing my family, that’s literally all I care about right this second.”

Paul bit off a fervent curse and looked out the side window again, arms folded tightly to his chest. “When?” he said.

“Soon.”

“I need a specific date.”

Lydia huffed in annoyance, though it was her own fault for not playing along. “Make a dinner reservation for next week, or the week after – I’m open to whatever. I’ll tell you everything.”

“Done.”

Paul leaned against his door, head pressed to the window, and she glanced at him to see that he was frowning as he watched the cars around them, all headed north for a weekend away from the hustle and bustle of the City. He bit at his thumbnail, so much so that she longed to reach over and take his fingers away from his mouth. But she kept both her hands on the wheel instead, eyes forward as she drove up the interstate, which meant she jumped a little when Paul abruptly cranked up the volume on the radio and fiddled with the dial until he found the local rock station they both liked. What sounded like “Rocks Off” was just ending, and the deejay announced in an overly-jubilant tone that the next block of their special Triple-Play Weekend was coming right up. Soon “Purple Haze” was blasting in the little rental car, heavy enough that Lydia felt the bass vibrate in her seat.

Four years ago, she would’ve interpreted it as a brush off. Forty years ago, she would have already exploded in a rage at his perceived insensitivity. But she knew better: Paul needed to think, so the subject had a pin in it for the time being. Fine. Shaking back her hair, Lydia started singing along with Paul and Jimi Hendrix, and Yoko didn’t come up for the rest of the trip.

They reached the outskirts of her hometown just before noon, and Lydia slowed down to show him some landmarks from her formative years. He saw her imposing red-brick, ivy-clad high school, the family-run deli where she and her friends used to hang out once they could drive, the movie theater where she made out with her first boyfriends. “My first job,” she said, as they drove past a local real estate agent. “My dad knew the lady who owned the place, and I did office work for them the summer I was fifteen.”

Paul looked around, at the trees beginning to bloom again and the expensive foreign cars on the roads. “Didn’t realize how posh your hometown was,” he said absently. “Very different from Liverpool, innit?”

“You’re dating an heiress, Macca,” she teased. At his surprised look, “My mom’s grandfather invented several thingumabobs back in the late 1800s that’re important to the manufacture of… I don’t know, a whole host of things. Travis can probably explain. The family made a lot of money and invested it well.”

“Jesus.” Paul watched as they turned into the gated community where her parents lived, the winding roads and the tall leafy deciduous trees that lined the way, arching over their heads like a natural cathedral ceiling. “Do you think you chose all this?” he wondered. “You know, before you came back, those five days or whatever. Do you think you knew this family would be…” He gestured with his hand, grasping for the words.

“I do,” Lydia admitted. “I don’t think I was born a Montrose at random. I think I picked the situation most likely to get my path to cross yours again. If it hadn’t been Ringo’s concert, maybe it would’ve been through my dad – maybe you would’ve hired him to renovate a property, or… something. Why else come back with all my memories unless I was actively hatching a plan to find you again?”

Paul grinned happily at her. “You scheming bastard,” he said fondly.

“It’s a dirty lie.” She grinned back.

At long last they pulled up the driveway of the Montrose castle. Paul said flattering things about the stately and symmetrical Colonial home, with its bright white siding and navy shutters. Lydia drove up behind a car with Massachusetts plates and parked near the rear kitchen door, and in seconds Paul was out of his seat, grabbing for the flowers and wine first thing. They laughed while they tried to juggle everything – Jeff was decidedly not amused at still being in his carrier – and in the end Carol was at the door to receive them by the time they had everything except the cot in hand.

“Mom,” Lydia said, giving her a genuine smile. She skipped ahead and gave Carol a big hug her mom returned in full force. She smelled like home, like she’d been cooking and baking something delicious for hours already. Pulling back, feeling a little shy all of a sudden, Lydia gestured behind her. “Um, so this is Paul.”

Carol visibly braced herself, smiling in such a way that only came across as maybe ten percent fake. “Paul,” she echoed. “Welcome to our home.”

“Mrs. Montrose,” Paul said, on best behavior, “it’s a real pleasure to see you again.”

“Oh – Carol, please,” her mom said, her hand fluttering around the collar of her shirt. She backed up and led them into the kitchen.

Scott walked into the room just as they had brought their stuff in, and Paul was handing Carol the flowers and wine they’d brought with a flourish. “Hey little terror,” he said.

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Hey yourself,” she replied, hugging her oldest brother. “Paul, Scott,” she said, gesturing between them, “Scott, Paul. Scott’s a heart surgeon in Boston, which means he golfs a lot and wears khakis unironically. Paul’s a rockstar who was knighted by the Queen of England, which means he’s way cooler than you’ll ever be, poor guy.”

“Oh that’s not fair,” Paul said, as he shook Scott’s hand. “I’m sure you’re very cool in your own way, you know. Save people’s lives, all that!”

“Lydia’s just jealous because I’m the smart one in the family,” Scott said, rolling his eyes.

Paul laughed. “Then you must be very smart indeed,” he said, “because she’s one of the cleverest people I know. Really scary when we do the crossword together.” This said with an arm around her shoulders, which made her blush furiously.

“Travis’s flight got delayed a bit,” Carol told them, as she put Paul’s flowers into a vase. “Your dad’s at the train station picking him up just now. Can I get anyone anything to drink?”

Lydia bent to let Jeff out, while Paul said they were both fine. There were some snacks and a veggie tray on the kitchen island, which Carol invited them to help themselves to, but besides nibbling on a scant handful of carrots they didn’t eat much either. Scott was looking at Paul and frowning, as if finding fault with Paul’s perfectly acceptable white shirt and blazer, while Carol was clearly trying to not devolve into a simpering fangirl. To allay the rapidly coming awkwardness Lydia suggested a tour of the house, which Paul readily agreed to.

They made an odd parade, she thought. She led Paul by the hand, pointing out various architectural details her dad had custom designed, while Scott and their mom trailed behind, adding additional commentary here and there. In the front hall, where an extensive gallery of framed family photos covered the entirety of one wall, Paul very quickly spotted the picture of Carol standing with the Apollo 11 crew. “Christ,” he blurted, “is that Neil Armstrong?”

Scott burst out laughing while Carol blushed. “I told you she worked for NASA,” Lydia said, feeling proud. “My mom helped put a man on the moon!”

“I watched that, you know,” he said to Carol. “The moon landing, obviously, who didn’t that day. I remember it was quite early in the morning, in London, so we were all fairly ragged, but the chance to see someone actually walk on the moon live on telly was incentive enough to stay awake, of course.”

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime event,” Carol agreed.

Paul looked at Lydia with a happy smile lit with the warmth of memory. “My daughter Heather was bouncing off the walls she was so excited, bless her.”

Lydia smiled weakly at him, and at the picture on the wall. July 1969 – it was hard to even remember watching the moon landing with everything else that had been going on at that time. Her main memory of that day was having a huge blowout fight with Yoko, who was still in bed recovering from their car accident, and in doing so pulling on his stitches, which had itched like crazy. They’d been married less than six months and it already had felt like it was falling apart at the seams.

As if picking up on the downturn in her mood, Paul reached out and twined their fingers together, and their tour moved on. Lydia had to pretend not to notice her brother and mom staring at their linked hands.

Travis and her dad arrived back from the train station when they were in the front room, and Carol was telling Paul a semi-funny story about Lydia’s piano teacher. Travis was his usual sullen self, merely shaking hands with Paul and mumbling hello, and Alan – after Lydia had hugged him and kissed his cheek – had seemingly decided to play the part of Protective Overbearing Dad for the people in the cheap seats.

“So, Paul,” he said, after they’d stiffly said hello. Alan made no effort to disguise the way he sized Paul up. “This is normally the part where I ask you about yourself and what you do for a living, but I guess I already know all that about you.”

“I reckon so,” Paul said mildly. Lydia tightened her grasp on his hand.

“Then that leaves the most important question,” Alan began.

“Oh my god, Dad,” Lydia cut in, stepping forward. “Can we not do the whole shotgun thing right now?”

“Not before lunch!” Carol chirped, clasping her hands together. “I’ve got food ready in the kitchen for everyone, we can eat in the solarium!” With her encouragement, the Montrose men all trudged out of the room ahead of her, with Paul and Lydia bringing up the rear.

Paul leaned in. “What’s that about guns?” he asked in a low voice.

Lydia rolled her eyes. “You know,” she murmured back. “The whole, ‘if you hurt my little girl I’m coming after you with a shotgun’ speech every dad gives his daughter’s suitor. Don’t look at me like that, it’s just an idiomatic expression. My dad doesn’t even own a shotgun.”

“Thank Christ,” Paul sighed. “With you Americans, I never can tell when firearms are automatic or idiomatic.” She jabbed him with her elbow for that and he shied away, chuckling.

But once Paul was occupied with getting his lunch – her mom had set it up buffet-style – Lydia sighed quietly. She hadn’t expected everyone to immediately get along, but only now was it dawning on her that they might never get along at all. Paul was obviously trying his damndest to be polite and kind and make a good impression, but her family was too starstruck, or being too contrary to appreciate his efforts.

If they didn’t figure out how to tolerate Paul… Lydia just didn’t know how she was meant to deal with that.

Chapter Text

Paul had two different modes when he was nervous or uncomfortable, Lydia had come to realize over the years: total silence, or nonstop talk. During lunch with her family, he shifted firmly into the latter.

In a way, it was their best and only option. Her dad was still eyeing Paul suspiciously as if he suspected him of past misdeeds, and Scott and Travis had never been overly sociable or outgoing in the first place. With so little opposition, then, Paul took control of the conversation and didn’t let go, peppering her parents and brothers with all kinds of questions about their jobs, what it was like living in Westchester, what kind of music they listened to. It was a trick she’d seen him deploy before, which kept people talking about themselves so that Paul didn’t have to divulge too much personal information, though in this case he did volunteer the names of a few bands he currently loved, musicians he’d met and thought about collaborating with. If her brothers said something even a smidge funny Paul was sure to chuckle, and if discussion felt like it was veering towards a topic Paul didn’t know he’d jump in and steer it back to safer territory. Lydia chimed in here and there, but mostly left him to it – whatever he needed to feel okay. As they sat together on the bench along one side of the long dining table, she reached out and grasped his hand, allowing them to rest out of sight atop his leg.

The one positive thing Lydia took from lunch was that Paul had clearly been paying very close attention as she’d briefed him on every member of her family, because he remembered all sorts of little things she’d told him: like how Travis enjoyed cooking, or how Scott considered himself an amateur photographer. She pressed their knees together under the table in tacit appreciation for his efforts.

Even so, despite all Paul’s earnest efforts, it was probably the longest, most painful lunch she’d had in… she didn’t know how long.

Afterwards, the afternoon yawned wide open like the most dangerous of abysses. Lydia panicked for a moment at the thought that all of their awkward attempts at socializing would be forced to continue in an even more stilted setting than lunch, but Paul had apparently reached his limit. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, with a winning smile for Lydia’s parents, “but I’ve got a tune rolling round my head that I’d better work out before it slips away from me. Is there a quiet spot where I can get some work done?”

Carol’s face lit up at the thought that he’d be writing a song in her house. “Alan has his home office at the back,” she offered. “It’s apart from all the noise.”

“Ah but it’s such a beautiful day,” Paul said, with an eye out the rear windows. “I might take over your back garden, if that’s all right?”

Lydia suspected that Paul could’ve asked for anything and her mother would’ve happily given it up, no questions asked. Permission thus granted, he grabbed his guitar case from where it sat by the door and sent a speaking glance at her – clearly wanting her to join him – but Lydia subtly shook her head and widened her eyes at him. He headed outside without her, the rear patio door banging shut behind him.

As soon as she was sure he was out of earshot, Lydia rounded on her family all loosely assembled in the kitchen, and threw her hands wildly into the air. “Stop being so damn awkward, would you?”

They immediately leapt to defend themselves. “I thought I was doing all right,” Carol said, frowning.

“Hard not to be awkward when he’s clearly trying so hard,” Scott said with a wince.

“Yeah, he’s no Mick Jagger,” Travis agreed. “You should date Mick Jagger instead.”

“Uh, Paul wants you to like him,” Lydia said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “He’s trying to make the best of a weird situation.”

Alan had merely looked at Lydia, arms folded. “Ladybug, I just don’t know,” he said, once everyone else had fallen silent. “I was prepared to have an open mind about the whole thing, but now seeing the two of you side by side… Sweetheart, I don’t know if I can look past the age gap.”

“It’s the same as it was when I first told you,” Lydia bit off. “It hasn’t changed by a single day.”

“It was a lot then and it’s a lot now,” Alan countered.

“Andrea’s only four years younger than me,” Scott piped up, “and even that sometimes feels massive, you know? You just have different cultural references, different life experiences. How can you, a Reagan-era kid, possibly connect with someone who grew up in the aftermath of World War II?”

“I have to say I have my reservations too, Ladybug,” Carol said, her voice slow. “He’s very charming, I’ll give you that. But he almost seems… too charming, if that makes sense.”

“He’s pretty slick,” Travis said, nodding along.

Lydia blinked, utterly bewildered. “Holy cow, are any of you even trying?”

“You realize that you barely said a thing during lunch?” Alan pointed out. “You let him do nearly all the talking. That’s just not you, Ladybug, you always have something to say.” He glanced at Carol, shaking his head. “I don’t like that, that he dominated the conversation like that and barely let you get a word in edgewise.”

“Oh my god,” she moaned, her shoulders sagging.

“And I’ve been talking to some friends,” Alan went on, apparently just getting warmed up, “asking them about him. I didn’t realize Paul’s still a heavy marijuana user.”

Travis and Scott coughed and looked away, hiding grins. “Jesus, did I just walk onto the set of Reefer Madness?” Lydia asked, spreading her arms wide. “Is this the scene where the parents tell their kids about the dangers of the devil’s lettuce?”

“Don’t belittle our concerns,” Carol said firmly. “You said it yourself, he’s a rockstar. The way he’s lived his life is very different from yours, including all kinds of groupies and hard drugs, I’m sure.”

“Mom, I went to college in New York City,” she said, enunciating her words. “There was cocaine and ecstasy everywhere. Columbia might be Ivy League but it’s also a raging party school, and I’m sorry if this ruins your image of me as your sweet little girl, but I went to parties and I partook. Okay? So Paul isn’t corrupting me with a little pot now and then, oh my god.”

“Well,” Carol said, looking horrified. “I suppose we’ll have that conversation at a later date, and don’t think we won’t, Lydia Grace. You have your career to think about now, you can’t be caught smoking weed just before you interview—”

“And I haven’t!” she cried. “I never would! I love my job, you know that and Paul knows that! He’s not—” Lydia heaved a sigh, suddenly feeling weary down to her bones. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me,” she said.

But Alan merely kept shaking his head. “I just don’t know, Ladybug.”

Lydia tipped her head back, hands in her hair, and counted to five to keep from losing her fucking mind. “So… what, you want me to break up with him?” she said, frowning at them all.

“No,” Alan was quick to say, “it’s not that—”

“Because that’s what I’m getting from all of you.” She looked around the room at each of them in turn. “He’s fake, he’s overbearing, he’s too old, he isn’t cool enough, he’s a stoner – did I miss anything?”

“Now don’t get defensive,” Alan began.

“Too late,” Lydia said, with fake cheerfulness. “No wonder Paul ran off to ‘write music,’ this is too much for me too.”

“Lydia, sweetheart,” her mom began, but she’d spun on her heel and headed outside after him, into the brisk spring afternoon and her parents’ verdant backyard. She could hear them all talking over each other in a rush before the back door had even banged shut behind her.

Paul had found two Adirondack chairs and set them up side-by-side near an old firepit they rarely used anymore, and he faced away from the house as he strummed his guitar. He didn’t look up when Lydia plopped into the chair next to him, curling herself into a tight ball. “Bad?”

“Couldn’t get much worse,” she muttered. Paul snorted and gazed at her warmly. “I think I just confessed to experimenting with coke and molly in college. Whoops.”

He chortled, bending over his guitar. “Jesus, when you said it couldn’t get worse!”

After a moment she shook her head, barely holding back a grin. “In my defense I only tried each of them once, because I didn’t like the high.” She heaved another huge sigh. “Ugh. Fuck.”

“Fuck indeed,” Paul agreed, fiddling with his guitar.

“Let’s run away and join the circus,” she said. “You can be the ringleader, I’ll be the tattooed lady.”

“Done,” Paul said, and he dutifully started singing “Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia, Lydia the tattooed lady…” He eventually segued back into whatever he was playing before, and after listening to a few bars she felt the hairs on her arms stand up. He really had something there; she could hear it already. “Love,” he said, his low voice bringing her out of her quiet contemplation, “I know today isn’t… going well.”

Lydia groaned. “Putting it mildly.”

“Right. But I… you know. I know how much you love your family, and what they mean to you.” Lydia swung her head around to look at him and found him staring determinedly at the new spring grass beneath their feet. “Have they said anything… I mean, could they, d’you think—”

“Paul.” She sat upright, leaning on one arm of the chair. “I’m in this. Okay?” He leaned in too, his face right where it used to be when they shared microphones. “There’s nothing they can say that would convince me that this, you and me, isn’t worth it.”

He gave her a lopsided grin, nose wrinkling, and it occurred to her that it was the first genuine smile she’d seen on his face in hours. It made her heart ache a little to even think about it: how much she loved him, how wonderful she thought he was, yet how much of himself he felt he had to keep back. She wanted everyone to know the version of Paul that she did and, at the same time, hoard all of his smiles so only she could see them.

“You know,” he said, “I think I’ve earned a bit of a reward after surviving that lunch.”

“Poor baby,” Lydia crooned jokingly, and she stood up with alacrity. Laughing, he set aside his guitar and allowed her to clamber into his lap where she sank her hands into his hair and kissed him, not caring how visible they were from the kitchen window. She curled up in his arms after, letting her legs dangle over the side of the chair as robins chirped overhead and the wind shared its stories with the budding trees. This, she reminded herself with a contented sigh, this is what it’s all for.

“That bit you were playing just now,” she said, after a long, easy silence. “Tell me more about it.”

“Came to me on the drive up,” he said, with a little shrug. “Seeing you behind the wheel of a car, remembering your road test from the ‘60s… thinking of you, of us, over the years… yeah. You know.” He shrugged again.

“Paul McCartney, leading poet of our modern times,” she said in a silly voice, her mouth pressed against his neck. He chuckled and poked her in the side until she laughed, which meant that Scott had to say her name twice before he got her attention.

Lydia immediately went to sit up but Paul held her right where she was on his lap, nonchalantly defiant. “What’s up?” Lydia asked her brother, ignoring the fact that her face was red.

Scott stood there, clearly uncomfortable, and she watched as he ran a hand through his short dark hair, folded his arms across his chest then reconsidered. He pointed towards the front of the house. “Mom and Dad spotted a black car parked next to our driveway that doesn’t look familiar.”

“That’s my security detail,” Paul said at once. “They’re pulled off to the side, not blocking the way, yeah?”

“Oh yeah,” Scott confirmed, “it’s just… wasn’t expecting it, I guess. Wasn’t sure if it was a reporter or something.”

“No harm done,” Paul replied, giving him a polite smile. “You won’t even notice them after a bit.”

Lydia shot him a sad, understanding look, which he returned before looking away again, gnawing on his lower lip. To distract Scott she asked “So how huge of a blunder was it, confessing I did drugs in college?”

Scott gave a big belly laugh. “Oh my god. Dad’s in there right now explaining to Mom that he ‘went a little crazy’ when he was in college too. Trav and I were dying, we’re trying so hard not to laugh. Dad even told her that one time he tried – what did you call it again?”

“The devil’s lettuce,” Lydia said. Paul snickered uncontrollably into her shoulder. “I bet Mom’s horrified. Our Mom’s really smart but she’s a self-confessed nerd,” she explained to Paul.

“It – Lyd,” her brother said, sounding serious. He shoved his hands into his pockets and scuffed his shoe along the ground. “They just need time,” he said. “We need time.”

“You’ve had time,” Lydia said. “You’ve known for weeks. I’m not all that patient.”

“You can be, you know,” Paul said, nudging her. “We can be patient,” he continued, looking up at Scott. “All we ask is that we’re given a chance in good faith.”

Scott nodded, frowning. “You love my sister?” he said.

“Very much so,” Paul said, as easily as anything. “I hope my sincerity in that regard isn’t in any doubt.”

“Take a seat, Scott,” Lydia said, moving her legs aside. “We’re in the lightning round now. Whatever questions you have ask them, and we’ll try to answer.”

Frowning at her, looking supremely skeptical, Scott dragged the other Adirondack chair a bit apart from them and sat down. Lydia glanced back at the house but if anyone was watching from the kitchen they weren’t noticeable. And maybe that was for the best – maybe they had to sweet talk and win over her family one by one, rather than en masse. Whatever it took.

“Are you two bothered by the age gap?” Scott said, going for the jugular right away.

“Nope,” Lydia said instantly, just as Paul said “Only at first.” Lydia blinked at him, so he went on, “If I’m being completely honest, love, I was. Not anymore. People say things when young women date older men, you know.”

“No kidding,” Lydia drawled.

“I’ve dealt with the media… Christ, about forty-five years now,” he said. He tightened his grip on her, holding her close. “I know what they’re capable of. I really hesitated at, you know, exposing you to all that.”

Again, she filled in. Especially considering what happened last time. Lydia kissed his cheek in silent thanks.

“But that’s what other people think,” Scott pressed. “I asked if you personally had an issue with it.”

Paul tapped the side of his head. “Ah, you are the clever one in the family, aren’t you,” he said in an amused tone. “Personally, no. Our age isn’t something we can control, you just are however old you are, you know.”

“But why her?” Scott said, leaning forward. “You’re… you’re a Beatle. You can have anyone you want, so why my sister?”

“Gee, thanks,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes, and Paul snorted as he watched her reaction. “Why are you marrying Andrea?”

Scott gave her a look. “Um, because I love her and want to be with her.”

Simultaneously, as if they’d planned the choreography, Lydia and Paul gestured at him as though to say well there you go!, which startled a laugh out of Scott.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “And you’ve been together…”

“It’ll be four years in November,” Lydia lied, as agreed, but her brother was looking at Paul.

“What are your intentions?”

Paul tossed his hair back. She could feel him nervously tracing random shapes on her hip. “Oh, you know. We’ve talked about marriage.”

“For like three seconds,” Lydia said, suppressing a giddy smile.

“No, surely it was five seconds, at least.”

“And just the once.”

“Well that’s how these things start, love, you talk about them once, and then a second time, and then—”

“—and then there you are in Vegas in front of a man dressed like Elvis, signing a marriage certificate that’s somehow binding despite the fact that your blood alcohol’s twice the legal limit—”

“Was Elvis Catholic, d’you think?” Paul asked innocently. “Only I reckon I should have a Catholic ceremony, for my mum’s sake, you know.”

“We can ask around,” Lydia assured him, patting his arm. “There must be a Catholic Elvis impersonator somewhere in Nevada.”

“Oh good, that’s settled then.”

They beamed at each other, and Lydia felt that rush she always got around him, like her veins were full of fizzing champagne. When she could finally tear her eyes away from him to look at Scott, her brother’s familiar face was wearing an expression she was pretty sure she’d never seen before – one she couldn’t translate right away.

Self-conscious, Lydia coughed and brushed her hair behind her ear. “Anyway, long story short, it’s serious,” she replied, her voice light.

“Huh.” Scott peered at her with sharp eyes, but said nothing further.

Dinner was better, though really anything would’ve been an improvement over lunch. But Lydia noticed right away that Scott had crossed the picket line and joined their team, and stood up to their parents just as often as she did. Paul had switched out of chatty mode and was mostly quiet for the entirety of the meal, only effusive in his compliments over Carol’s delicious food.

Once they had eaten the last bite, Lydia volunteered for cleanup duty, mainly to head off whatever stilted activity would come next. “It’s your birthday, Mom,” she declared to the table, “so you shouldn’t have to lift a finger the rest of the evening.”

“Happy birthday, Carol,” Paul said, and Lydia watched her mom blush in delight.

Paul helped her clear the table over everyone’s objections, and with his assistance they made quick work of scraping off the plates and setting them in the dishwasher, then taking out the birthday cake that had been chilling in the fridge for most of the day. They sang, Carol blew out a handful of candles, and dug ravenously into a citrus and olive oil bundt cake.

“I did have one request, if I can exercise a final birthday privilege,” her mom said, once everything in the kitchen was more or less tidied up. She turned to Lydia and smoothed down her hair. “I don’t suppose you still know that Carole King song you played years ago?”

Paul turned to her, eyebrows raised, as Lydia made a face. “Um. Yeah, I can probably still play that.”

“She plays piano and sings so well,” Carol told Paul. “I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to hear her—”

“Once or twice,” he replied, earning him an elbow to the ribs when no one was looking.

An elegant baby grand sat in the front room, virtually untouched since Lydia had moved out years earlier, but when she opened up the bench it was still packed with all her old sheet music. After shuffling through it a few moments, Paul hovering over her shoulder, she found the pages for “It’s Too Late,” all still taped together from when she had played it at a family function ages ago.

“Do you know this one?” she asked Paul in a low voice.

“Yeah, pretty much,” he said, “but remember I can’t read music.” She then found a pencil stub in the bench and started circling and explaining the guitar tabs over every bar, so he could follow along – because there was no question, of course, that he’d be playing it with her.

They settled on the bench, Paul down at the lower keys and her at the upper. “On the occasion of her birthday,” Lydia announced, doing a goofy voice into a fake microphone, “this one is dedicated to Carol Montrose of Westchester, New York. Take a bow, Carol!” Paul played a riff and her family all cheered and clapped as Lydia’s mom grinned and accepted a kiss from Alan.

It took them a bit to fit together – they started and stopped once, laughing at themselves – but by the time they were at the bottom of the first verse and hit the rhythmic repeated chords that were the signature of the song, they had slipped fully in synch with each other. They’d played at a hundred pianos together just like this one, noodling around trying to find a song, or concentrating fiercely to hone one already half-born. And as Lydia felt herself drifting aloft with Carole King’s music, Paul’s right arm pressed against her left kept her anchored to the world. His voice came in on the chorus, singing a lower harmony, otherwise allowing her to sing the verses alone. It wasn’t even their song, but they were able to turn it into something new and wholly their own.

She returned to earth when the last chord rang out in the living room, and her parents and brothers applauded enthusiastically. Blushing, she allowed Paul to put his arm around her and kiss the side of her head. “Goffin and King, that’s us,” he murmured in her ear, and she squeezed his hand.

The evening turned into something of a talent show after that. Lydia and her mom played “Heart and Soul,” which had been their big party number when Lydia was a kid, and Travis – the only other pianist in the family – knew some of “The Entertainer” and “Maple Leaf Rag,” his recital pieces. The front room of the house grew warm and loud, as they all talked over each other about songs they recalled from childhood, and Paul happily took request after request.

It took an embarrassingly long time for Lydia to realize that Scott wasn’t in the room anymore; she didn’t actually notice until she saw him slip back in, in such a way that he was clearly trying to be inconspicuous about it.

Their eyes met. Lydia frowned when she saw the odd look on his face, and her hackles raised when he approached and whispered in her ear, “Can I talk to you?”

Lydia followed him to the back of the house, where her dad’s cramped home office sat in a rear corner, and Scott let the door shut partway behind them. “That’s Paul, isn’t it,” he said without preamble, and pointed to the near wall.

Lydia felt her heart plummet to her feet. Her dad had made much of her artwork when she was a child, as many dads would, but Alan had taken it a step further by having some of his favorites framed and hung on his office wall. Even now, almost twenty years later, a three-by-three grid of nine of her drawings still hung there, in between a tall bookcase and a bulletin board pinned with aborted architectural drawings. The Skeptical Man, her old cartoon creation, was in four of them.

She fisted her hands so hard she could feel her nails digging into her palms. “Scott,” she said, unsure of where to even begin.

“Lydia,” he said, looking at her. Scott turned away for a moment, as though gathering his thoughts. “When I was in med school I did a rotation in geriatric medicine,” he said. “You think going into it ‘okay, old people, terminal illnesses, palliative care and hospice – seems pretty straightforward.’ But… you see and hear things in that wing that no textbook can prepare you for. That science can’t adequately explain.” He cleared his throat, watching her carefully. “I had patients who saw people in empty rooms, talked to long-dead relatives. Died on the operating table, and then came back with all kinds of experiences. I’ve long accepted that there’s most likely something after life on earth, if only because I’ve seen so much evidence of it with my own eyes.”

She could only stare at him, heart in her throat. “What are you saying?” she said, her voice sounding hoarse.

“You were a really creepy kid, when you were little,” Scott said, with a dry laugh. “I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but I don’t know how else to describe you. You probably don’t even remember most of it, but I was eight when you were born.” He shook his head, running a hand through his hair. “You’d say things that were so weird – weird as in, stuff you shouldn’t have known about. Dad was watching Reagan give the State of the Union this one time? This was maybe ‘83 or ’84, during his first term, and you were really little still. You saw Reagan on TV and suddenly yelled ‘Let’s Make America Great Again!’”

Lydia folded her arms tight to her chest. “So?”

Scott chuckled humorlessly. “So that was Reagan’s campaign slogan from 1980. Before you were born. You never would have seen those ads, because they weren’t on TV anymore.”

She leaned against her dad’s desk, her knees trembling too much to keep her upright anymore. “I’d also sometimes overhear you playing with your Barbie dolls,” he went on, “and you’d give the Barbies all kinds of European accents that sounded really, really accurate, if that makes sense? I remember one of them spoke in like broken German, and I freaked out and went to Mom and Dad, wondering how the heck you knew German.”

A floorboard creaked out in the hallway, and Lydia looked up to see Paul standing there, his head tilted to one side, a question in his eyes. She could only stare at him. “And I didn’t remember this until just today,” Scott went on, not having seen Paul yet, “but your first word as a baby – it wasn’t mama or dada, it was mimi.” He paused. “John Lennon was raised by his Aunt Mimi, wasn’t he?”

Lydia jerked her head, signaling for Paul to enter, and he did so at once, going to her side and putting an arm around her. “Remember Scott’s boast that he’s the smart one in the family?” she said to him. “Well. Brother mine has figured it all out. The jig is up.”

Paul glanced up at Scott, nonplussed. “Figured out what, exactly?”

“That apparently reincarnation is real,” Scott said. He pointed to the Skeptical Man in a drawing on the wall: Paul, wearing a gray suit and holding a medal, and along the bottom in a childish scrawl the attribution LYDIA – 1988 – AGE 7.

The room went absolutely quiet. A multitude of emotions flickered across Paul’s face, and Lydia felt like her heartbeat was reverberating in her ears like a gong. At long last he turned to her, and the façade had completely fallen away. “I thought you didn’t remember until you were eighteen,” Paul said.

She shook her head. “I didn’t make sense of everything until I was eighteen,” she clarified. “I remembered bits and pieces, including you… well, obviously long before then,” gesturing at her drawings.

“Long before,” Paul echoed.

“Yeah. Maybe… from the very beginning.” She leaned into him, comforted by his presence. “I don’t remember not knowing your face.”

Scott’s eyes darted between the two of them, growing bigger and bigger. “This is real, then?” he said, sounding stunned. “I was right?”

“I was planning on telling you eventually,” Lydia swore. “I just thought it wouldn’t be right to distract you when you’re gearing up to get married. Andrea deserves your full attention, you know?”

“Sure, yeah,” Scott croaked.

“Don’t tell anyone else just yet,” Paul said. “It’s your sister’s decision.”

“Of course.” He seemed to have trouble swallowing. “Um… can I just say that…” He glanced at Lydia. “The two of you wrote some of my all-time favorite songs. I survived studying for the state boards while listening to the White Album, and I’ve performed surgery sometimes while having Revolver playing in the operating theater.”

“That’s very kind of you, ta,” Paul said graciously, and thank god he did, because Lydia found herself lost for words.

“Um.” Scott barked out a laugh, running a hand through his hair again. “God. Okay. I better get back to Mom and Dad before they wonder where we all disappeared to.” He cleared his throat awkwardly and, with one last odd smile for her, left the room.

Paul let loose a rushing breath as soon as he was gone. “Christ, that was unexpected,” he said, but she was already heading out the door behind Scott.

Lydia felt herself on autopilot for the rest of the night. She barely spoke to any of them, only answering yes or no when called upon, and at the earliest possible hour declared that she was tired and wanted to go to bed. “Are you sure, Ladybug?” her mom asked, looking concerned.

“Yeah,” Lydia replied flatly. “Pretty sure. Long day.”

Much was made of the cot Paul had brought; he went out to the rental car to pull it out of the trunk, and Carol dug up some twin-size bedsheets and an extra pillow from the linen closet for him to use. They set it up in the empty space in Lydia’s bedroom, parallel to her own bed. She could tell Paul wasn’t ready to sleep yet, though, and didn’t want to be left to fend for himself against her family. Before she disappeared upstairs for the night, she heard him saying he’d like to use her dad’s office to continue working on the song from that afternoon.

She was still wide awake an hour or so later when she heard everyone else come up. As she lay there, turned away from the rest of the room, Paul moved around quietly, tiptoeing down the hall to the bathroom and back. He whispered her name once or twice but she pretended to be asleep.

But how could she? How could she sleep, when all she could hear was Scott’s voice, repeating over and over again The two of you wrote some of my all-time favorite songs.

The two of you wrote some of my all-time favorite songs.

The two of you.

My favorite songs.

The tears surprised her, and she gasped wetly. “Love,” Paul whispered, and Lydia dropped the pretext to look back at him, shuddering uncontrollably.

He was never actually going to sleep in that silly cot. Both of them had known it all along. He stepped around it without hesitation and slid in behind her in her narrow bed, arms going around her immediately, and she burrowed into him.

“What is it, my love?” he whispered.

“I didn’t want it to be like this,” she wept into his sleep shirt. “It was supposed to be better, not worse. Not like this."

"Like what, love?"

But she couldn’t articulate it, not fully. So he merely held her until she’d exhausted herself, falling into a bleak, dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

When she woke up Sunday morning, she was alone in bed.

Lydia turned and buried her face in her pillow a moment, inhaling and recentering herself despite the fact that her sleep the night before hadn’t been particularly restful. She then stretched luxuriously, pointing her toes out and arms up, before collapsing in a heap onto the mattress. Just because the two of them could squeeze into a twin bed together didn’t mean her muscles weren’t protesting afterwards.

The previous day came rushing back in a flood. Fucking hell. She’d hoped for so much more than the way things stood right now. But she’d think about that later, once they were on the road back to the City. Bracing herself, Lydia blinked open gummy eyes.

Paul sat at her desk on the other side of her bedroom, hunched over, flipping through old Polaroid photos. Multiple desk drawers hung open and books had been pulled off her shelf, left in stacks nearby. Even though it was clear that he’d helped himself and gone to town digging through her personal possessions while she slept she felt no clutch of panic, no fear that he’d find something she didn’t want him to know about. His curiosity made her feel oddly calm instead. She didn’t know what that said about him, or her, and was too tired to care.

“Morning,” she said, low and rough.

Paul looked up at her with wide eyes. “Ah,” he said. “Hi. All right?”

Something in his voice made her sit up and lean against her headboard, forcing her brain towards greater wakefulness. “You’ve obviously been on a journey. And it’s not even—” she glanced at the alarm clock on her bedside table “—eight o’clock yet.” Lydia yawned hugely. “Wanna share with the class?”

He set down the photos and looked around at everything he’d rifled through, still a little bug-eyed. “I, ah. After you went up last night I went back into your dad’s office,” Paul said, his voice barely above a murmur. The house was still quiet, no creaking boards or water rushing through pipes to signal that any of the Montroses had risen yet. “Those drawings…” He shook his head. “I recognize nearly all of them. Even the ones I’m not in.”

“I called him the Skeptical Man,” Lydia said, to fill his silence. “He only ever had the one eyebrow, no face. I knew that he was a big-time doubter, and hard to convince – hard to talk into anything he didn’t fully trust. He liked dogs and playing piano, and his outfits sometimes were a little out there.”

Paul looked down at his hands as he picked at a nail. “You drew him often, then.”

“All the time,” she admitted. “Between… I don’t know, the ages of seven and nine, I think, when I got that false diagnosis and put on meds. My parents thought he was some kind of imaginary friend, since I came up with such an elaborate backstory for him.” She pulled the covers closer, up to her chest, and hugged herself. “I dreamt about him too. I heard his voice constantly in my dreams, until the meds walled all that off and… he went away for a bit. Came back later, as if to prove he wasn’t a symptom of mental illness.”

He pinched at the bridge of his nose. “Were you ever going to tell me about all this?”

She shrugged. “Honestly, I think I planned to at one point but then kind of forgot? I didn’t need to draw or think about him anymore because… well. I’d found the real thing again.”

Paul huffed and glanced away, towards her bookshelf and its old paperbacks and college textbooks. She saw now that he was wearing one of her old dark blue Columbia University t-shirts, one that she’d washed so many times that it was extra soft and broken in. On her it had been baggy, but on him it just about fit. What a mess they were, she mused idly – determined to share clothes again, even when they were no longer remotely the same size or shape.

“In 1981,” he said slowly, “a few months after… I asked Carl Perkins if he’d work with me on some things for my album. He was with us for about a week, I think, writing and recording – and we had a great time. Carl Perkins!” he repeated, which was all the recap she needed. “Right before he left he told us he’d written a song to, you know, sort of sum up the wonderful time he’d had working with us.” Paul sniffled and bent his head, staring down at his hands again. “If we never meet again,” Paul sang softly, “this side of life, in a little while over yonder, where there’s peace and quiet, my old friend, won’t you think of me every now and then?”

Lydia felt tears sting in her eyes. She watched as Paul shook back his hair, cleared his throat, got ahold of himself again. “It was a message from you,” he said at last. “I was sure of it. Fully convinced, no – not skeptical,” he said, giving her a wry look. “After that I was on the lookout for any messages at all. Specific songs on the radio, you know… One time in an interview there was this odd flash of blue light on the set, none of the crew could sort out what was causing it, and I said ‘oh, it’s John, he must be saying hello!’ Joking, you know, except I was a hundred percent serious. Over and over again, as the years went on. But then…”

“But then?” she prompted.

“Then I met you, in 2001,” he said. “Found out you’d been here in New York the entire time, so. Really I reckon none of it was you.” He sniffled again. “No messages from beyond the grave since you weren’t in the bloody grave to begin with, so I’d been grasping at straws like a stupid fucking fool for twenty years—”

“Come here, babe,” she said, suddenly feeling there was far too much distance between them, and he stood at once and crossed the floor. She scooched over to make room and let him put his head in her lap, and she draped herself over him, feeling his body tremble as he tried to keep from falling apart.

“That bloody song,” he said, wincing. “I made such a fuss over it, practically forced Carl to record it, and it wasn’t meant for me at all—”

“How do you know that?” Lydia asked. “I’ve told you before, I have no clue how any of this works. Maybe it was me, for all we know. Maybe that blue light was me too. And every time you heard certain songs on the radio. Maybe those were all the times I was dreaming about you. Just like… maybe every time you thought about me, I was inspired to draw the Skeptical Man.”

Paul was quiet, his gears turning as he toyed with her hand. “I think… I reckon I thought that you were getting little pieces of memories, but you didn’t remember anything important,” he finally said, his voice somewhat muffled by her comforter. “There was the big flashback you had when you were nine, of course, but then you didn’t really understand what was going on until eighteen. I thought that meant that for eighteen years you’d lived almost completely unaware, you know. Didn’t remember me. I was…” He exhaled loudly. “Angry? Jealous a bit, maybe.”

Lydia snorted. “Of course you were,” she murmured into his shoulder. “You thought you’d suffered alone and I hadn’t.”

“And that wasn’t the case at all.” He paused, and she saw his eyes wandering. “You’re all over this room,” he said after a quiet moment. “I can see so much of you here.”

“Is that your conclusion after rooting through all my stuff?” she teased.

“I remember that you loved the seaside,” he said absently. “I think you said once you wanted to retire to a house in Ireland, near the ocean, and here you’ve got pictures of the Irish coast on your walls. And you never could take a straight photo, you always had to be making some sort of mad face. And your taste in books, and music…” He clasped her hand between both of his.

“It’s just me, Paul,” she whispered.

“And there never was even a second where you weren’t you,” he realized.

They lay there quietly, as birds began singing outside her window. The shadows in her room had begun to fade away, and noises started coming down the hall: her parents, waking up and heading downstairs for breakfast.

Paul sat up and she grinned at the sight of his hair standing on end. “Hello, my old friend,” she murmured.

“Hello, my love,” he murmured back. “I meant what I said, you know. Last month, when I said I wanted to get married again someday.”

Her heart knocked against her ribs. “I didn’t think you were kidding.”

“Good.” Paul stood up and fixed his hair, giving her a flirty wink. “Because I wasn’t.”

“Especially the part about Catholic Elvis being the officiant.”

“Obviously.”

“Just don’t do one of those big public engagement spectacles, where you propose in front of like a hundred strangers at a mall or a restaurant,” she said, following him out of bed. “I hate those. And now people are filming them and putting them on the Internet for everyone to see, so it’s like ten times worse.”

“Of course not,” he said, making a face. “What a bloody nightmare, can you imagine?”

She grabbed her robe and he pulled on a zip-up sweatshirt, but he stopped her just before they headed out to join her family. “No public proposal,” he said. “Noted. Any other requests?”

Lydia smiled, feeling almost drunk. “I don’t care either way, but my dad’s a bit old-fashioned,” she said. “He’ll probably want you to ‘ask his permission’ first.”

“Oh naturally I’d do that, yeah.”

Lydia gave him a look. “It’s for him, not me. Do I really strike you as someone who’s particularly hung up on traditional gender roles?”

Paul chuckled as he followed her into the hallway. “No,” he said with a grin, “I suppose not.”

“There we go!” she said, having a brainstorm. She rounded on him. “Scratch that, I’ll propose to you. Problem solved. You better be ready.” Lydia burst out laughing at the panicked look on his face.

Her mirth had faded somewhat by the time they arrived in the kitchen, where her parents were starting to rustle up breakfast; Scott was there but not Travis, who was apparently still sleeping. Paul got some sideways looks from them, since he’d done nothing to hide the fact that he was wearing a Columbia shirt, but no one uttered a word about it. Then Jeff wandered into the room, probably drawn by all the commotion, and stood by his food and water bowls whining piteously for his meal. Lydia pulled out the food her parents kept on hand and got him situated while Paul gamely tried to engage with her dad. Lydia caught his eye as she put Jeff’s food away and blew him a kiss; he winked back. He was trying so hard, and still pushing forward despite everything. She should’ve known his stubbornness wouldn’t allow him to give up so fast.

On his part, Scott darted odd looks at her as she moved about the kitchen, and as they sat down to eat cereal, toast, yogurt, scrambled eggs, whatever was in the cupboards. When she got up to get the orange juice out of the fridge, he leaned towards her and whispered “Is it true that you and George Harri—”

“No,” she hissed back, glaring. Alan sent them a concerned look until Paul distracted him, and when Travis finally shuffled into the kitchen to join the land of the living, Lydia leaned in to say directly into Scott’s ear, “Here’s a rule of thumb going forward: If it’s not already in print, it’s not for public consumption.”

“I wouldn’t say anything,” Scott protested just as quietly. “I’m family, you can trust me.”

“Sure,” she said, “but the lads were my family first.” She gave him a hard look before returning to her cereal.

A wave of tears swelled at the back of Lydia’s throat, but she swallowed it down. Her own brother. She’d stress over that later.

“It’s a beautiful day out,” Carol said, once breakfast was winding down. “I might take a walk around the neighborhood.”

“Let me join you,” Lydia blurted, without thinking about it. Talking with her mom alone might get them the same advantage speaking with Scott had yesterday, and Lydia wasn’t one to miss out when opportunities fell into her lap. Besides, Scott had her squirming and she needed to get out of the breakfast nook before she went crazy.

She ran upstairs to change out of her pajamas and throw on some sneakers, and came back down to join her mom in the driveway. As the bodyguards watched them from their unmarked black car, the two Montrose women took off down the street. It was quiet at first, and Lydia soaked in all the familiar sounds of the neighborhood where she’d grown up: chirping birds, gently blowing wind, rustling trees. A few neighbors Lydia had known her whole life were out on their front stoops watering their hanging plants or grabbing the morning paper, and Carol waved to a lot of them and shouted good morning!, but neither of them stopped for a chat.

After awhile, the silence became oppressive. “Okay, Mom,” Lydia said at last. “Dad and the boys aren’t here, just you and me. Gloves off.”

Carol sighed and gave her a sideways glance. “He’s not what I expected,” she began.

“What did you expect?”

“Oh… I don’t know.” They walked a few steps forward before she went on, “My only brush with celebrity, if you want to call it that, was with the Apollo 11 crew. They were all down-to-earth normal men who were quiet and focused on their work when they weren’t expected to give press conferences. Well,” Carol added, “Buzz Aldrin was just as kooky and off-kilter wherever he was, whether cameras were present or not. I think… I think I was expecting Paul to be quiet too. You know, that the version of him that performs onstage and does all those talk show interviews would’ve been left behind, and the real him would be staying at my house.”

Lydia sighed inwardly. “But that’s not him,” she said. “He doesn’t know you, except that you’re important to me. And you might not see the real him for a long time, until he feels more comfortable.” If she were being brutally honest, Lydia thought, her family might never see the real Paul, but she didn’t say that part aloud.

Carol was nodding thoughtfully. “I expect that being famous for as long as he has, you get wary about meeting new people.”

“Exactly,” Lydia agreed. “Everywhere he goes, people want something from him. They want to know if their favorite Beatles anecdote is true. They want him to sign something. They want to take a picture with him. They want him to know they… named their daughter Michelle after his song, or whatever. He’s constantly expected to give away bits and pieces of himself, day after day, and if he doesn’t, well, now he’s difficult, now he’s an arrogant jerk. Which would kill Paul, seriously,” she said, with a fond little snort, “he hates not being liked. You should’ve seen how he went about winning over Jeff, it was…” Adorable, her mind supplied. She shook her head, chuckling.

Carol looked at her, a warm smile on her face. “You really care about him.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Lydia replied. “I really, really do.”

“I mean – of course it’s not shocking,” Carol went on quickly. “Last night, when the two of you were playing that song for me…” Lydia looked over at her mom to see her looking back with bittersweet affection. “Ladybug,” she said quietly, “the way he looks at you. I’ve always wanted that for the three of you, that you’d all find someone who looks at you the way Paul looked at you last night. Scott found it, and I think you have too.”

For all that she had despaired of everyone getting along and becoming friendly, for all her parents’ objections and concerns – maybe, if her mom could at least see that she and Paul did truly love one another, it would smooth the way. Maybe someday they’d be laughing about this godawful weekend, and how difficult it had been. A lump in her throat, Lydia could only throw an arm around her mom’s shoulders, giving her a sideways hug.

“You know,” Carol said, after a lull, “Scott told us that you two had discussed marriage.”

Lydia blushed. “‘Discussed’ is too strong a word,” she replied. “More like we joked about it a little bit. I’m not getting married anytime soon, I can promise you that, because my main goal right now is to leave the Post and join the New York Times. That’s all I care about this year and for the foreseeable future.”

That shifted their conversation over to her career, as Lydia told her mom about what she’d been working on, whom she’d been networking with, and how good her chances looked. While there weren’t any openings in the Times’s international news department at present, they were still interested in her work and the channel was very much open. The topic carried them straight into the village center, as they walked up the main drag and approached a quaint little café that served organic coffees, teas, and a selection of baked goods. They ducked inside to get lattes and grabbed a table by the window to sit and keep catching up with each other.

Lydia’s hometown – which wasn’t really a town, more like an unincorporated area in Westchester County – had always been marked for its pleasant, slow pace of life. Few cars drove on the streets, with there not being any major tourist traps in the area, and just about everybody knew everybody else, since many of the residents had been there for decades. So when a car with out-of-state plates pulled into the café, Lydia’s eye snagged on it just for that fact alone. She wondered absently what would bring a person all the way up from Delaware, and didn’t notice that the driver never emerged from his or her car. She and her mom kept talking.

But then a second car pulled up twenty minutes later, followed in quick succession by a third. It was the third car that did it, because the driver stepped out, trained a massive camera right on Lydia, and started taking pictures.

“Fuck,” Lydia blurted out, startling her mom, “the paparazzi found me.” Scrambling, she grabbed their coffees and ran away from the window. The place being so small, the only spot where they could hide was behind the counter with the rather confused barista.

“You’re Nick and Debbie’s daughter,” Carol was saying to the barista, as Lydia tried to confirm that they were out of range of the prying cameras.

“Yeah, Ashley,” the barista said. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, seventeen years old. “And you’re the one who’s dating the famous guy,” she said, looking with round eyes at Lydia.

“I can also recite the names of the presidents in order,” Lydia said dryly, “and say the alphabet backwards.”

“Oh shoot – does this mean we can’t walk back to the house?” Carol realized, turning to her. “If we do they can follow us, and then they’ll know where your dad and I live.”

“I know,” Lydia agreed, pulling out her phone and dialing. “I promise you, Paul and I don’t want any of this crap falling on you. Paul,” she said, when he picked up, “the media found us at the Bluebell Café in town.”

Paul swore feelingly, then had to explain to her dad and brothers what was going on. As he did, Lydia peeked outside again and found that the three photographers had swelled to seven – some were pressed against the front window, craning their necks trying to spot her. “Lydia!” one shouted. “Lydia, is Paul meeting your family this weekend?”

“I’ll pick you up,” Paul was saying over the phone.

“I think we need to get out of here,” she said. “Pack up our stuff, grab Jeff, let’s just go back to the City. Have Scott come get Mom in his car, his Massachusetts plates will throw them for a bit.”

They discussed logistics a few more minutes then Paul promised to be there in fifteen, following behind her brother. Lydia hung up and heaved a deep sigh, wishing for all kinds of impossible things. “Sorry to cut short our visit,” she said to her mom, after she’d explained their plan of attack.

“Will you be safe?” her mom asked, touching Lydia’s hair.

“Yeah, the security detail will be right with us. I—” Lydia shook her head, her fury growing. “I was hoping nobody would care about us, since it’s not like it was at the height of Beatlemania, you know? I’ve been… unpleasantly surprised over the past several weeks.”

“It’s probably the age difference,” Carol told her. “People and Us Weekly are both full of stories about unusual and atypical relationships, I assume because that’s what sells these days.”

Lydia’s heart sank. “Is that what we are? ‘Unusual and atypical’? Circus freaks?”

Carol smiled ruefully at her. “Oh, Ladybug,” she murmured, “you’re not unusual. You’re just in love.”

Their rescuers arrived fifteen minutes later on the dot. While Lydia was unfortunately wearing zero makeup and a too-big Franz Ferdinand t-shirt she’d stolen from Paul, Paul himself had clearly gotten prepared for being on camera. He came zooming into the parking lot right behind Scott, and as her mom dove into Scott’s Lexus and the two of them sped off, Paul put their rental in park and stepped out, buttoning his blazer like he had all the time in the world. He strode around the front of the car pulling focus while Lydia ducked into the driver’s seat. As she adjusted the seat for her shorter stature she could hear him out there gently admonishing the photographers – now ten in number – for interrupting his restful weekend “visiting friends,” and as they yelled questions at him, he gave them a wave and a chipper “Cheers!” (which, translated, meant kindly sod off now) and settled himself on the passenger’s side. As soon as his door was shut Lydia ripped out of the parking lot headed for the highway.

She couldn’t relax until she’d taken the on-ramp onto I-87 and the way back home stretched out before her. A quick glance in the rearview mirror showed that their only tail was the security detail in their black car, none of the media. Only then did she relate everything that had happened to Paul. “All I can figure is that one of the neighbors spilled the beans,” she admitted. “Which sucks, but they might not have realized what they were doing. I don’t think there was any malicious intent, if that’s how we were found out.”

“There’s apparently a photo of the two of us,” Paul said, turning his phone over in his hands, “taken yesterday afternoon in your back garden. My detail was telling me about it when you rang. That’s how they knew we were here.”

Lydia gaped at him. “Fucking what? Who took it?”

“Someone in one of the houses behind yours, I reckon. Looked a bit to our right, I think? That one rather big tree was between us.”

She’d never understood the cliché “seeing red” before, but now, finding out one of her parents’ neighbors had betrayed them, there was no other way to describe how she felt. “Fuck a pig,” she ground out, and she lifted her arm up. “Reach in my pocket and grab my phone, would you? I need to tell my parents.”

Once Paul had done as asked and had her mom on speaker, Lydia said, “Mom, one of the Van Ormans took a photo of me and Paul sitting in the backyard yesterday and gave it to the press.”

“Travis just showed it to me on the computer,” Carol said. “It’s apparently up on a blog called… Perez Hilton? He drew a heart around your faces and wrote something about a Kiss Cam?”

Lydia’s jaw dropped. “Oh no. It’s from when we were making out, isn’t it. Why the fucking fuck is everyone so obsessed with getting photos of us kissing?”

“Carol,” Paul said, keeping calm, “if you don’t mind, my PR team is going to handle this. They may reach out if they have any questions, if that’s all right?”

“Oh, whatever we can do to help,” Carol said. “And you can be sure that I’m going to march right over to Frank and Maureen’s today and uninvite them from Scott and Andrea’s engagement party, and I’m going to tell them exactly the reason why I’m doing it, too.”

“Go get ‘em, Mom,” Lydia said, holding back a laugh.

They promised to keep each other apprised on both ends, and Paul flipped her phone shut and returned it to her pocket. All of the goodwill and contentment she’d felt that morning – both from her conversation with Paul and the one with her mom – had evaporated like so much mist. Impotent rage zipped through her, making her hands tighten on the steering wheel.

Paul cleared his throat, after a few miles of tense silence. “Love—”

“Nope,” she said immediately. “Not right now, babe, I need to be angry for a while.” She reached over and turned on the radio, cranking up the volume until Black Sabbath filled the car.

She could see from the corner of her eye Paul watching her; his mouth opened once or twice as if he were going to power through her frustration anyway – but thought better of it. Frowning, he turned in his seat and faced forward, completely motionless as they drove back down to the city.

Chapter Text

The Perez Hilton photo, it turned out, was but one part of a voyeuristic triptych of them together in the Montroses’ backyard, and it wasn’t even the most titillating of the bunch. Monday morning, when she went into work and joined her coworkers at a regular story meeting, Lydia had the unpleasant experience of discovering that it was the third photo of the series, actually, that had the most people talking.

“Morning all,” Tom grunted as he walked in and sank into a chair at the head of the table. “Hope everyone had a restful weekend.”

“Montrose definitely did,” someone said behind her, leading to a chorus of awkward snorts and giggles.

Tom glared at them all over the tops of his glasses. “All right, get it out of your system.”

“Paul McCartney’s apparently an ass man,” another guy said at the other end of the room, “who knew?”

“Maybe we should finish this conversation later,” Lydia said, glaring at the speaker over a second round of suppressed laughter. She leaned back in her chair, hoping her flippancy hid how hard her heart pounded. “I can go see if Hannah Kirkwood has an available meeting slot in her calendar.”

“Montrose,” Tom said, in a voice that brooked no talkback. “I need you on the mosque bombing in Iraq, if you’re not too busy filing complaints with HR.”

“On it,” Lydia snapped, scribbling it down in her notebook.

Later, once she’d returned to her cubicle, she texted Nicole: Is there a photo of Paul grabbing my ass somewhere?

Yeah, came the response a half hour later. From this weekend. He got quite a good grip.

MOTHERFUCKER, Lydia texted back, once she’d picked her head up from her desk.

She went about her work that day as inconspicuously as possible, grateful for the fact that the government officials and spokespeople she contacted for her article apparently weren’t up to date on the latest celebrity gossip. Every time she identified herself at the top of a phone call – “This is Lydia Montrose with the Washington Post, do you have a few minutes?” – she braced herself to hear “Wait, why do I know that name? Oh—!” Mercifully, it never came.

After lunch, once she’d carried her trash to the kitchen and thrown it out, refilled her mug with coffee, and was headed back to her cubicle, she saw Tom waving to her from his office. Lydia detoured and walked in. “I’m half done with the bombing article,” she told him. “Few more hours should do it.”

“Good, but that’s not why I called you in here,” Tom said. He gestured for her to have a seat. “I’ll just get to the point. I know you turned me down before, but now unfortunately I’m not asking: my bosses want you to start doing video packages for the Post’s YouTube channel.”

Lydia frowned, confused. For some amount of time she could only stare at Tom, or into the murky depths of her lukewarm coffee. “If the quality of my work has declined in the—”

“It hasn’t,” her editor said, giving her a rueful grin. “You know it hasn’t. You’re one hell of a writer, Montrose. It’s going to be tough for me to lose you.”

“Writing for the international affairs desk was my career goal,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as frantic as she felt. “Writing for your department – this is where I belong, I know it is, this is where my interest lies, and all my contacts are—”

“Montrose,” he said, holding up a hand to stop her. “You’re seeing this like it’s a demotion or a punishment. I can assure you, you’ll still have the same title and payrate.”

“Then why am I being moved? I don’t want to do YouTube videos. I have no interest in that.”

Tom folded his hands on his desk and looked down at them, grimacing. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “You deserve that much. I don’t have to tell you that the news business is experiencing… a bit of a downturn. The Internet is eating into our revenues, smaller papers are getting bought or going under completely. We need to have a presence on YouTube and other social media platforms to stay relevant and capture some kind of online ad sales. Montrose…” He sighed. “You have a famous boyfriend. Pictures of you were plastered all over the Internet this weekend. People are searching for your name, wondering who you are. The powers that be want to ensure that when potential readers type your name into the Google search bar, or wherever, your work at the Post comes up first.”

“I’m sure it does already,” she said, her voice getting thinner and higher, “I’ve got four years of bylines they can weed through, my profile page went live last year on the Post website—”

“YouTube ad sales pay more,” Tom said.

It didn’t matter how or what she protested or how vehemently, Tom parried every thrust. The decision had been made. Numb, Lydia listened in stony silence as he told her where to report starting the very next morning, where her new desk would be, who she’d be working with. Her new beat was local news, and she’d be paired with a videographer to travel around the City capturing stories about the mayor’s office, the City budget, homelessness, Ground Zero, immigration – whatever was timely and relevant. She had some leeway for choosing her own stories, but her new editor would get final approval.

“And before you go,” Tom said as she stood. “Jenkins and Franczak know better, and I did have a word with them after this morning’s meeting. If anyone keeps bothering you about paparazzi photos, don’t hesitate to talk to HR.”

“I will,” Lydia murmured. She nodded in farewell and went back to her cubicle in a daze.

When she returned to her desk she could only sit there at first, spine sagging, as her fellow reporters worked phones and research leads around her. This was the world she loved, where she most felt at home – the only job she’d ever wanted. And now it was all slipping away from her because of something completely out of her control.

Lydia drank her cold coffee and made a face. It might not have been a demotion in the strictest sense of the word, but it sure as shit felt like one.

She declined to tell Paul what was going on; when he asked how her day was she just grumbled moodily and he took it at face value. By the time she woke up the following morning she had mustered enough resolve to make the most of the enforced change. “I’m Lydia fucking Montrose,” she hissed defiantly at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, and she followed it up with an aggressive cuddle with Jeff and hardcore making out with Paul while they made breakfast. She left the Upper East penthouse for work feeling like a million bucks. I am woman, hear me roar, and all that.

Then she met her new coworkers: the videographer, Mike Schneider, and supervising producer Henry Condon. Lydia quickly figured out that they literally knew her only as that chick being groped by a celeb in a seedy tabloid photo who was now going to make the Post’s YouTube channel profitable. Somehow, this translated in their heads to her being a total dimwit. And the more she pushed against this false portrait and tried to assert her journalistic credentials, the more confused they got, seemingly wondering how she was capable of speaking like a real live reporter or something.

It was a long first day of work.

She’d completely forgotten about her promise to tell Paul about what was going on with her and Yoko; so much had happened since Saturday morning that that conversation in the rental car already felt ten years distant. His text on Wednesday afternoon, then, was a bolt from the blue: Got us a table at that Indian place we like – reservation at 7 tonight xoxo

With a sense of trepidation and exhaustion she left work and headed downtown to their favorite Indian restaurant, which was only modestly occupied, as expected for an average Wednesday night. Paul’s warm hand on her lower back, as the hostess led them to their table, made Lydia want to sink into his arms and forget about work, forget the press, forget everything and run away and not think about any of this bullshit anymore. What a glorious existence that would be. She returned to her senses when his hand dropped and they took their seats and menus.

He was better at picking up on her moods now, so as soon as the hostess left them to it, he leaned in and took her hand, entwining their fingers together. “If tonight’s not a good night, love,” he began, looking concerned.

“It’s not,” she said bluntly. “But…” She shrugged. “I promised.”

“I just want to know what’s going on with you,” he said. “I feel like there’s a lot you haven’t been telling me, and—” He gave a weak chuckle. “You know how I hate being left out of the loop.”

“But you’ll – you’ll want to jump in and fix things,” she said, sighing. “And it sucks, but there’s nothing to fix, just… I don’t know, endure. White-knuckle my way through it.”

“I’m excellent at white-knuckling my way through,” Paul cried. “We can do it together.”

That, of all things, made her want to burst into noisy, snotty tears. She squeezed his hand and said “Remind me to tell your therapist she deserves a medal,” which got her an eye roll and a cute blush.

Their waitress approached, looking nervous, and Lydia and Paul gave their orders as quickly as they could. Once she’d left and they had privacy again, Lydia launched into telling him about her last few days at work, and how all of it was a result of the leaked photos the neighbors had taken. He listened with a bewildered look on his face, clearly not having anticipated this kind of thing happening as a result of the spotlight swinging onto them.

“Christ,” he said, when she wrapped up. Their food had arrived in the meantime and they were digging through their respective plates. “I’d call up the publisher and give him what for if I thought it’d help, but I suppose it wouldn’t at all.”

“No, you better not,” Lydia replied with a wince. “I fought back – you better believe I did – but they didn’t take no for an answer, and I don’t want to be unemployed, so. My only plan now is to get hired by the New York Times. Sooner rather than later.”

Paul nodded decisively. “Then maybe you can make it a condition of employment,” he added, “that you’ll only work in international news as a journalist, not as a video contributor in any fashion.”

She nodded, taking another bite of her food. Wouldn’t you know it, she did feel better after unburdening to Paul, and after talking it out with him her plan felt that much more like one that stood a chance of succeeding. The Times wanted her, she knew they did. And she could bear with the Post a few weeks or months longer knowing that there was definitely a light at the end of the tunnel.

Lydia tangled her feet with Paul’s under the table. “You’re the bees’ knees, buddy,” she said in a silly voice.

“You’re the cat’s pajamas, doll,” he replied, winking at her. He waited what was for him a decorous length of time before then adding, “If that’s sorted for tonight, now I want to hear about the other thing. With Yoko.”

Even knowing it was inevitable, the words landed like a punch to the gut. “Yeah, let’s get it over with,” she said, mortified to hear tears in her voice. She gulped down some of her ice water and focused on her breathing until she had a better handle on her control. He reached across the table for her again; his callused thumb, swiping over the back of her hand, helped settle her. “I don’t want to talk about this again, so. Tonight’s it.”

Paul scooted closer to the table and leaned in towards her, eyes darting around her face. “I take no pleasure in talking about her either,” he said dryly.

Lydia huffed a silent laugh in spite of herself. “Two of us,” she muttered. She glanced at her empty plate as she gathered her thoughts, wondering where to start. “I take it you know what happened in 1975,” she said, “since you reacted so hugely on Saturday.”

He hesitated. “Some of it, I think,” Paul admitted. “May said something to me about it years later, and at the time I reckon I thought she was just… you know, being nice. Saying something kind because I needed to hear it, not necessarily because it was true. But then I happened to dig up a postcard you’d sent to Neil at the time that backed up May’s story, so.” He shrugged.

The waitress came by and cleared their plates, and they both declined dessert or coffee. Once they were alone again, Paul stared down at her hand. “You were going to join us in New Orleans in 1975,” Paul breathed, sounding achingly wistful. “You were going to write with me again. Then Yoko put a stop to it.”

Lydia squeezed her eyes shut, as flashes from those weird few days flickered on the insides of her eyelids. Even with her perfect recall of her past life, she still had no idea what had happened to her – or been unwittingly administered to her in her tea – a realization that horrified and repelled her. “In a nutshell, yeah,” she said. “Yoko put a stop to it.”

“And now?” Paul prompted. “Is she preventing us from writing again?”

“Yeah,” Lydia whispered. “She is. And not just that. She doesn’t want me talking to Sean either.” Feeling his eyes on her, his indignation – feeling hot and uncomfortable, she took her cloth napkin from her lap and set it on the table, and started compulsively folding it, over and over. “I first noticed it after we had our fourth number one single off The Great Hiatus, so this is early 2004. She authorized my name and likeness to sell some – some like thousand-dollar Montblanc fountain pens. The exact kind of elitist shit she knew would piss me off. It was like a warning, a shot across the bow. Then—” She heaved a breath, holding herself so rigidly upright she trembled. “I noticed that every time I spoke to Sean, or he spoke to me, there’d be little things in the paper. Little digs at me. I stop speaking to Sean, the digs stop. Then after three months of radio silence he calls me up to ask if I want to go see Van Halen’s summer tour – you remember that?”

“Yeah,” Paul said hoarsely. “I remember.”

“And I thought ‘fuck it, I want to see Van Halen with – with my son,’” she forced out, tears welling in her eyes. Only blinking furiously kept them from spilling over. “So we went. And what does Yoko do, she authorizes that godawful Broadway musical based on my life and music, that was so bad it closed after less than a month. She used songs that were incomplete – that nobody should have been hearing, because I never finished them to my satisfaction – knowing full well how I’d feel about it. And then last year!” She laughed, and it sounded hysterical even to her own ears.

He now had her hand sandwiched between both of his. “What happened last year, love?” Paul murmured. She drew strength from him.

“Your album, New Messages,” she said, finally looking up at him. “The dedication on the inside of the booklet to… ‘to my love.’ Red cape for the bull, that. She starts cooperating with that guy, Philip Norman – you know, the hack who wrote that book about the Beatles that was all yay Lennon, boo McCartney – he’s apparently writing a biography on me alone now. And Yoko – just last year, what a coincidence! – agreed to fully cooperate with him and be interviewed. Who knows what secrets she’s going to spill.”

“Christ,” he breathed. “Love. I had no idea.”

“And then we get to last fall,” Lydia said. Now, her momentum faltered, at this the most painful part. She stared down at their joined hands. “I know you don’t like to say his name,” she said, “so what do I call him? The man who shot me,” she added, sotto voce.

“The jerk of all jerks, you mean,” Paul bit off. “The king of wankers.”

“Him,” she said. “So. You know I’m anti-death penalty – for all crimes, even the worst ones you can think of. And when… the Asshole pled guilty to murder in 1980, he was sentenced to twenty years to life in prison.”

Paul’s face was filled with so much anger and pain she could scarcely look at him. “Why are we talking about him,” he said, anguished, “I thought we were talking about—”

“According to the laws of the great state of New York,” Lydia went on calmly, “every prisoner has the right to petition for parole after twenty years’ incarceration, and they can do so every two years. Which, for the record, I’m all for. The Asshole – he petitioned the parole board as soon as he could, in the year 2000. But it was a no-go: Yoko wrote and submitted a victim statement, militant Beatles fans threatened to kill him if he showed his face outside a prison – petition promptly denied, done and dusted.” Lydia swallowed and looked away from Paul’s glittering eyes. “He applied again in 2002. More victim statements, more deliberation, another rejection. 2004: lather, rinse, repeat.” She wiped at the corner of her eye, feeling the fear bubble up inside her. “He applied again last year – last October. And this time Yoko didn’t send in a victim statement. She knew he’d set a date for a hearing, and she didn’t do anything at all.”

“But they still denied him,” Paul said, clasping her hand ever more tightly. “He’s still locked up, isn’t he?”

Lydia exhaled, looking up at the ceiling, trying to get herself under control. “That’s not the question you should be asking,” she said, sniffling. “Obviously he’s still imprisoned. Ask me… ask me why Yoko didn’t speak to the parole board in 2006.”

She saw Paul’s mouth working to get the words out, but no words came.

“It’s because Sean texted me about my old birthday,” she replied. “Our birthday. And I texted him back, and we ended up hopping on the phone and speaking for about three hours. Just catching up.” After that, it was like the dam had broken: “We had to catch up because I hadn’t spoken to him in about two years – not since the fucking Van Halen concert.” She placed her free hand over his then, gripping hard, trembling harder. “Every time I make contact with Sean,” she rushed on, “or he reaches out to me, or you make some sign in public that we’re happy and in love, she retaliates by doing something she knows I’ll hate – selling stuff of mine that she knows should go to Julian, saying awful things in the press – trying to keep me in my place and away from – from my own son, Paul – or to make us unhappy, you and me – and this last time she cranked up the retaliation to the next level by dangling the Asshole over my head. Who wants so desperately to get out of prison,” she whispered frantically, “he wants out, he applies for parole like clockwork every two years, he’s not going to stop, and frankly the thought of him being a free man again scares the ever-loving shit out of me—”

Paul stood up abruptly, his chair making a horrible scraping sound against the cement floor. He looked ready to murder someone with his bare hands. “Excuse me,” he said, tossing his hair, and she watched as he spun on his heel and made a beeline to the back, to the men’s room. The door shut behind him loudly enough that a few diners looked across the room, frowning.

Lydia sank back in her chair, panting as if she’d run a marathon, shaking as if her bones and muscles could no longer keep her upright. A woman at a table near them happened to make eye contact and gave Lydia a concerned look. You okay? she mouthed. 9-1-1? gesturing to her cell phone.

I’m okay, Lydia mouthed back, shaking her head.

You sure? came the response, with a look of extreme skepticism.

Lydia put her hand over her heart. Yes, thanks.

She could still feel little tremors racking her body when the waitress brought the check; Lydia gave over her card and handed the folder right back. She gestured to the waitress, who bent and listened as Lydia whispered in her ear about paying the bill for the couple underneath the painting of Krishna too. The waitress nodded and said she’d run both tables on her card, then strode away.

Paul had still not emerged from the men’s, and she didn’t blame him. All this had been building up for years and she had just inelegantly dumped it on him over one night’s dinner. But after a while, once the waitress brought her card and check back and Lydia paid for everything, she started to get impatient. She wanted out of this place, to go home, to be alone with her misery, or to have Paul kiss her until she had amnesia – was that a thing? Maybe they could experiment and find out.

Lydia draped her coat over her arm as she walked out of the restaurant and stopped underneath its cheerful yellow and orange awning. The month of May was never a sure thing in New York, with sunshine and shadow, warmth and chill equally possible on any given day or night. A brisk breeze blew past her, sending tendrils of her hair skittering across her face, and she looked up at the starless sky. She’d kept it to herself because their agreement was between the two of them – her and Yoko. No one else needed to be drawn into their toxic wake. She hadn’t breathed a word to clueless Sean, who either thought she was a poor correspondent or disinterested party or worse, nor had she told Paul, Ringo, Julian… no one.

But maybe it didn’t need to be like that. Paul could be vicious when stirred up; she’d seen it with her own eyes. And she’d long known that there was no one else she wanted on her team more than him. Maybe—

She turned when she heard the jangle of the bell over the front door, and saw Paul had finally emerged. He glanced at her only briefly, then strode practically out into the middle of Lexington Avenue traffic to flag down a taxi. His hand was steady as he guided her into the backseat, but he said nothing save to tell the cabbie where they were headed.

The trip was silent at first, and the cabbie very quickly gave up trying to strike up some stimulating conversation. They had just passed Grand Central Station, lit up against the gloomy darkness, when Lydia undid her seatbelt and slid across the backseat to join him. She wrapped her arm around his torso, heart jumping when he returned her embrace immediately. He pressed a fervent kiss to the top of her head but still said nothing.

They alighted outside the penthouse, and held hands as they walked past the scary ex-military doorman and went up in the elevator. Dumping her bag, her shoes, and her coat at the door, she let Paul lead her up to the living room, to the bar cart stationed along one wall, where he poured them each a generous tumbler of whiskey on the rocks.

At long last their eyes met across their drinks. He raised his. “We need to be open with each other,” he said slowly, sounding like he was reciting something he’d heard his therapist say. Maybe he’d called her from the men’s room for an emergency session, maybe that was what had taken so long. “Truth and honesty in all things, love. No more secrets.”

Lydia nodded. “I agree,” she said. “No more secrets.”

“There is nothing I want more,” he said earnestly, “than to write another album with you, love. Would you write with me again?”

“I’m scared,” she admitted. “If I seem like I’m having a good time, Yoko goes after me.” She told him then what she should have told him ages ago, about her and Yoko’s compact of mutually assured destruction. “I can’t retaliate,” Lydia concluded, “because I’m worried she’ll see it as an act of war. And I didn’t tell you about it because I was trying to protect you.”

“We protect each other,” Paul declared, looking positively hacked off. “And it’s a good thing I’m not party to this so-called nuclear pact, isn’t it? Let’s write together and damn what anyone thinks.”

Lydia plunked her drink on the bar cart and launched herself at him, kissing him for all she was worth, moaning as she felt him return her ardor with interest. Passionate kissing probably wouldn’t wipe her memory of everything that had gone wrong in the past – but it did make the future look that much brighter.

Chapter Text

Lydia was the kind of person who put off waking up on a workday for as long as she possibly could. With a little luck, she gave herself just enough time to get in a workout on her stationary bike, take a leisurely shower, scarf down breakfast, talk over with Paul their respective plans for the day, and then walk to the train station to head to the office. It was a system she’d worked out so exactly that it ran like clockwork for years – until the past few weeks, when she started getting dogged by photographers along the four blocks to the nearest train station, snapping her picture and yelling invasive questions.

The paparazzi was making her get up earlier in the morning. She’d probably never forgive them for that.

Meanwhile, Paul was always up ages before her, doing his morning yoga, chatting with business people in England (five hours ahead of New York time), sometimes speaking with his kids or doing a little writing. When she got up one morning several days after their Big Talk About Yoko, Lydia was unsurprised to find a few computer printouts laid neatly on the countertop in the kitchen.

“What’s up?” she asked, nodding at the pages as she gulped down some of her smoothie.

Primly, Paul pointed to the first pile in the row: a menu from a very posh restaurant on the Upper West Side, one that she remembered had a private dining room available for reservations. “I think we should have dinner with Sean,” he announced, “or you should by yourself, if you don’t want me there. If you really haven’t spoken to him since last October, it’s long overdue.” Moving on quickly, clearing his throat, he next pointed to what looked like a business website for a realtor who specialized in million-dollar properties in Manhattan. “I’m also finding it rather difficult to look out our window and see the Dakota just across the way,” he was saying, his voice steely. “I know you said it wasn’t a problem before, but now that I’m aware of what’s been happening…” His eyes flicked up to hers. “We can always find another place to live, you know. One near a green space that we both like. Central Park isn’t the only park in New York.”

Lydia was speechless for a moment, heart swelling in gratitude. “And this last stack?” she said.

He tapped one long finger on it; its top page looked like a diagram of her parents’ backyard. “My team came up with security measures for the engagement party,” he explained. “If you think these’ll work and let your parents know, we can get everything squared away. No cost to your family, I’ll cover the extra bits and bobs needed since I’m the reason strangers would be nosy about the party in the first place.”

“Okay,” she croaked. “Sounds… sounds good.” Fuck a pig. She should have told him about Yoko years ago. Why did she do this to herself – hide away important things thinking that she was somehow protecting him, or saving him the worry? She should’ve known by now when things weren’t going well, Paul’s response was never to wallow in indecision or dismay, but to go straight to work. “Um… I’ve got to head out soon, I’m interviewing Governor Spitzer this afternoon. What’s your day look like?”

Paul grinned. “Oh, you know,” he said, tossing his hair, “just telling the record company folks that Monty Hayes agreed to another album collaboration.”

Lydia threw her head back and laughed, finding her footing again. “Oh my god, can you describe it for me in detail tonight, when we get home?” she begged. “Like, the exact looks on their faces – do they all orgasm simultaneously at the thought of the millions in record sales, or—”

“You pervy bastard,” Paul said, with an amused snort.

That morning they happened to leave at the same time – Paul to the car waiting for him at the curb, her down the street to the train station – so the paparazzi crowded around him at first, giving her enough time to get a half-block head start. When Paul had sped off and the press gaggle had caught up with her, though, she began to get some pretty odd questions lobbed at her:

“Are you and Paul fighting, Lydia?”

“Does Paul have an anger problem?”

“How much have you spent covering up your arguments?”

By the time she jumped onto the train and left them behind, she had unfortunately been able to piece together what the hell was going on. An Internet search when she arrived at work later confirmed it: The couple whose dinner she’d paid for at the Indian restaurant had made a public statement, saying they’d witnessed her and Paul fighting “viciously,” with Paul storming away leaving Lydia at their table “inconsolable and in tears.” When the woman – a sales rep for some cosmetics company Lydia had never heard of – then asked Lydia if she was okay, Lydia had (according to this lady) quickly dismissed her and attempted to pay for her silence by covering her meal. “But verbal abuse is never okay,” the woman told the New York Post. “If Miss Montrose is in trouble, then she should know that she doesn’t have to stay in a bad relationship.”

What. The. Fuck. At least that explained some of the worried looks she’d gotten as she came in that morning.

By noon, she had a text from Paul about how his PR team was going to confront the matter, explaining that there had been no fight but Lydia was grateful that the bystander had thought to check on her wellbeing. Add that I think women need to support women more, she texted Paul.

Done, he wrote back. And my PR team wants you to stop paying for other people’s meals.

She was being a good ally! I just wanted to do her a favor!

One thing I’ve learned over the years, Paul texted her, shortly before she had to leave for her interview, is that no good deed goes unpunished when you’re in the public eye.

Lydia tilted her head back with a groan when she read through his words. And though she refused to think about it in any great detail – not when she really had to be prepping for her interview with the governor – she couldn’t help but wonder at how rapidly, over the past month or two, her world had gotten so much smaller.

They mainly kept their heads down for the next week or so, only going out in public on one occasion to go see Hot Fuzz. For a few hours she didn’t have to think about anything of import or public interest – she could just sit in a darkened movie theater and giggle uncontrollably with the man she loved. It was sheer bliss.

Then that Saturday, two weeks after the tense weekend in Westchester, it was time to head back for her brother’s engagement party. Lydia rented another car, and Paul put his life in her hands yet again as they drove back up to the Montrose house, tailed by another unmarked black SUV. She felt a little like her cheer was forced that morning – she hadn’t been sleeping well the past few days, what with her growing dissatisfaction with her new YouTube-based job and the lack of forward movement on the New York Times’s side job-wise – and eventually she cottoned on to the fact that Paul could see it.

They were about a half hour from her parents’ place when Paul reached over and turned the radio off. “Out with it,” he said.

Lydia frowned and glanced at him. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just…” She sighed. “I’m tired of seeing unflattering photos of myself in the media. I just want to get dressed up and let everyone see how hot and happy we are. Like, drill it into their heads until it sticks.”

Paul chortled at that, leaning forward a little in his seat. “Hot and happy,” he echoed, “in that order!”

At the entrance to the gated community where Alan and Carol lived, they reached a short queue of cars and cluster of photographers grouped outside the bounds of the neighborhood. Paul’s security team had taken over at the booth and was checking in the Montroses’ guests and their neighbors, keeping out all unauthorized drivers. But long before Lydia had pulled up to the booth for the guard to check them off the list, the photographers had spotted Paul and pressed on both sides of the car, snapping away and shouting questions. The guard lifted up the traffic arm for them and Lydia sped down the street, leaving them all in her dust.

The street around the house was full of luxury cars with plates from all over New York and New England, so Lydia pulled into the driveway and parked behind her dad’s old Lincoln and next to a white van sporting the logo of a local catering business. The party had been set to officially start about a half hour earlier, at noon, making them slightly more than fashionably late. But that had been the plan all along – Lydia hadn’t liked being on time to parties since 1964, and that wasn’t changing anytime soon. The two of them said a quick hello to her dad in the kitchen and headed up to Lydia’s room with their overnight bags to change into their party finery.

When they descended the stairs to join everyone – Paul in a crisp pale blue Oxford and dark jeans, Lydia in a floral-print shirt dress cinched with a wide yellow belt – word had clearly gone around the party guests that the celebrity had arrived, and the kitchen was suspiciously more packed than it had been on their arrival. Andrea’s parents, the Adlers, were there, and instantly starstruck in Paul’s presence. Lydia watched fondly as Paul willingly placed himself in Mrs. Adler’s clutches and allowed her to relate to him in great detail the time she and her husband had seen him perform in Boston at the TD Banknorth Garden. Lydia touched his arm lightly before heading outside to see the changes wrought to the backyard.

The green space behind her parents’ house had been transformed since their last visit. Though the original plan had called for an open-air gathering, there was now a huge marquee tent filling the yard, crowded with round tables covered in elegant settings. Around the edges stood vertical freestanding trellises, decorated with fake vines and flowers, which she saw the event photographer using as tasteful backdrops to snap pictures of guests. (Really, they were meant to block the neighbors from doing what the Van Ormans had done and sneaking photos of her and Paul together.) A deejay bobbed his head in time to the music at his setup in the corner, and a parquet dance floor sat at the center of the tent, unoccupied.

Lydia felt her brother walk up beside her. “This engagement party is the nicest wedding I’ve ever been to,” she said dryly.

Travis snorted. “Okay, so… Mom went a little overboard.”

“The oldest always gets special treatment.”

“I know, right, such a mama’s boy.”

“You talking about me?” the man of the hour said, coming up behind them. Scott punched Travis’s shoulder and gave him a one-armed hug with a lot of back slaps, then turned to Lydia. She saw clearly the way he hesitated before giving her a hug like she was someone he’d just met, not the little sister he’d grown up with.

“Okay, weirdo,” she muttered in his ear, which made him blush in embarrassment – a reaction Lydia had never pulled from her oldest brother before.

Andrea stepped out of the kitchen then, carrying two glasses of sparkling lemonade. Lydia smiled when she saw her. Andrea was down at the mild end of the autism spectrum, which made her plainspoken and blunt in a way Lydia thought suited her ever-practical brother to a tee. She was feminine without being girly, efficient without being ruthless, and loved Scott as much as he loved her. Lydia was thrilled to have her as a sister-in-law one day.

“I have to apologize for my parents,” Andrea said, as she handed Scott a lemonade. “They’re totally monopolizing Paul’s time,” with a nod back towards the kitchen.

“He’s expecting it,” Lydia assured her, waving her hand. “Honestly, if he gets to spend this entire party just having people fangirl at him, he’ll be happy as a clam.”

“Sound like my kind of nightmare,” Andrea said, making them all laugh. Scott put an arm around her and kissed the side of her head.

Alan poked his head out of the kitchen door then. “Your grandma is down at her table,” he reminded them, the directive to go say hi to her heavily implied. The four of them dutifully made their way to the marquee tent and found Granny Montrose, seated at her table like a queen on her throne, surrounded by aunts, uncles, and family friends like she was holding court.

Lydia, being the youngest child of two people who had kids late and were both themselves the youngest children, had never had a full set of grandparents. One had died before her birth, another when she was a year old, and Grandpa Hayes had passed away when she was fourteen. That left Granny Montrose, the woman who had wanted her son to marry a nice girl who could cook, not Carol Hayes with her master’s degree. She’d lightened up some since then, but Lydia didn’t hold out hope that she’d one day become a full-throated feminist, exactly.

“There’s the happy couple,” Granny declared when they came closer, and she opened her thin arms for hugs and cheek kisses from Scott and Andrea. “Tuck in your shirt,” was how she greeted Travis, who did so before bending for his own hug and kiss. “And you,” she said at Lydia, once it was her turn. “You can’t imagine the shock I felt when Alan told me you’re dating Beatle Paul McCartney, of all people. Were all the boys your own age already taken?”

Lydia plastered a fake smile on her face and went through the motions of greeting her. “Boys my age just aren’t ready to grow up and settle down,” she confided in Granny. “It’s a real problem.”

“I can see that,” Granny said. “Look at Scott here, not getting married until he’s thirty-four years old. Thirty-four! Why I had girl friends who got married at nineteen, right out of high school. What is the world coming to?”

Point to Lydia for successfully derailing her. She was about to smirk at Travis, basking in the glow of her victory, when Paul walked up behind her. “Ah!” he said, and the circles of people around them all shifted subtly in a way Lydia couldn’t quite describe – a change in their posture, their bearing, their self-awareness. Somebody Famous was here now; everybody look cool. “This must be Granny Montrose,” Paul said, his charm cranked up to eleven as he bent and offered his hand to her, “I’ve heard so much about you.”

Granny sniffed, suspicious, as she shook the proffered hand. “So have I,” she said. “And I’m not sure I like what I’ve heard.”

Paul stepped back, putting a hand over his heart. God, the man was such a ham; Lydia fucking loved him so much. “Oh no!” he cried. “What have you heard? Maybe I can set your mind at ease.”

“Are you dating my granddaughter?”

Lydia coughed to hide her awkward laugh, and watched as Paul knelt before Granny. “I am,” he said easily, no hesitating, “and we’re very much in love, you know. But I must admit, now that I’ve met her grandmother, I think my head might be turned.”

Granny Montrose – traditional New England society matron Eleanor Crowninshield Montrose – then did something Lydia had thought impossible. She blushed, pressed a hand to her cheek, and said “Oh you!”

Ten minutes later, over by the appetizers, Lydia muttered to him, “I owe you a hundred bucks.”

“I’ll take it in twenties,” Paul said, winking at her. He snaked an arm around her waist and kept it there for the next hour, as Montroses and Adlers alike came tentatively forward wanting to fangirl (and fanboy) in Paul’s general direction. Just like she’d told Andrea, Paul loved every minute of it because it meant he could just stand there with his guard up, as he preferred around people he didn’t know.

The weather was perfect for their party, and while it did get a bit cloudy after the entrees were served, the sun broke through again before much time had passed. Carol had promised, after coordinating with Paul’s team, to email everyone and make it clear that only the photographer they’d hired was allowed to take pictures; no personal cameras were allowed anywhere. Looking around, Lydia was relieved to see that everyone had taken the directive seriously. For the first time in weeks, they were out in public and there was no risk of being photographed without their knowledge or permission. Taking full advantage, Lydia positioned her chair right next to Paul’s, their hands clasped and arms touching through the entire meal as they joked and chatted and had a grand old time with her immediate family. And as soon as the plates had been bussed away by the catering staff, the fawning fans returned, seeking that personal Beatle Paul anecdote they could tell at cocktail parties for the rest of their lives. Lydia sat beside him, holding in a laugh.

At one point that afternoon, as Paul nodded along and listened as Andrea’s uncle told him about how he’d seen the Wings Across America tour in 1976, Lydia heard buzzing vibrations coming from her clutch. Digging around, she pulled out her phone and saw an incoming call from Son of Hari.

She excused herself – not that anyone save Paul noticed – and ran back into the house to find a quiet spot before answering. “Hey, Dhani!” she said. “Good to hear from you.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he began.

“No, no. I mean, Paul and I are at a party for my brother and his fiancée, but it’s all good.”

“Bollocks,” Dhani said. “I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have rung if it weren’t really important.”

Lydia sat down on the couch in the parlor, unnerved. “Okay spill,” she ordered. “You’re freaking me out.”

Dhani sighed down the line. “I just got off the phone with a fact checker,” he said. “Someone leaked to them that you and I used to date. Said we were very serious, and that you left me for Paul.”

Her blood ran cold. They’d only used that ruse a single time – at the Concert for George in 2002 – around a specific and limited group of people, and she frankly hadn’t thought about it since. Dhani was a friend, a good friend, and things had never been anything but platonic between them. “Fuck,” she said feelingly. “Holy fucking shitballs.”

“There’s more,” Dhani said, sounding reluctant. “They also had a photo of you and Sean together at an outdoor concert—”

“Van Halen?” she asked. “Back in 2004?”

“That sounds right, yeah.”

“Fucking fuck a pig,” she cried, just as Paul stepped into the room on his own phone. He stopped at the sight of her horrified face. “Dhani,” she said, “what else did they have? Did they – were there photos of me with Julian?”

“I’m not – oh, yeah, one of you eating together somewhere in New York City.”

And that was all she needed to know. With a ballooning sense of sheer dread, she knew where this bombshell information was coming from. “What paper was it?”

“The New York Times, I think.”

She’d known what Dhani would say before he said it but the words still landed like a physical blow. Of course it was the New York Times. Her dream job. The place she’d wanted to work since she was a child. Lydia sank back into the couch cushions, her spine bending with the weight of the realization. “What did you tell the fact checker?” she asked Dhani, as Paul settled on the couch beside her.

“Denied it, of course,” he said quickly. “Said we were just friends, I didn’t know who was telling them such ridiculous nonsense. No one at our Thanksgiving party would’ve gone to the press,” he added, as if she’d been in any doubt. Lydia would’ve been hard pressed to see someone like Eric Clapton or Jeff Lynne volunteering private details to the media. “And my friends wouldn’t have said a word.”

“You’re absolutely positive about that?”

“Yes,” Dhani said, emphatic. “Most of my mates are also the kids of famous people – my best mate’s the son of Christopher Reeve, the actor, you know? They’re not the type to do that.”

“I figured,” she said. “Just had to be sure.”

“Lydia, I’m so unbelievably sorry about this entire thing.”

“Don’t be, it wasn’t you. I know who did it.”

“You do?” Dhani sounded surprised.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” she promised, and ended the call as fast as she could. Paul was still on the phone with someone so Lydia opened up her contacts list and scrolled down to Beautiful Boy; while it rang she stood and left the parlor, headed for her bedroom.

Sean picked up just as she closed her door. “Hey!” he said cheerfully. “What’s up?”

“Hi. Um… fuck.” She sat down on the edge of her bed. “I need to ask you some really shitty questions.”

“Uh oh,” he said with a laugh. “What kind of—”

“I need to know if there’s any way Yoko could’ve gotten a copy of that photo you and I took at the Van Halen concert a few years ago. The one where I’m sitting on your shoulders making devil horns with both hands?”

“Probably? I have it framed in my apartment, I think she’s seen it a couple times when she’s come over. Why?”

She bent forward over her knees, head pressed to her free hand. “Sean,” she said, “I… god, now I know how parents feel when they have to tell the kids Mom and Dad are getting a divorce.” Taking in a deep breath, she then told him not the gory details but the main headlines: the extreme dysfunction of her and Yoko’s marriage, the vicious fights, the blatant cheating, the romance story they spun for the press. All of it formed whole cloth out of pizza and fairy tales. “And I’m telling you all this,” Lydia finished, nails digging into her palm, “because Yoko has been going after me anytime I try to do something that makes me happy. This time, I assume it’s because of the recent announcement about Paul collaborating with Monty Hayes again, or just all the media hype around the two of us being together – or, hell, maybe it’s just because it’s been seven months since she last went after me and she thinks I need to be reminded to stay in line.”

“Jesus,” Sean blurted out. She listened to him breathe a few moments. “I mean… Jesus.”

“She has the photo of us at the Van Halen concert,” Lydia said. “She gave it to the press. She told them you and I hooked up or were dating or something, and she got a photo of me with Julian, and she also told them that I dated Dhani Harrison before I got together with Paul. She wants to paint me as, I don’t know, some kind of determined, obsessed starfucker, which would completely destroy my reputation in the news world. Sean, I…” She had to inhale and count to five to steady herself again. “I really don’t know if my career could bounce back from that, if that kind of thing gets printed about me.”

Paul opened her door, paused at the threshold, and let himself into her bedroom. He shut the door behind him and sat down on the bed with her, putting an arm around her. “I don’t even know what to say,” Sean said, sounding devastated. “Oh my god.”

“I want to give you all the time you need to process,” Lydia said, “and I’ll happily answer any questions you have then, but in the meantime I need a favor from you. I need you to stop telling Yoko private stuff about me. Take any photos or anything you have related to me in your flat, and put it away where she can’t get to it. She’s using you as her source of information and I can’t allow that anymore.”

“Yeah, okay,” Sean said. “I can do that. Fuck.”

“Hey.” Lydia reached out with her free hand and grabbed Paul’s, hard. “Sean, this has nothing to do with you. Please understand that, okay? I’m sorry your mom turned you into an unwitting spy. I never wanted you to know about any of this in the first place.”

“But why not?”

“Because.” She inhaled again, just barely keeping her control. “Because I love you, and I want your life to be perfect. Yoko and I… that’s just toxic bullshit that nobody needs.”

He was silent just long enough that Lydia’s heart started to freefall towards the floor. “Okay,” Sean said finally. “I love you too.”

She hung up soon after and immediately leapt to her feet, clinging to her composure by a thread. “Please tell me your team is on this,” she said, hearing how thin and strained her voice sounded.

“They’ve got it all handled, love,” Paul replied, his voice soothing as he squeezed her hand. “Thank god for the fact checker alerting us. We caught it early, nothing will get printed, it’s all sorted now.”

“Cool. Gimme a sec.” She ducked out of her room and into the bathroom down the hall, splashed some water on her face, touched up her makeup, and returned to Paul, waiting for her on her bed. Right as she entered the music from the party outside switched to something slow and classic. Her encyclopedic knowledge of music identified it as Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.”

“Okay,” she said, chin up. “I’m not thinking about that for the rest of the day.” As he stood, she reached for his hand again. “Let’s go dance.”

They made their way downstairs, not pausing for anyone, and Lydia didn’t stop until she’d pulled Paul to the edge of the dance floor. Not many people were actually dancing, just a few couples, since the open bar was still doing a vigorous business on one end of the tent. Lydia saw her Aunt Debbie staring at her as she stepped towards Paul, he took her hand and her waist, and they started swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the song.

“Better now?” he asked after a few moments.

“Much.” Lydia glanced around the tent, startled somewhat by just how many people were watching them. Her parents hovered by the tent entrance, differing levels of concern on their faces, Andrea’s parents still looked completely starstruck; Granny Montrose looked like she was thinking if only she were thirty years younger. But all that benign attention was all right, Lydia decided. “This is what I wanted for this weekend.”

“What is, love?”

As if on cue, the song ended and the next began – The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You.” She leaned in even further towards him, until they were cheek to cheek. He rested their joined hands over his heart and she felt its comforting beat beneath her fingers. “I like when everyone’s looking at us,” she murmured in his ear, “but you and I are only looking at each other.”

Paul pulled her closer, his hand at her waist dipping a little lower. She felt his thumb hook inside her belt, his lips brushed a kiss under her ear. “If those are my marching orders for this party,” he said, “mission accepted.”

“Enjoy it now, soldier,” she teased, “because Monday, we’re going to war.”

Chapter Text

McCartney and Hayes were back – but it wasn’t going as smoothly as it had before.

The songs for The Great Hiatus had come pouring out of them four years ago, and more tracks besides those that made the final cut, so effortlessly it had almost felt like cheating. The recording process had been more fraught, sure, but even then they had stubbornly put their heads down and made it all come together. Even though they hadn’t written a single song since 2003, due to Lydia’s fear of retaliation or sabotage, she had hoped that coming back would just be like riding a bicycle.

But Paul was tense, in the days following the engagement party. She could see it in the way he carried himself, the way he spoke to her. He’d come to her with a few bars of a melody, ready to write, and when she tried to help him he was so effusive in his agreement with whatever she said that she would grow suspicious and take it back.

“You know how this works,” she said, gesturing between them. “We always take the best suggestion, no matter who it comes from.”

“Why do you think I’m lying?” he cried.

“Why do you think I need to be buttered up?” she shot back.

Lydia didn’t pretend to know every fleeting thought that went through Paul’s head. Paul himself probably didn’t know the sum total of everything that went on in his subconscious. But given enough time, she could eventually begin to figure it out.

They were still lying low, to let some media attention fade. Despite all their precautions, photos of them at the engagement party had leaked – someone very industrious had apparently hacked into the photographer’s website after she put her proofs up for Alan and Carol to browse and make their selections. Nothing unflattering, fortunately, just a few shots of Paul and Lydia slow dancing and one of them sitting together at a table laughing at something. Then a week after the latter picture had appeared on some celebrity gossip websites, Lydia came home from work to find that Paul and his people had been busy in the meantime.

“Oh wow,” she said when she saw it. Paul had personal photos everywhere in the penthouse, framed ones hanging in gallery walls and freestanding photos cluttering up every table and shelf. Now, at the end of one of those sofa tables, was a framed copy of that engagement party snap paired with one of them back in the ‘60s at some press conference, in virtually the same poses.

He came up behind her, his hands going to her waist. “I thought I recognized the framing of the shot,” he said, leaning his head against hers. “Did some digging around. Turns out I was right.”

“Now I get what you and Richie mean when you say I have the same body language and mannerisms,” she said, smiling up at him. “Give me a haircut and a cigarette and… Holy fuck.”

“It’s a good look,” he said, grinning down at her.

They stood for a moment, admiring the photos. “Paul,” she said after a comfortable silence. “You know I was being metaphorical, right?”

“Hm?”

“When I said I was going to war with Yoko.” She slipped out of his arms to face him. “I didn’t actually mean, like…” She hunched over and started snapping her fingers, like she was a gang member in West Side Story.

Paul snorted. “So we aren’t joining the Sharks or the Jets, then?”

“Hell no. I’m not about to go down to the Dakota to challenge her to pistols at dawn or anything. I have no interest in that.”

He sighed, sounding more than a little relieved, and ran a hand through his hair. “Well that’s good to hear,” he said, “but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s been going after you all this time, you know. You must have some idea of how you want to… I don’t know, respond.”

“I do.” She twined her arms around his neck. “I’m going to do as Oprah says, and live my best life.” Lydia brushed her lips against his. “Yoko’s tried to make me too afraid to be happy,” she murmured. “So… I want to be happy. I want us to be happy. That’s it, that’s the whole battle plan.”

He pulled her closer, so that they were pressed together. “And what would make us happy, love?”

“Everything,” she said. “Whatever we want.”

“Will you write with me?” he asked, his voice soft.

“Hell yeah I will,” she replied, beaming at him. “Will you go to movies and concerts with me?”

“Hell yeah I will,” he teased.

Now that they were public the sky was the limit, and with Lydia’s new mandate whole new vistas opened to them. Over the next weeks they went to the movies constantly, seeing all kinds of new releases and special screenings of classic films they remembered from back in the day. Paul landed hard-to-get tickets for several acts coming through town, and together they got to see Roger Waters, Muse, The Chieftains, plus various orchestras and ensembles playing classical music over at Carnegie Hall. She took him to see her favorite exhibits at the Met, and they dabbled in stand-up comedy and opera and speakeasy jazz and indie bands paying their dues at gritty Brooklyn night clubs. He took her to Michelin-starred restaurants, where they ate some of the most amazing food she’d ever had. She took him to Sounds on St. Mark’s Place, where they bought dozens of albums and CDs.

Finally, the music came. Lydia woke up humming something one Saturday morning and by evening they had a full set of lyrics for the rocker “Quiet Down.” Paul was waiting for her when she returned from work one evening and by midnight they had “People Tell Me It’s No Good.” They recorded demos for Paul to start shopping around to producers, and yet again they practically had their pick of the lot.

They were photographed frequently – not all the time, but often enough. Lydia forced herself not to care or notice each time she saw a skulking figure in her periphery, trying to position himself for an unobtrusive photo of them together. This was the deal. She had to get used to it. And the less she fought it, strangely, the more flattering the photos turned out. Lydia saved a few that she liked on her laptop and looked at them sometimes, when no one was watching and she had a few slow moments at work. She liked the photos where she and Paul were walking down the street holding hands, or their eyes were locked on each other over a votive candle at a small café table. She liked when the camera captured him looking at her like she was the greatest thing since sliced bread, or she was grinning at him like she was about to burst with affection. She liked the ones where they looked happy.

Though neither of them mentioned it out loud, Lydia felt like they were recreating London in the spring of 1967, going out to discover beautiful things and people and events together. It made her fall in love with New York City – and Paul – all over again.

They also started hanging out with other people a lot more. Lydia was introduced to a whole array of Paul’s friends and acquaintances, many of whom were famous in their own right. She met Dave Grohl and his wife Jordyn, who were lovely and down-to-earth; she met producer Rick Rubin, who was odd and intense. She met Billy Joel, which was the only time Lydia felt herself devolving helplessly into a giddy fangirl (she was a New Yorker, of course she wouldn’t be cool about meeting Billy Joel). Nor could she be calm about the news Billy happened to have that night.

“You know they’re finally moving forward with demolishing Shea Stadium,” he said to them, as they worked through their meals.

Lydia’s head snapped up, eyes wide. She exchanged a look with Paul, who simply said, “No, I didn’t.”

“I know they’ve been talking about it for over ten, fifteen years,” she chimed in, “but there’s been some debate over financing and a new design for the replacement stadium. And then… 9/11 happened, so it wasn’t a priority for a while.”

“It is now,” Billy said. He swung his eyes back towards Paul. “I’ve been approached about doing the final concert performance there next summer before they close up shop for good.”

“That’s brilliant!” Paul said, smiling. “Good memories in that place, you know. Our show there in ’65 was sheer madness.” This said with a warm look at Lydia.

“Oh did the Beatles play Shea Stadium?” she asked innocently, making both men chuckle. She had a hunch as to why Billy had brought it up in the first place, so she continued, looking down at her food, “You should be part of that concert too, babe. Kind of a nice historical bookend, since the Beatles were the first music concert held at Shea.”

“Now there’s a thought,” Paul said, in that mild tone of voice he used when he didn’t want to commit to anything outright.

“That’s actually what I hoped to ask you about,” Billy said, and he launched into a pitch that to his credit didn’t sound at all rehearsed. Paul wouldn’t have to do an entire concert, or even half of one; he could show up towards the end and they could do two or three songs together. The crowds would love it. It would be an amazing, bittersweet sendoff for a place that held so many great memories for so many generations of sports and music fans. “In fact,” Billy said, “I’m told the same groundskeeper that drove the Beatles out to the stage back in 1965? He still works at Shea Stadium. How crazy would it be if he could drive you out to centerfield again?”

Lydia watched Paul as Billy made his proposal, and Paul watched her back. She lifted an eyebrow.

He tilted his head.

She shrugged.

Paul turned back to Billy with a grin. “Have your people talk to mine,” he said. “Let’s see if we can’t work something out.”

Later, as they were on their way out, Paul stopped to use the men’s before they left. Billy pulled her aside. “I don’t know what happened back there,” he admitted, “but I think you convinced him to do the concert, so I really want to thank you for that. It’ll mean a lot to a lot of people.”

Lydia felt herself blush hotly. “Just doing my part for a hometown landmark,” she said, shyly tucking her hair behind her ear.

Summer came in heavy, muggy, and hot, with high temperatures lingering longer than was welcome and the remnants of a tropical storm dumping rain everywhere. Whatever titillating thrill people got from dissecting their relationship seemed to have faded somewhat, maybe from oversaturation, as Lydia noticed their photos being published less and less often. The paparazzi still followed them, and were still a nuisance yelling intrusive questions at them wherever they went, but things felt… manageable.

The record company was over the moon about an impending McCartney/Hayes collaboration, to the extent that Paul was sent out to do a round of talk show interviews just to announce the news. Most of them taped during the workday, when Lydia was busy, but through some clever finagling and making puppy dog eyes at her supervisor, Lydia got to go see him on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in mid-June, the Thursday before Paul’s birthday.

She arrived at 30 Rock little late on the day of taping, but a helpful NBC page guided her to the right place. Lydia made her way up in the elevator and through a studio filled with narrow, low-ceilinged hallways until she got to the green room. Paul was kicked back on one of the sofas, reading a book she had loaned him and munching on an apple.

“There you are,” he said when she blustered in, hot and sweaty.

“Couldn’t get into the building until someone who reads celebrity gossip recognized me and helped me out,” she said, rolling her eyes. She went towards him as he stood and gave him a brief kiss. “You going on soon?”

“He’s doing his monologue bit right now.” Paul nodded at the monitor showing the live feed, which currently had Conan doing the string dance as the audience cheered and whooped in delight. “Dinner after?”

“Sure,” she said, frowning. “Why the formal invite?”

“Oh,” he shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets, “wanted to discuss something with you, is all.”

“Anything important?”

“I might have found us a new place,” Paul said vaguely. “On Central Park West. And—”

A PA stepped in to cue Paul, so he nodded and pulled a blazer on over his Exeunt, pursued by a bear t-shirt she’d bought him for Christmas. “And?” Lydia prompted, smoothing down one of his lapels.

“And James said he’d come to my birthday party this weekend,” he said in a rush, not making eye contact. “I’d better get on, I’ll see you after.” With that, he strode across the green room and followed the PA out towards the stage.

Lydia stood there alone, in the ringing silence after the door fell shut behind them, trying to figure out if she’d really just heard what she thought she’d heard. She and Paul had been trying to get James to meet her for… years. Literally years. But up to this point, as soon as he found out Lydia would be present anywhere he’d suddenly have a “scheduling conflict” and wouldn’t show. She’d skipped out on several birthdays and holidays just so she didn’t totally estrange Paul from his son, spending them instead drinking red wine straight from the bottle while Jeff gave her the stink eye.

“Now for my guest tonight,” Conan said, seated behind his desk, “who needs no introduction – literally, I’m not going to introduce him, because it’s Sir Paul McCartney!” The studio audience went wild, screaming and clapping in an impromptu standing ovation as Paul emerged from behind the curtain, waving and giving a thumbs up. Lydia watched him bask in the crowd’s adoration before he walked over and greeted Conan.

“So great to have you here tonight, Sir Paul,” Conan began, once everyone had been seated again. Lydia herself sat down on the edge of the green room couch, eyes never leaving the TV screen.

“Oh, it was no trouble,” Paul said, tossing his hair. “I was in the neighborhood.”

“You were. In fact you’ve been spending a lot of time in New York, actually, the past few years. Have you moved here officially? Are you going to get a green card or citizenship?”

“Well no, not really,” Paul said. “Still an English lad at heart, you know.”

“You just like it here for now?”

“I like the people here,” he said, with a sly look on his face.

“That’s the wrong answer,” Conan said flatly, “New Yorkers are the worst people on earth.” The audience laughed. “But I think specifically you’re talking about one person.”

“Suppose I am,” Paul said, coy. “My, ah, my partner is a New York girl, you know. And as far as New Yorkers being the worst, well – you lot should know she’s giving you all a very good name.”

After the applause died down, Conan leaned to one side, looking down at his prompt cards. “People have been talking about the two of you a lot, over the past several months,” he said, “you and Lydia Montrose, your girlfriend, about how there’s… such a big difference in your ages, and how could you possibly date someone whose – whose perspective on the world, the things she’s seen in her life, must be so dramatically different from yours.”

“Yeah,” Paul said, “and that’s something we’ve talked about a lot, me and Lydia, between the two of us. There’s this thing the public does, you know – the more years there are between two people, the more it’s perceived to be a sort of… transactional relationship? Or one that’s based on something like money, social connections and standing, that kind of thing? When you’re about the same age, ‘oh that’s a love match,’ no question about it. But then the bigger the age gap, the more likely people are to think ‘oh them,” Paul waved his hand through the air, “you know, ‘that’s nothing but a business opportunity.’”

“Are you saying she tried to get you in on the ground floor of a multi-level marketing scheme?” Conan joked.

“She said I get to be my own boss,” Paul deadpanned, as the audience laughed. “But no, you know,” getting serious again, “I don’t know how else to convince people that it’s just… We’re in love, that’s all.”

The audience cheered at that. “Sounds like you’ve convinced them,” Conan said, nodding at the audience.

Paul made to stand. “And that’s all the time we have for tonight…” More laughter, and then Conan steered the interview onto other topics.

Lydia leaned back into the couch cushions, hugging her purse to her chest. Paul had known Conan almost ten years and they had been friendly most of that time, so she knew that his show was a safe environment for Paul to get certain messaging out. She’d noticed a year or so ago that Paul seemed a tiny bit more candid when he was on with Conan. But his public confession of love for her coming as it did after that grenade he’d carefully lobbed right before going onstage… she didn’t know what to think.

They’d planned a big to-do for Paul’s birthday this year, his sixty-fifth. Because of the song, his last birthday had been absolute mayhem for several straight months, with rounds and rounds of interviews, cards and well wishes from fans around the world, parties thrown in his honor – and all of it he’d handled by himself while she waited for him at home. With Paul now being on the other side of “When I’m Sixty-Four,” though, she had thought to launch a new phase of his life, of their lives, one where they were an unbreakable pair moving forward together.

But with James agreeing to attend the party this weekend, did that mean she had to skip yet another of Paul’s birthdays? A party she herself had had a major hand in planning, no less?

The interview continued on, funny and engaging as Paul always was. He announced the next McCartney/Hayes collaboration to much applause, while Conan tried to figure out who Monty Hayes was (“It’s not my dentist, is it?” “Yes, and he said you’re overdue for a cleaning.”) and then Paul took the stage with his touring band to play “The Beat My Heart Skipped” off the album he’d written for Lydia.

Damnit, the man knew what he was about. That was her favorite track off New Messages.

 After filming, as the audience noisily filed out of the studio, Conan and Paul came back to the green room where Paul introduced them. Lydia had known Conan was tall, but seeing him tower over her and Paul in person was startling. “The famous Lydia,” he said, smiling down (and down) at her.

“The famous Conan,” she said. “We meet at last.”

“Thanks for letting us borrow your boyfriend here,” he said, clapping Paul on the back. “Bringing him back all in one piece, only slightly dinged up.”

“Glad to hear it.” She grinned at Paul as he slid an arm around her waist. “And now that I have you, I wanted to tell you about an amazing opportunity to be your own boss—” Conan and Paul both exploded with laughter.

She waited until they had done a full round of thank yous, until Paul had made tentative plans for dinner with Conan and his wife then met with every crew person who wanted to say hello, until the two of them were in the back of a hire car and alone at last.

Paul was leaning forward in his seat, she assumed to tell their driver where the restaurant was, when she stopped him. “I changed my mind,” she told him, not allowing her voice to give anything away. “I don’t feel like going out for dinner tonight.”

He blinked at her. “But I thought we’d—”

“I’m tired. Some other time.” She turned and stared out the window, motionless. Eventually, after a long and awkward silence, she heard him huff in frustration before turning to the driver to say actually just take us home, please, ta.

They were in the elevator heading up to the penthouse when she decided she couldn’t wait any longer. “Give it to me straight,” she burst out, turning to him. “Do you need me to go to Nicole’s for the night of your party?”

“Why would you do that?” Paul said, frowning. “It’s my party and I want you there.”

“But James is coming,” she said. “Is he going to stay away unless I—”

“Oh that.” The elevator reached the condo and dinged pleasantly, opening its doors for them. Paul led her into the foyer as they removed their shoes and jackets. “Love, I had a long discussion with him a few weeks ago about it. I told him how much it’d mean to me if he met you, you know, all that.” Paul spread his hands towards her, excited. “And he finally agreed! Isn’t that something?”

Lydia had her doubts. All the McCartney sprog were immovable and obstinate just like their dad, and from what she’d heard James had taken his mother’s death the hardest. He’d barely been twenty years old when Linda passed away – not that there was an easy age at which to lose your mother – and had struggled mightily with drugs and alcohol after. Now his dad was dating again, and someone almost his own age – someone James himself could have dated – was presuming to be his stepmother one day.

Lydia totally got it. She didn’t want to be someone’s stepmother either. That implied a certain level of close involvement in Paul’s kids’ lives that she frankly didn’t want to have, even if they’d welcomed it with open arms. She wasn’t out here trying to replace Linda, because she knew that effort would be doomed from the start if she even tried.

“That’s… something all right,” she said slowly. “So he’s coming, and he knows I’m going to be there too.”

“Of course,” Paul said, as they headed up to the kitchen. He buried himself in the fridge for a moment, digging around for something to eat. She leaned against the countertop, arms folded, watching him. Open and honest, Paul, she thought at him. Sometimes it needed a few minutes to really take. “I don’t know if you’ve picked out what you’re going to wear,” he was saying, his voice slightly muffled, “but I do love that black lace dress you wore to Carnegie Hall the other night, I thought you’d look gorgeous in that for the party.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m wearing,” she said.

“Oh good.” Paul found something edible and promptly started bustling around with the pans to heat it up in the oven. He whistled a little of their latest song as he did.

The pantomime went on for twenty seconds – she counted. As soon as the oven door closed and he set the timer, he turned to her.

“What else?” she prompted.

Paul sighed, his spine sagging. “James told me he’d meet you,” he said, the words sounding dragged out of him, “but that I couldn’t expect him to make any small talk or socialize with you for the rest of the evening after that.”

“And there it is,” she said, nodding. “So really, he finally consented to be in the same room as me, not actually meet me.”

“Baby steps, love.”

“I know.” She sighed too, and crossed the room to him; he opened his arms at once as she embraced him. “Two steps forward, one step back,” she said.

They stood there a moment, listening to the subtle tick, tick of the timer, until Paul started humming under his breath. Not their latest work, but a song she hadn’t heard in decades.

She grinned up at him. “You say yes,” she sang, “I say no.”

“You say stop, and I say go, go, go!” Paul sang.

Lydia laughed despite herself, despite the weariness she felt deep in her soul, and the two of them sang in harmony as they got ready to eat their reheated dinners.

Chapter Text

With Paul’s birthday falling on a Monday that year, Lydia had blocked off the ballroom at the Plaza the Saturday before. Everything was going to be perfect: the décor, the table centerpieces, the food, the deejay. Paul was going to wear a suit Stella had designed for him, Lydia was going to wear a dress she knew he liked on her – it was going to be a fantastic night. Which of course meant it all went to hell.

The day of the party she left the last-minute details in the hands of Paul’s capable assistants, so she was curled up on the couch with Jeff, watching CNN, when her phone started jangling on the coffee table. Lydia glanced at the ID and answered right away. “Hey, Nic.”

The only thing she heard down the line was a wet, gasping sob.

Lydia sat upright, Jeff snapping his eyes towards her. “What is it, what’s going on?”

“Fuck,” Nicole wailed, “Tim and I had a huge blowout fight and – and I’m pretty sure we broke up and I hate his fucking guts but I thought he was the love of my life and—”

“I’m on my way.” She jumped to her feet, fumbling with the remote to turn off the TV, and raced down to the foyer. Paul was in his office on the phone with his manager but he glanced up when she appeared, breathless at the door. “Friend emergency,” she said, pointing to her phone. “I have to head out for a bit.”

“Oh, all right,” he said, distracted by his own call. Lydia breezed into the room, kissed him quick, and was gone again.

Nicole answered her door in her bathrobe, her face flushed red with tears, when Lydia turned up at her apartment. “Everything fucking sucks,” she declared dramatically.

“Yes,” Lydia agreed, stepping in. She hugged her best friend, holding her tight. “It fucking sucks. Tell me how much it sucks.”

No matter how badly she wanted to, Lydia didn’t once look at her watch or her phone to see what time it was at any point that afternoon; her focus was solely on her friend in her hour of need. They sat on Nicole’s couch, curled up facing each other, as Nicole spilled out the entire saga of this latest fight with her boyfriend, which seemed like it might be the death knell for the two of them. Lydia listened, and was supportive, and cursed Tim’s name when called for, and ordered some burritos and tacos delivered when Nicole started bawling about how she didn’t have any food in the cupboards because it was Tim’s turn to do the grocery shopping. As the shadows and angles of the sun changed in the living room – as the minutes ticked by and Paul’s party grew closer – she stayed with her friend, knowing that if the situation were reversed Nicole would do the same for her, no hesitation.

When Nicole went to use the bathroom at one point, Lydia dove for her phone. Still in crisis mode, she texted Paul, might be a little late. Save some cake for me! Love you. She checked the time and then ran some mental calculations. If she left in the next half-hour or so, she could make it home, get dressed and made up, and reach the Plaza only about twenty minutes late.

Nicole emerged, putting her hair up in a messy ponytail. “Ugh, Tim forgot to grab his toothbrush and his razor when he ran out of here,” she complained. “He’d forget his own head if it wasn’t screwed to his shoulders.”

“I’ll chuck them out,” Lydia said, standing up. “Should we go around and make sure his stuff is gone?”

“No,” Nicole whimpered. Tears rushed to her eyes. “He might come back for them, right?”

Lydia thought their relationship sounded like it was toast, but of course she didn’t say that aloud.

By the time she was sure Nicole was all right by herself and didn’t need anything else, the sun was setting and Paul’s party had already begun. She waited until Nicole had shut the door behind her before racing down the stairs, out to the sidewalk, and down the three blocks to the nearest train station. Lydia checked her phone again before she descended underground and was mildly surprised to see that Paul had never responded to her earlier text. Getting the train back now, she sent him.

Ah, well. It was his birthday, he had to get ready. She put it out of her mind.

He was gone and the lights were all off when she burst into the penthouse and ran pell-mell up to their bedroom, past a bewildered Jeff who yowled at her as she sprinted past. “Nope, no time,” she called back to him, “we’re at threat level midnight, Jeffy Pop!”

Then the next disaster: after taking the fastest shower of her life, she started pulling on the black lace dress she’d promised Paul she would wear. And what should she do but yank too fast on the zipper – and rip it beyond repair.

“Fuck a pig!” she shrieked, staring at the torn fabric. Cursing a blue streak, Lydia removed the remains of her dress and left it puddled on the floor. She shoved through her side of the closet, finally picking out a shimmery bottle green dress she’d just bought a few weeks earlier but hadn’t worn yet.

She tried Paul again, before doing her hair and makeup: At home getting ready. Be there soon!

Outside at the curb, just as she stepped into her private car, she texted again: ETA 15 mins, apologize to our guests for me.

She kept checking her phone every few minutes as the car made its slow way through Manhattan traffic to the Plaza. Her knee jostled and jumped nonstop, and she found herself compulsively smoothing her dress across her legs, over and over again. Was time standing still, or was it just her? Was it possible this was actually the longest day of the year and it was taking hours for her to drive barely two miles?

And the worst part: Paul had not responded to a single one of her texts.

She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt – maybe he’d left his phone at home, or he was so engrossed in conversation with someone at his party that he missed the phone vibrating. Except she’d texted him from their bedroom; she would’ve heard it go if his phone were at the penthouse. And Paul was better than a lot of her friends with responding to texts, especially hers. He’d told her once, in an unguarded moment, that he’d never take it for granted that he could talk to her whenever he wanted. Twenty years, love, he had whispered to her, I thought I’d never talk to you again.

So maybe he was pouting. It was his birthday, and he wanted her there but she wasn’t, and so he was punishing her. “Shit,” she hissed, frowning out the tinted window.

Lydia alighted at the Plaza’s famous main entrance and walked as fast as she was capable, heels clacking against the marble floor of the foyer as she crossed before the front desk, made eye contact with the desk clerks who knew her, and made her way to the ballroom. Just got here, heading in, she texted. Bodyguards stationed outside the party nodded in recognition as she approached. The moment Lydia entered she was enveloped in sound, dance music playing at high volume, and as a waiter passed she grabbed a champagne flute and downed it in a few gulps because suddenly she decided that, whatever happened, she didn’t want to be sober for it.

“There you are!”

Lydia turned and saw Rich and Dhani, each holding a small plate of finger foods. “Oh my god,” she sighed, hugging them both, “what a year today has been.”

“Everything all right?” Rich asked, sounding concerned.

“It is now,” she said, forcing herself to smile.

Dhani tilted his head towards another part of the ballroom. “Paul was—”

“I’m so glad to see you two,” she said brightly, over him, “I feel like it’s been ages. Catch me up on what’s going on with you guys.”

She listened with half an ear, making sure to nod and smile and interject with the odd comment to show she was paying attention. But really she was searching the room, going over every face she could see, wondering where Paul was and why he wasn’t answering his damn texts.

After about fifteen minutes Barb joined them and said that someone Ring knew wanted to say hello, so with their apologies they headed for the other side of the ballroom. Just as she was thinking she should really track down Paul, Dhani turned to her. “I’m glad I’ve got you alone a moment,” he said. “Something’s come up that I think will be brilliant in the long run, but I might need your help to get Uncle Paul and Uncle Richie on board.”

Lydia blinked up at him, nonplussed. “Color me intrigued.”

He was grinning and rubbing his hands together. “Have you heard of the video game Rock Band?”

“Sure. Friend of mine owns it, I’ve played it several times.”

“What would you say if I told you that someone might be interested in creating a Beatles-only version of it?”

She gaped up at him. “With the instruments—”

“With the instrument controllers and everything,” Dhani echoed, nodding. “Paul’s violin Hofner, your Rickenbacker and Dad’s Gretsch – everything. All Beatles songs, with animated videos between games, maybe options for expansion packs?”

“Holy shit,” she said, her drama with Paul forgotten for the moment. “Yes. Yes, I’m in, where do I sign up?”

Dhani laughed, showing all of his teeth the way George used to. “Brill! But what do you think would convince the others?”

“Well Richie’s a total luddite, so he’ll need a demonstration of some kind,” she said, thinking out loud, “and Paul won’t agree to anything until he can try it for himself. I think we’d have to be able to get our hands on a prototype, take it for a drive.”

“Right,” Dhani said, nodding. “That’s probably still a year out or more, for the programming and controller design and all that. But you’ll come, yeah, and help me sell them on it?”

“Absolutely! Oh my god, yeah!” She laughed and hugged him again, squealing a little as he leaned back and picked her up off the floor.

When he set her back down Mary had materialized out of nowhere, dressed in an effortlessly chic white dress that contrasted starkly with her near-black hair. “Lydia,” she said, in the carefully neutral tone she always used around her, “we were wondering where you were.”

“Mary,” she replied, her voice even and polite. She straightened her hair, feeling out of sorts, like she and Dhani had been caught up to no good. “It’s great to see you.”

She gestured to the side. “I wanted to introduce you to my brother James,” and then there he was, the one McCartney she hadn’t yet met. Of all the kids he looked the most like his dad, but James looked like Paul if he were a dour pessimist instead of the eternal optimist. He appeared slightly disheveled, not in a trying-to-be-cool way but in an uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin way, and he was a little shorter than her in her high heels. She could see that his hair was beginning to thin on top. If she’d felt sorry for Julian and Sean for being stuck in the long shadow of a famous dad, that went double for Paul’s son.

Lydia stood up straight, stuck out her hand. “It’s really great to meet you, James,” she said, smiling. “I’m so glad you were able to make it to your dad’s party.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled. He shook her hand and released it quickly, as if it were diseased.

“Your dad told me you’ve started working on your own album recently,” she blurted out, when an awkward silence rushed in between them.

James shrugged. “Writing some things.”

“That’s so awesome,” she said – then kicked herself for being such an American. Abruptly she felt like a kindergarten teacher, or an adult trying to get a shy toddler to talk. “You know we started working on our next album a few months ago, I’d love it if you considered playing on it. Sean and Jules played on the last one.” She glanced at Dhani. “I’d love it if you played with us too.”

“Brill,” Dhani said, with a kind smile. “I’m game, yeah.”

“I’ll think about it,” James said flatly.

Another horrific silence. “Well.” Lydia slapped a hand over her stomach, giving them all a fake grin. “I still haven’t managed to get a bite to eat, and I’m starving.”

“Oh yes of course, we’ll let you eat,” Mary said. “Good to see you, Lydia.” James mumbled something unintelligible and bolted after her.

Lydia stepped towards her. “Wait, is Paul—?” But they’d already gone.

“Christ,” Dhani burst out. “Was that as uncomfortable for you as it was for me?”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “It’s already in the past. But you know what isn’t in the past? My dinner.”

She wanted to find Paul, she really did. After she filled a plate and took it to a table to eat with Dhani and Ring and Barb, she circulated around the room trying to spot the guest of honor. Thinking he might be walking around the room looking for her and they were just missing each other, Lydia stopped by the open bar in the back corner, next to the last arch along the wall, and craned her neck to see everything.

Another text: I’m here but I can’t find you. Minutes went by with no response, and no sign of him.

Counting her breaths, trying to remain composed, she left the party and headed down the corridor for the women’s bathroom – the same bathroom where her memories had come rushing back to her on her prom night in 1999, in the stall down at the end. She wetted down a paper towel and pressed it to the back of her neck, the side of her face, trying to cool off after the close warmth of the ballroom. Her skin felt hot and tight, like she was going to burst out of it, and her dress, which had seemed so pretty when she bought it, looked cheap and garish in the fluorescent lights.

If she just knew – if she’d just had one clue as to how she’d pissed him off. He knew how it worked with her and Nicole; she’d explained the whole concept of “hoes before bros” to him a few years ago and he’d said he understood. It wasn’t her fault Tim had decided to be an asshole the same day as Paul’s party.

One clue as to what was going on. That was all she needed. Then she’d know how to proceed.

She sent him another text, now no longer expecting a response: This dress’s zipper is in the middle of my back. For future reference. ;-)

Walking back she dragged her feet, feeling somehow like she wasn’t even in the same zip code as him anymore. But then Lydia returned to the ballroom and spotted Paul immediately, because the cake had been brought out.

The music had stopped. Two caterers in crisp white tunics had rolled out a table from the kitchen to the front of the ballroom. The guests applauded the sight of the gorgeous, elaborate multi-tiered cake, with its intricate piping recreating music notes and guitars.

Paul himself stood nearby, handsome in his tartan suit jacket. He was frowning down at his phone, which he then flipped shut and tucked inside his jacket pocket, his face covered with a fake smile. His kids stood with him. So did a brunette woman Lydia didn’t recognize. The woman tapped Paul’s elbow and he turned back to grin at her in a warm, friendly way. Not his polite smile for strangers. But like he knew her.

Lydia froze. Was she underwater, as they all sang to him? As their voices rose and fell in unison it seemed to her that she was, that something fathoms deep separated her from the rest of the guests. They all knew what was going on here and she’d somehow been left in the dark. She felt like she’d been cast in a film, but then her character had been cut out of every scene and no one had warned her before the premiere.

If he cared so little that she was here, because of some slight real or imagined, then maybe she should just go. Nicole would probably be down to go out clubbing and get fucked up tonight, because making bad decisions in the midst of heartache was always better with a friend.

Fuck it. She’d helped to pay for that cake, and pick it out, and damnit she was going to eat a slice of it.

Lydia grabbed a cocktail from the bar, then walked over to where she’d last seen Rich and Barb and found them still sitting at their table. She plopped into the seat beside Rich just as a waiter set a plate in front of her.

“Well hello there.” Rich watched her a moment as she dug into her cake. “What am I missing, love?” he said, leaning closer to her. “You should’ve been up there when we were singing.”

“As soon as I figure it out,” she said, “I’ll let you know.” She drank deeply from her glass.

“Are you two fighting again?” Ring asked, sounding annoyed. “What’s he done?”

Lydia snorted. “First off, I love the fact that you automatically assume the fault lies with him, but maybe it’s me this time.”

“Is it?” he pressed. “What’s happened?”

“Again, as soon as I figure it out—”

She cut off, startled, at the sensation of the table vibrating – and it kept vibrating, over and over, one after another, coming from the purse she’d carelessly tossed beside her plate. Lydia unzipped it and removed her phone to find that she’d gotten a whole cluster of texts all at once, all from the same number:

Hope your friend’s alright xoxo

Remember the party starts at 6! xo

Are you on your way? xx

Kids are here, I’m going ahead, I’ll see you at the party xo

You did such a great job with the decorations love xo

Don’t tell anyone, I’m getting bored without you here xo

Are you on your way?

Is your friend OK? Are you?

Just text me so I know everything’s alright

Lydia. I’m going to start ringing hospitals.

“Oh fuck,” she blurted out.

“What?”

Lydia looked up at him, but then realized that he’d never understand what had just happened. What she’d told Dhani earlier was true; aside from his phone, Ringo was a luddite who had no understanding of and limited interest in modern technology. So if she tried to explain to him that something had glitched with their phones, that Paul had been texting her all day because he cared about her so much, but that his phone – or hers, who knew – hadn’t delivered those texts until right now—

A heavy form thunked gracelessly into the seat on the other side of her, followed by a strong whiff of scotch. “Found you!” Paul cried, looking jubilant. “My phone blew up – and here you are!”

If before she’d felt underwater, now she felt like she was soaring. “Hey, Drunky Spice,” she said. “Been imbibing, have we?”

“Oh, love,” he declared, pulling her chair closer and burying his face in the crook of her neck. “I want to do filthy things to you.”

“Jesus,” Ringo spluttered on her other side, and he got scarce fast.

“Wow,” Lydia said, shaking with a combination of suppressed laughter and desire, and sheer relief that they weren’t fighting after all. “Babe. Love that idea, love that energy. A few notes? You aren’t whispering.”

“Oops,” Paul said, with a giggle. He dragged her chair even closer and leaned in again, giving her a saucy wink. “Let’s go home and fool around.”

“Again, love that idea. Still not whispering.”

Ringo reappeared between them, setting down a tall glass of water on the table. “Drink that,” he said, and he waited until he saw Paul pick it up and start gulping it down. He took the empty glass and swapped it out for a second full one.

“I think he’s done for the night, you know,” Ring said to her, as Paul worked on the second glass. “There’s paparazzi lying in wait outside, you don’t want them to catch him like this.”

“Why was he overserved in the first place?” Lydia asked. Paul’s hand was on her knee, slowly creeping upwards; she threaded her fingers through his and held them in place. “He knows what a lightweight he is, he never drinks to excess like this.”

“Because I thought you were very cross with me on my birthday,” Paul said, having polished off the last of the water. “And… the kids brought Nancy and she’s very nice, but—”

“Who’s Nancy?” Lydia said, heart rising to her throat.

“Not important right now,” Ring said, a little too quickly for her taste. “Up you go, love,” and he helped Paul to his feet.

“Rich,” Paul said, very serious, “you’re my second favorite.”

“You’re my second favorite too,” Ring said, patting Paul’s shoulder. Lydia took one last bite of cake, grabbed her purse, and started helping keep Paul upright. “We’ll stop by tomorrow with brekkie for your birthday, how’s that?”

“Brekkie’s my third favorite.” He looked at Lydia, beaming. “You’re my first favorite, my love, my darling, please believe me—”

“What a beautiful singing voice you have,” Lydia said. “We can sing some more when we get home though, okay?”

“We play this game,” Paul said to Ring, “where she texts me where the zipper or the button on her dress is, and then I think about it all night while we’re out—”

“I could’ve easily gone my whole life without knowing that and been very happy,” Rich said, shaking his head, but he gave them both an affectionate look.

“I think we’re scarring Richie for life, babe,” Lydia said.

“Oh no,” Paul said, sounding devastated.

“It’s okay, he’ll get over it.”

“Oh good.”

They had exited the ballroom through the kitchen entrance, and Lydia had the driver on the phone directing him to meet them out back, when Stella found them. “There you are, Dad,” she said, looking concerned.

“Stel, I’m going home,” he said, with all the gravity of a major announcement. “I’m… rather drunk, you see.”

“Do you need me to come with you?” She half-turned, as if to run back to get her things.

“We’ve got him,” Lydia said. “Here, take him for a sec,” she muttered to Ring, and she slid out from under Paul’s arm. As soon as they were far enough away, she met Stella’s gaze with a glare of her own. “He loves the four of you,” Lydia said. “When you disagree with him, he takes it really hard.”

“Disagree about what?” Stella said, all innocence.

Lydia shook her head. “I’ll give you three guesses.” With that, she hiked her purse strap up on her shoulder and spun on her heel.

Ring was just settling Paul in the backseat of the private car when Lydia rejoined them outside, at the Plaza’s back entrance. “Have him drink more water when you get home,” he advised her. “He’s going to be wreckage tomorrow.”

“Ringo I went to a party school. Sadly, this is not my first drunk babysitting gig.” Lydia put a hand on his shoulder. “How are you, though? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he assured her, “though I might read some pages in the Big Book before I pack it in tonight.”

Lydia gave him a hug. “You’re one of my favorites,” she murmured.

“You’re one of my favorites too, love. Take care of each other, yeah? Barb and I will bring breakfast.” He stood and waited as she got in the car, shut the door behind her and tapped the roof to signal the driver.

Paul heaved a sigh and tipped over until he was practically draped across her lap before they’d even exited the rear alley. “I didn’t want to be this sad for my birthday,” he murmured.

Lydia blinked back a few tears. She ran her hand through his hair, smoothing it down where it had gotten ruffled. “You weren’t answering my messages,” he kept on, his voice slightly slurred, “and then I happened to spot you at the party – and you were with Dhani, and you weren’t wearing the dress I like, so I thought you were cross and… I started having scotch and Coke to distract myself.”

“No,” she said. “I wasn’t getting your texts either, something happened with our phones. But they’re working again now.”

“Oh good,” he sighed.

It was supposed to be better, people knowing about them. By sharing their happiness with other people, it was meant to make them happier. If you’d asked her a year ago if she would ever doubt Paul, Lydia would have given a resounding no – they were solid. They had trust and honesty firmly established between them. But now, months after going public and telling their families, the people they knew and loved were part of this relationship too. And with just a few missed texts…

She thought it was supposed to be better.

Chapter Text

For one of the very few times in their shared history, Lydia woke up first the next morning.

She lay in bed a moment after rubbing the sleep from her eyes, taking in her surroundings. Paul was curled up in an apostrophe of suffering on his side, despite the sun having risen and the day begun, the clearest sign of his misery. He faced away from her and the windows, towards the rest of the room, where the light had yet to shine as bright. She heard him groan softly. Though still in bed, he was awake at least a little.

Lydia sighed, not ready to get up yet. Paul wasn’t the only one who’d been drinking last night, and she wasn’t twenty-one years old with the metabolism to match anymore, much to her chagrin. Instead, she rolled over and reached for her phone on her little bedside table to check her messages, and discovered then that Paul wasn’t the only person she hadn’t gotten texts from. There were dozens of messages, from her parents and brothers, friends and coworkers, all of them getting increasingly paranoid and anxious when hours passed and they received no reply from her. A string of relieved texts then followed after the issue had righted itself.

Holy fuck. Whatever phone company malfunction had caused this issue was going to fuck with them for days to come, wasn’t it?

She texted the most important people, to assure them she wasn’t ignoring them out of anger or spite, then decided she couldn’t put off getting up anymore. Lydia tucked her phone in the pocket of her pajama shorts and hoisted herself up to her feet.

Paul groaned louder when she rounded the bed. “Where are you going?” he mumbled into his arm.

“Not far,” she whispered, brushing back his hair from his face. “How does another glass of water and some Tylenol sound?”

He exhaled in a relieved rush. “Abso-fucking-lutely brilliant.”

Biting back an affectionate grin, she went down to the kitchen to fetch said items; she brought them back and set them down on his matching bedside table. He reached out suddenly and clamped his hand around her arm. “Stay, love,” he said. Lydia was helpless to deny his pathetic request.

Paul shifted back on the bed and she sat in the C-shaped space formed by his body, her feet pulled up and bent to the side as he sipped the water and swallowed both pills, giving little moans of discomfort every time he moved. He then reached his arm across her legs and hugged her knees as if she were going to bolt away. The brush of his lips and stubble against her bare skin tickled but she held still, just running her hands through his hair, her touch as light and gentle as she could make it.

“Rich and Barb are coming over for breakfast,” she said, keeping her voice low.

“When?”

“In about an hour.”

“Okay.” He sighed, his hot breath skittering across her leg. “I want to stay here.”

“Yeah, he’s bringing food over, we aren’t going out to eat.”

“No,” Paul said, blinking his eyes open for the first time, “I mean I want to stay right here. Holding you.”

Her hand paused on his head. “I’m not going anywhere, Macca.”

“Yesterday…” He grunted and closed his eyes, wincing a little. “You were yesterday.”

Lydia swallowed back the sudden lump in her throat. She explained to him then what she thought had happened – that there was probably some kind of outage with their phone carrier and that nobody’s texts had been getting through for a big chunk of the afternoon and evening. He probably had tons of missed messages on his phone himself, just like her. “So, in a way,” she said, “if you think about it, our phones were actually keeping us apart even when we were in the same room. I thought you were ignoring me and you thought I was ignoring you.”

“I would never ignore you,” Paul said at once, his voice rough.

“And I’d never ignore you,” she returned, a little annoyed, “but that’s exactly what we both ended up thinking, so.”

“Fuck,” he mumbled.

“Fuck indeed.”

She paused, wondering if he was in the right state yet to discuss what had happened the night before. Because it was weird, right? The fact that they had both jumped to the worst possible interpretation of what was happening? Lydia had an excuse, she figured; she was the pessimist of the two of them and usually couldn’t help but think negatively in any situation – but Paul? Why had he, Mister Sunshine himself, gone straight to the theory that Lydia was angry with him and staying away on purpose?

He sighed again, muttering something into her knee that she didn’t quite catch. Then: “Did we have plans today?”

“Nope,” she said, popping the p. “I have a big day at work tomorrow, so I think we were just going to hang out and write.”

“Bloody hell, don’t even know if I’m good for that much. My head feels like a rotted coconut.”

“Descriptive,” she said, with a small laugh. “We can write a song about the king of all hangovers. My coconut is full of rot, I drank just one too many shots…”

He hummed and grinned in approval, making her giggle at the vibrations in her knees. “I like your laugh,” Paul said, apropos of nothing.

“Um… thank you, I made it myself,” she said, feeling herself blush.

“Do you like mine?”

Lydia decided not to question the logic of hungover thought patterns. “I like that one laugh of yours,” she said, “where it’s all—” She demonstrated the high-pitched titter that she lived to hear. “That’s the laugh you make when you’re really amused by something. The brass ring of laughs.”

“Brass ring,” he repeated slowly.

“Yeah, like – if I can get you to make that laugh, it means I’ve said something outrageously clever.”

He hummed again and blinked his eyes open, this time all the way. Lydia couldn’t quite read the expression in his intent gaze. “I love you very much, you know.”

Her heart knocked hard against her ribs, and she suddenly couldn’t look at him. She stared at her nails. The polish had chipped on her index finger, she saw. “I do know,” Lydia said. “I love you too very much.”

Paul tsked, sounding frustrated, but said nothing else.

They were both dressed by the time Rich and Barb came over, weighted down with bags from a local authentic French café that carried vegetarian quiches and scones and hot tea that actually was up to their exacting English standards. Conversation was stilted, what with Paul still suffering and the awkwardness between them so blatant. They hung out a little while, sitting around the kitchen table chatting and pretending to be comfortably at ease, until Paul reached for her hand and Lydia was so startled she jumped in such a way that none of them could miss it.

“Sorry,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear, “million miles away. I’ve been working on a tricky project at work that’s kicking my ass.”

No one said it aloud, but with a quick glance around the room she could tell that none of them believed her.

Rich and Barb left not long after that, though Rich said as he hugged her goodbye, “It isn’t your fault, you know, what happened yesterday.”

“I know,” she said, frowning. “We were actually doing a great job communicating. It was the fucking phone company’s fault.”

“Then what…?”

Paul was in the kitchen giving Barb a plastic container to put some leftovers in; they were both out of earshot. “But then who’s Nancy?” Lydia blurted out.

A pained look crossed Rich’s face. “He has to tell you that,” he replied, and he wouldn’t say anything else on the subject. The vault was shut tight.

She felt at loose ends all day, like she was forgetting something extremely important and it just wouldn’t come to her. She called her mom, to back up her earlier text confirming she wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere, but couldn’t make herself concentrate on their conversation longer than a few minutes at a time. She called Andrea, who had settled on a color scheme for the wedding and wanted to talk about the dresses she was thinking about for her bridesmaids. She checked in with Nicole, who was still drowning in self-pity and watching Clueless on a loop. They spent a long time discussing if it was icky that Cher falls for her ex-step-brother, until Nicole decided unilaterally that Paul Rudd could get it no matter what the circumstances.

“How’s your Paul doing?” she asked. “Are you guys still making me want to puke and believe in true love all at the same time?”

Lydia hesitated. It stretched out long enough that Nicole gasped aloud. “Now wait, don’t read into—”

“Too late, I’m reading into it!” Nicole said. “Does it have anything to do with the whole phone situation yesterday? You weren’t getting each other’s texts?”

“Yes,” Lydia admitted reluctantly, “but like, he made a point to say ‘I love you’ this morning, and he was being all warm and cuddly, so we’re still good? But I can’t stop thinking about yesterday when I thought he was upset with me and was ignoring me?”

“But you’re obsessing over something that didn’t actually happen, Lyd. He wasn’t upset or ignoring you. So you have nothing to worry about.”

“I know, but…” Lydia ran a hand through her hair, mind racing. But who was Nancy?

Tension hung in the penthouse like a tangible thing. While she tried vainly to read down in the living room, Paul spent most of the day up in his music room, but she didn’t hear any music. There was plenty of pacing, some aborted snippets of melodies on the piano or on a guitar, and every now and then she heard his voice as he spoke with someone on the phone. He was probably having to put out fires too, with all the people who had tried to reach him yesterday. The rest of the time he was quiet, in a way that made her want to be noisy on purpose.

Finally, driven mad by inaction, needing to do something, Lydia got up with every intention of joining him for a writing session. If nothing was wrong, if she was really getting worked up about something imaginary, then this weird, strained silence between them would surely dissipate as soon as they started working on a new song.

She was at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the third floor when she heard him on the phone – with Mary, presumably, based on context. “…glad you enjoyed yourself last night, was really thrilled you could make it, love,” Paul said. He paused, turning, and Lydia ducked back into the hall so there was no chance of him seeing her lurking. “It was good to see her as well. Please give her my best. …No, actually, I don’t think I do have her new number, not if she’s moved recently, you know. …She was your guest. …Well then Stella can send her my regards, it’s – what are you – I’m not being dodgy!”

Lydia went to find out what Jeff was up to, uninterested in hearing the rest.

On Monday, Paul’s actual birthday, Lydia went into work in a fog. They had both gone through their usual morning routines, ending with her giving him a kiss before she walked out the door, per normal. But then he had grabbed her chin and kissed her again, more insistent. When he pulled back he had an almost wary look in his eyes. “Good luck with your big project, love.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Love you. See you at dinner tonight.”

“Love you,” he said, but the wary look never left.

At work, she delivered the pitch she’d been preparing for weeks. Annoyed and fed up with her local interest video essays for YouTube, she wanted to try doing a broad explainer on the war in the Middle East for people who hadn’t been following what was going on in Afghanistan and Iraq (which, unfortunately, was most Americans in her experience). As she stood in front of her supervising producer, she laid out how they could clearly and concisely take viewers from September 11 to the present day, being as factual as possible about how the Bush administration had gone after Afghanistan for giving aid and comfort to the Taliban – so, in retaliation for 9/11 – but the reasons for the Iraq War were much murkier.

“We could maybe initiate a new series with this video,” she offered. “Come up with some big concepts that people hear a lot about from the news or their friends, but maybe don’t have a full understanding of. Create an explainer that gives them a good knowledge base, and some pointers towards more in-depth reporting in our archives. We could cover topics like… immigration, gay marriage, civil rights—”

Henry held up his hand. “Jesus Montrose, why are you always in here trying to pitch me hard news?” he said, sounding annoyed.

“Because I’m a hard news reporter,” she said, smiling through her rage.

“Okay, but the video that got us the most hits was that one where you talked about the history of the songs and hand clapping routines all kids grow up knowing – the one where the little girls pulled you on camera to join them jumping rope.”

“The one where I conform to gender norms and look like a nurturing maternal figure,” she said through clenched teeth. “You realize that most of that online traffic was just people trying to get a closer look at Beatle Paul’s girlfriend? Never mind all the academics I spoke to about the origins of children’s songs and games—”

“Oh, get over it,” he groaned, leaning back in his swivel chair. “Why do you make this so hard on yourself? Look, last week I pitched a video about immigrants opening up ethnic restaurants in the City and they approved it, so just go with that.”

Lydia gathered up her pitch materials, shaking with fury. “Awesome. I’m excited for the professional opportunity. Just a heads up, I’m only going to conduct interviews in French with French-speaking restaurateurs, and force viewers to read subtitles.”

Henry paused. “You speak French?”

“I don’t know, do I?” Lydia gave an elaborate bow and strode out of his office.

As soon as she left work she was on a train headed uptown, headed for a birthday dinner with Paul, his kids, their spouses, and his grandkids. She arrived last because apparently the dinner reservation had been for six o’clock, despite Paul promising they wouldn’t start until 6:30, the earliest she could get there. The moment she stepped towards Paul to give him an absent kiss on the cheek, one of his younger granddaughters pointed at her and yelled “Grandma!”

Lydia jumped, as if startled. “Where?” she cried, looking around the room in fear. The little girl giggled and thus was born the grandkids’ new favorite game. She fantasized about punching whichever adult had taught the little kids that word in relation to her, and had to remind herself multiple times that she was a pacifist. It became her mantra that night.

Just like at work earlier, she tried to grin and bear her way through the evening. She mingled and chatted with Heather, the McCartney most willing to speak to her, and endured barbed comments and barely-veiled insults from the others (could anyone top the English for passive aggression?). But when Lydia overheard Stella telling her dad “Nancy was really sorry you had to leave the party so early Saturday night,” it was everything she could do not to fucking scream herself hoarse.

She wasn’t an idiot. When Lydia set aside her anxiety long enough to think critically about what she knew, she could work out a few things in her reporter brain. The McCartney kids had brought Nancy – presumably a family friend of long standing – as a guest to Paul’s birthday bash at the Plaza, and were doing everything they could to keep her in Paul’s sights. So Nancy was probably single, and the McCartneys’ chosen successor to their late mother’s position in the family. Never mind that Paul, of course, wasn’t single himself; that was seemingly a minor detail no one was too fussed about.

And Paul was going along with it. Or, if not willingly cooperating, at least not doing very much to push back on his kids trying to set him up with a date.

Lydia looked out the taxi window as they headed home that night, her fingers twined with Paul’s and resting on the center seat between them. She tried to force herself towards positive thoughts which, for an avowed card-carrying pessimist like her, was far easier said than done. Saturday night, the moment all of her texts had been delivered and Paul knew for certain that she wasn’t actually angry at him, he had immediately hunted her down and flirted with her. Not Nancy. Nancy had been an afterthought as soon as Paul reached Lydia’s side.

“Hey,” she said, her voice light. “I heard one of your kids mention somebody named ‘Nancy’ tonight and I don’t think I know who that is. Is she a friend or something?”

Paul had turned towards her when she started speaking, but the moment she said Nancy he was staring at the back of the taxi driver’s head. “Oh,” he said, his voice equally light, “Linda and I used to holiday with Nancy and her husband whenever we were on Long Island. Old friends, you know.”

“And she was at your birthday party Saturday?” Lydia pressed.

Paul blinked slowly at her. “Why do you say that, love?”

Her stomach plummeted to the ground. “You said she was there. Maybe you don’t remember, you were pretty…” She made a vague hand gesture, rather than say wasted beyond belief aloud in front of the driver.

“Yeah, suppose I was,” Paul said, which neither answered her question nor put her fears to rest.

I won Saturday, Lydia thought anxiously, changing her mantra. Not Nancy. He came home with me.

When they got back to the penthouse, the elevator doors had barely closed behind them when Lydia raked her hand through Paul’s hair and kissed him deeply. He responded in kind, and she pretended she couldn’t detect a kind of desperation in their movements as they made a trail of clothes up to their bedroom. “God I want you so fucking bad,” she breathed in his ear, knowing he loved it when she was talkative, “I want you to fuck me so hard I can feel it for days,” and he rewarded her with a moan that made her blood hum.

But an hour later, as soon as they had tired out, cleaned up, and gone to bed to sleep, the intrusive thought poked its dark head up again: So anyway, who’s Nancy? I need more info.

If someone was trying to break up her relationship, all Lydia asked was a simple heads up. There was nothing she hated more than the idea that people were talking behind her back.

The first weekend of July Paul got them both iPhones, the new cell phones that Apple had just launched at the end of the previous month. “Now we won’t have any more texting incidents,” he declared, holding up the boxes triumphantly.

“Will we be able to save our SIM cards, though?” Lydia said, biting her lip. She looked down at the reliable old flip phone that had been her constant companion for so many years. “I don’t want to lose all the texts I have from George.”

Dismayed, Paul looked at the iPhone boxes. “We’ll ask,” he decided, sounding less confident. “I don’t want to lose my texts with him either.”

She and Paul had picked out a producer for their album a month ago, just before Paul’s birthday, and recording had been swimming along smoothly for the past few weeks. Unlike with The Great Hiatus Paul was pushing for them to record faster, and though he still made allowances for her to listen to takes and rough mixes at home, they did move at light speed compared to their first album. By the end of July they already had ten tracks fully mixed and ready to go, with three more songs just waiting for finalized lyrics and arrangements.

But they needed a fourteenth song. “It’s just a good number,” he said, when she asked why twelve or thirteen wasn’t enough. “Rubber Soul and Revolver each had fourteen songs. Our first album had fourteen songs.” He chuckled and tilted his head sideways as he gazed at her, almost shy. “It’s pretty much a lucky number for us by now, you know.”

“Imagine only has ten tracks,” she said, feeling the urge to be contrary. “Plastic Ono Band has eleven.” When Paul’s face fell and he turned away without saying anything she felt like the biggest heel on the face of the planet.

They really tried. She cleared chunks of time out of her schedule so they could write, yet some kind of magic spark was gone from their writing sessions. Lydia didn’t want to blame it on the distance opening up between them, but it was really hard not to. They made a point of saying I love you at the beginning and end of every day, and to hold hands and cuddle on the couch watching TV, and Paul sent her flowers and surprise lunches at work (or dinners, if she had to stay at the office late) but somehow it had all taken on the pallor of playacting. Their texts felt more and more formal, like they were roommates consulting on shared issues like are we out of milk and I can’t find the broom, it’s not where you said you left it.

She loved him. She knew he loved her. And yet.

And yet.

It must have happened through sheer dumb luck – Lydia had no other explanation, because god knew she’d been phoning it in at work for months now. But somehow, she managed to create a viral video.

Her video on immigrant-owned restaurants in New York City had gone live on YouTube the first week of August. One of the interviewees, a cheerful Congolese refugee named Remy (whom she had interviewed entirely in his native French, as promised), had excitedly showed her around every inch of his small but fastidiously clean Harlem restaurant, giving her the story behind every piece of art on the walls, every photo, every memento from his home country. Remy’s positivity had been infectious, even for an eternal pessimist like her.

When they entered the kitchen he insisted she try several of the specialty dishes on the menu, and with no other choice that wasn’t the height of rudeness Lydia had reluctantly appeared on camera eating with him. It helped that the food was absolutely delicious: they dug through fragrant dishes of black-eyed peas, okra, fried rice, and mikate pastries. They laughed and chatted in French, she asked him if he had any stories behind these particular dishes and what they meant to him, and managed to coax ever-more thoughtful and revealing answers from him. “I loved my home in the Congo,” Remy admitted to her. “I did not want to leave, I wanted to stay there forever with the people I love. But being here in America, with the community we have found and the business we have created, it’s pretty okay, I think.”

And when the video launched online, it took mere hours for the world to fall in love with Remy too.

The day after the video went viral, Lydia and Remy appeared together on the news channels. Remy did have some English but was quick to let the news anchors know he was still learning, so Lydia translated a little for him too. They were busy all day, jumping from one interview to the next, speaking to people remotely in Australia, Japan, England. At the end of the day, Remy’s equally lovely wife and son arrived at the Post’s office with big trays full of catfish steamed in banana leaves, rice and beans, and more mikate for everyone from the restaurant. A feast was enjoyed by all.

Okay. So sometimes, her job didn’t totally suck.

She’d been so nonstop all day that it wasn’t until she was packing up to leave – after repeated promises to Remy and Nathalie that she would visit their restaurant again very soon – that she finally checked her personal phone. Paul had texted her, she saw. Watching you on TV now. You’re bloody incredible xoxo, he’d written.

Then: I miss you so much.

Tears welled in her eyes. God damn it. She’d hoped – oh, she’d hoped for so many things the past few months. That he couldn’t smell the suspicion on her, the careful spaces she left between them now. The silences where before she’d be brimming with conversation. He might have just meant that he missed her today, but some gut feeling told her it was something more than that.

Without thinking about it too much, she typed back a response: I miss you too. Heading home now, meet me up on the roof.

The sun was beginning to set when she climbed the stairs to the rooftop patio, making everything the light touched soft and golden like a photograph from the 1970s. The man she loved lay on the sofa with Jeff perched on his chest, purring loudly enough that she could hear it across the patio.

Paul smiled broadly, his nose crinkling when he spotted her. “Look who it is, Jeff,” he said, “it’s our Lydia.”

He sat up and made space for her to sit with them, and she lingered in the kiss he gave her in greeting. They spoke a little about their days – Lydia with all her interviews with Remy, Paul recording the guitar solo for “Quiet Down” – and in the first conversational lull, she asked “Where do you hide your secret cigarettes?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Paul said too quickly.

She gave him a look. “Macca. This can be easy or this can be hard.”

After a moment where he visibly hemmed and hawed, he finally reached under the couch cushion and pulled out a slightly crumpled pack of Parliaments, a lighter, a shallow metal ashtray, and a tin of Altoids. “What gave me away?”

“The mints only disguise your breath,” she said, “they don’t cover up the smoky smell when it gets into your clothes.”

“For what it’s worth, I only have one every few months or so.”

“No judgment here, babe.” Smoothly, with the fluidity of long familiarity, she stuck one of the cigarettes in her mouth, lit it, and took a drag. She then offered it to him. While she found herself grimacing a little at the taste (the strong French cigarettes she smoked back in the day were apparently still her brand of choice) the nicotine helped steady her as she’d planned. They sank back into the sofa cushions, Jeff purring between them, trading the cigarette back and forth for a few quiet minutes as the sun set over the city and Central Park. They stared at each other, the energy between them slowly building up to a simmer, before she had worked out what to say.

She leaned in, her head inches from his on the couch. “Tell me something only Paul would know,” she whispered.

A smirk crawled up his face. “Well.” He took a drag and handed it to her. “Do you know, I don’t think we met for the first time at the Woolton fete?”

“Heresy,” she cried. “What?!”

“Yeah!” He sat up a little, warming to his topic. “This bit of a memory came into my head the other day, and the more I thought about it the more I realized my god, I think that’s John I was talking to that afternoon.”

“I need details!”

He laughed. “Oh, this would’ve been the year before – summer or autumn of ’56, I think. I had a paper round delivering the Echo and I think I saw you from my bike standing outside a chippy.”

“A chippy?” she said, frowning. “1956?” She looked away, shuffling through her memories, trying to hone in on a specific—

It landed in her head abruptly, as if it had been waiting to be found. She turned to Paul and found he was holding up his iPhone, snapping photos of her. “Holy fuck,” she said, awed. “The chippy on Woolton Road, near—”

“The cenotaph, yeah?”

“Abba’s newsagents?”

“Yes!”

“Oh my god!” she shrieked.

“I was on my bike, heading off to deliver papers—”

“And I’d just been to Julia’s for a visit, and stopped to grab something to eat before heading back to Mimi.”

“You were standing outside on the pavement with your packet of fish and chips.”

She ashed the cigarette but then, on second thought, stubbed it out. “You were wearing this shirt with horizontal stripes,” she said, gesturing, “and you were staring at me as you rode past.”

“Never seen someone so cool before, had I?” he teased. He took her picture again.

“I thought the shirt looked like a sailor’s shirt, for some reason,” she said, twining her hand with his, “so I yelled ‘Oi, shipping out soon, sailor?’”

Paul laughed again, sounding delighted beyond words. “And I yelled back, ‘Going to see the world, I am!’”

“That was you!”

“That was you!”

She burst into giggles, rolling around on the couch, until Jeff stood up and stepped towards her. “Jeffy Pop, it was him!” she cried, scooping him into her arms. Paul kissed her, and she joked “Christ Macca, if I wanted to lick an ashtray,” but neither one of them could stop laughing long enough to get more than a few words out for the longest time.

Lydia was wiping away a few happy tears when Paul dropped another kiss to her shoulder. “Tell me something only John would know?” he said, his voice low.

“Would you settle for something Richie and Neil know too?”

He tossed his hair, pretending to be put out. “If I must, love.”

She shuffled closer to him on the couch, not breaking eye contact. “The night we finished the final mix for Sgt. Pepper,” she said, keeping her voice as quiet as his, “we were so excited we hardly knew what to do with ourselves. It must’ve been four, five o’clock in the morning, so all the usual night spots were long closed, but we didn’t want to go home. Too much energy to burn off.

“Then I remembered I had Mama Cass’s number. She’d just moved to London the year before, and had that house in Chelsea where all the terraces were packed in so tight together? I rang her up – of course she was still awake – and we invited ourselves over with a tape of Sgt. Pepper.” Lydia shook her head in wonder. “I remember thinking that I’d know we really had something if Cass liked it. She had such a good ear for music. If we got her stamp of approval, we really had it made.”

Paul settled in, hand under his cheek, grinning at her. “Keep going, love.”

“We got to her house, and she had this amazing sound system – state of the art back then. Set it up right on the windowsill, stuck in the tape, and cranked up the volume, so that the opening chords echoed all around Luna Street. She broke out the spliffs and the scotch and Cokes, somebody made cheese toasties, and we ate on the floor like we were having a picnic. I jumped up at one point and saw that nearly all of her neighbors had opened their windows and stood there listening to the album. When they saw me they waved and gave me the thumbs up.” She reached out then and touched the point of Paul’s chin, feeling overfull. Buoyant. “I remember that you joined me at the window. That the sun appeared over the rooftops of London right when ‘A Day in the Life’ started. I felt like we’d conjured the new day ourselves somehow. Like the sun had come up just for us.”

A change came over Paul’s face at that. He stared at her unblinking a long moment.

Lydia snorted, feeling giddy. “I know that look.”

Without saying another word he grabbed her hand and tugged her down to the music room, where they both sat down at the piano, Jeff trailing behind them. Without prompting Paul started playing the song he’d been tinkering with at her parents’ house all those months ago.

“Play it again,” she said, when he reached the end. When he was halfway through she said “Stop. Now take me somewhere I’m not expecting.” They worked through it painstakingly, until they landed on an unusual chord that took the song in an entirely new direction and they were off and running from there. Had it ever been this easy before, where the music had flowed out of them with so little effort? Had every conversation they’d ever had been mere dress rehearsal for this one, when their minds were so in synch and on the same wavelength that she barely had a thought before it was coming out of Paul’s mouth?

They had jokingly been calling their album Year 10, since that was the equivalent of a high school sophomore in the States and this was their sophomore effort. Without coming up with anything better, the name stuck despite pushback from record company execs who just didn’t get it.

And the fourteenth and final track they wrote and recorded that summer was eventually titled “For You”:

            “So take me in your arms tonight

            And honey don’t be blue

            For when the sun comes up in the morning, love,

            The sun comes up for you.”

The best part was, Lydia even managed to go an entire day without wondering about Nancy and what she was to Paul.

But just the one.

Chapter Text

All day long, on the Monday that True Replica’s Year 10 was released, she got excited text updates from Paul about what was happening in the popular music media. 4 star review from RS! he texted her when she sat down at her desk to start her day. 4.5 stars from Pitchfork and AV Club!, when she stopped to eat lunch. The first single from the album, “For You (The Sun Comes Up),” had hit number one in downloads on the iTunes Music Store, while “Quiet Down” and “Tied in Knots” were in the top ten.

I take it the record company is happy, she texted back. Already picking out their third vacation homes and second yachts.

Very happy! he wrote back some minutes later. But who cares about them? Are you happy?

Lydia snorted, then – checking to make sure no one in the office was paying her any attention – she snapped a picture of herself making a crazy face. Radiantly happy! Can’t you tell?, she typed. She hit send and watched her selfie appear in their text thread. Minutes later she received one of him standing in the lobby of Rolling Stone magazine, mugging for the camera and holding up that month’s issue, which featured him.

Lydia shook with silent laughter, sinking back in her desk chair. She was pretty sure he hadn’t known before this that he could send photos via text, and he’d probably start sending her selfies all the time, now that he knew. She couldn’t wait.

Despite the specter of Nancy still hovering somewhere in the background, things had been really good between them since the day they wrote “For You,” and Lydia had decided she wouldn’t question it too much. She’d hashed it out over drinks one night with Nicole, who had (figuratively) smacked her over the head and reminded her that she was dating a man with whom (literally) millions of people were obsessed. Was Lydia really out here thinking that just because she’d taken him off the market, no one was interested in him anymore? And interest didn’t equal cheating.

Nicole was right, of course. The more times Lydia told herself that, the easier it got.

She returned home that evening with a sense of expectation beyond her usual eagerness to see him again. Paul was embarking on a promotional tour for the album in a few days, hitting all the usual TV and radio spots in the US, though this time it would be somewhat curtailed due to Scott and Andrea’s wedding in mid-September. Afterwards, he’d make the rounds of the British press. His absences always sucked, and Lydia wasn’t looking forward to the weeks she’d have to spend bouncing around their empty home with only Jeff for company, especially after all the emotional distance between them this summer. Every moment he was here had to be treasured and stored up to get her through those days.

Lydia dumped her things at the door and was about to hunt him down, when: “Thizza-bee,” Paul called from close by, doing a funny voice.

“What?” she screeched. She went to the door of his office. Grinning, she was about to comment on the selfie he’d sent earlier, but the words died unspoken when he spun around in his desk chair and she finally laid eyes on him.

“Hello, love,” he said. He stretched out one hand; she took it and allowed him to draw her closer.

“Wait, no no,” she mumbled, after accepting a kiss but denying him more. “What’s going on? What’s the matter?”

Paul frowned. “Nothing’s the matter.”

“Wrong answer,” she insisted. “You look upset.” Lydia planted herself directly next to his chair and hugged him around the shoulders, holding her ground until he sighed and wrapped his own arms around her waist. She waited, prepared to wait all night if necessary.

“Got the results back from the doctor,” he said at last, his voice muffled by her sensible work blouse. “That visit I had a few weeks ago, where they did the—”

“Fuck’s sake, Paul, just give me the headlines,” Lydia forced out.

“I need to have an angioplasty.”

Her breath caught, hard, in her throat. She didn’t even know what an angioplasty was, so she stood stock still as Paul explained how they would use a tiny balloon to clear out blockages in his arteries, since various medications and lifestyle changes hadn’t helped him as much as his doctor had hoped. “Oh god,” she groaned, “we smoked that cigarette a few weeks ago, tobacco is terrible for people with—”

“It’s all right, love,” he said quickly, tightening his grip around her. “I already had high cholesterol long before I had that half a ciggie.”

“And your birthday, when you were drinking – people with heart disease shouldn’t be overdoing it with alcohol!”

“One bad night didn’t cause this either,” he said, his voice still that soothing tone. “I’ve been very good otherwise, you know that.”

“So but what does this mean?” she said. “Are you going to schedule it for like tomorrow? How urgent is it?”

“It’s all right,” Paul said again, smiling up at her. “Christ, I can feel you shaking, you know. And you’re the one with the heart surgeon in the family!”

“Scott and I don’t discuss angioplasties for fun,” she shot back.

He burst out laughing, resting his cheek against her stomach. “Lydia,” he said, “love, I’m not on the brink of death. The problem was caught very early, I’m going to go in and have it done at the end of the month, and everything will be fine. I promise.”

“You better.” She bent and pressed her lips to the top of his head. “Do you need me to come to the hospital with you? I can take a day off work, I’ve still got like twelve days of paid vacation left for the year, I think, minus the two I need for Scott’s wedding.”

He paused. She really didn’t like this pause. “I’ve actually decided to have the procedure done in England, after the promo tour,” Paul said, sounding far too unconcerned. “There’s an excellent surgeon, highly recommended, and it’ll be easier to avoid media attention there. I’ve talked to Mary and she said I can stay with her whilst I recover.”

So it got worse. This procedure was serious enough that it had a recovery period, and Mary had known it was happening before she did. Lydia would ask about that later; what was more pressing at the moment was the fact that he was going to be apart from her even longer than they’d originally planned. “I could join you in England for a few days,” she tried.

“I wouldn’t.” He shifted so he could look up at her again. “If you’ve only got ten vacation days left, I need you to save all of them. I’ve got big plans for your birthday.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m really not thinking about my birthday right now after the nuclear fucking bomb you just dropped on me.”

“Not a bomb, my love. A very safe, frequently performed procedure after which I’ll be healthier than ever. Ready to do something special with you in December.” One of his hands slipped lower, below her waist. “I’ve been planning something for us a long time, you know, and now that we’re public we can go ahead with it. Just need all ten of those days off.”

She huffed and shifted her weight to one foot. Frustration, anger, resentment burned in her gut. Why was he presenting this to her as a done deal, where he’d already decided everything and she just had to go along with it? Did he not think she wanted a say? Did he think she didn’t care, or wouldn’t mind? “When we talked about being more open and honest with each other,” she said, “was there a clause in there that said major medical decisions were exempt? I might’ve missed that.”

He grunted, sounding annoyed. “Lydia—”

“Because last year when I needed a new IUD I told you all about it, but I guess maybe next time I shouldn’t bother.”

His hands slid away from her hips. “That was different,” he said, coming to his feet. “Birth control affects both of us.”

“Oh, so I have no vested interest in your circulatory system keeping you alive,” she said, stepping back. “Awesome. Good to know, thanks for clearing that up.”

“Lydia, love—”

She didn’t want to hear any more. He reached out for her again but she dodged his hands, striding out of his office and stomping upstairs.

Part of her hoped that he’d follow after her, ready to apologize or explain or ask forgiveness – she was definitely in the mood for some quality groveling. But when the minutes passed and he didn’t come upstairs, that made her feel relieved too. Relieved, because she couldn’t guarantee at the moment that she wouldn’t just explode in anger at him, scream out everything that was bothering her, about how she was being treated at a job she no longer enjoyed, about how her brother didn’t see her as his sibling anymore, about how Paul was hiding his kids’ machinations from her. She needed an ally in her corner and instead he was treating her like a fucking child.

She waited until she was safely in the shower with the water running before she started crying.

Later, dressed in soft sweats, Lydia settled herself on the couch in their bedroom with a book and a notepad, working on a half-formed idea that had been bouncing around in her head for some time. She was desperate to do something that actually mattered to her, a project that engaged her full interest, to push away from the front of her mind everything that was going wrong. Jeff joined her after a while, sitting on her legs facing the doorway, keeping an eye out for danger.

Lydia pouted as long as she dared, staying put even when her stomach started growling loudly in protest. But just as she had decided she needed to suck it up and go eat something, Paul appeared.

“I ordered us food, it’s just arrived,” he said, shuffling into the room. He tipped back her book to look at the cover. “The 9/11 Congressional Report again? You’ll have it memorized soon.”

She set it and Jeff aside and allowed Paul to pull her to her feet. “I’m still pretty fucking pissed at you, you know.”

“Oh I know.” He bent to kiss her, which she allowed. “The food is meant as a peace offering, you see.” Her stomach chose that precise moment to growl, which made them both snort.

The kitchen counter was covered in cardboard containers emblazoned with a familiar logo. He’d ordered all her favorite foods from her favorite Greek restaurant, so that was something. They were both quiet as they served themselves and took their meals to the dining table; she unbent a little and sat next to him, close enough to twine her feet with his. It was no fun, being angry with him, and the fire of her frustration was already starting to burn out.

She was picking through a small mountain of dolmas when Paul began talking. “The truth is, love, that the publicity around our relationship hasn’t been great,” he said, jumping them both straight into the deep end.

Lydia looked up at him, wide-eyed.

He grimaced back at her. “I’ve apparently let people down by turning into a dirty old man stereotype,” he said dryly, “and you’re seen as some sort of… I don’t know, a grasping opportunist. And that’s all I’ll say,” he added, when she opened her mouth, “because the rest of it is bloody insulting.”

Lydia swallowed, looking back down at her food. “But you probably get a pass,” she murmured, “because sexism.”

His silence was loud. “I’ve watched you the past several months,” he said after a moment, “getting held back at work, getting harassed by photographers, everything with Yoko, your brother knowing about you and reacting, you know, not the way you’d hoped… I reckon I just thought I’d take some of the stress off your shoulders.”

“Making decisions on your own about things that affect both of us,” she said.

Paul winced. “My favorite pastime, apparently.” He reached for her hand and took it, squeezing a little. “My publicist thought it best to keep the heart procedure out of the news,” he explained, “because, well, it’s usually something people of a certain age have done. The last thing we want people thinking about, in relation to us. I thought of the media sticking microphones in your face, asking you how you feel about your geriatric—”

“Ugh, I hate that word,” Lydia complained.

“Me too,” he said with a chuckle. He shrugged, tossed back his hair. “So anyway. That’s what my team thought and I went along with it. But I should’ve told you.”

“And your kids are still trying to set you up with other women,” she blurted out. “Because they don’t like me with you.”

He just looked at her a long time, his thumb moving back and forth across the back of her hand. “Yeah,” he admitted finally.

“Including… including Nancy, at your birthday party.”

Paul bit the inside of his cheek. Then nodded.

Lydia shifted in her chair, drinking some soda, nibbling at her food. “Cool. And instead of just telling me any of this you let me get all paranoid, thinking you didn’t trust me or were hiding stuff from me. And I have a really vivid imagination, I can picture you hiding a lot. You know how– how absolutely shitty that made me feel? Especially after I spilled my guts to you about the Yoko drama? I mean fuck, Paul.”

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I know, love.”

“You’re so fucking lucky I still like you.”

“I’m very lucky.”

“You’re also lucky that I hate fighting and I’m already over this whole thing.”

“I hate fighting too.”

Lydia nodded decisively. “Okay then. Now eat your quinoa bowl, it’s good for your cardiovascular health.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, with a grin and a little salute.

A week later, after he’d done the New York half of his US promo tour and had to head off to Los Angeles for the second leg, she held him extra tightly before he went to catch his flight. “You drive me so nuts sometimes,” she muttered in his ear, “but I fucking love you.”

“I fucking love you,” he said, “even though I don’t always know how to show it properly.”

“I’ll see you at Scott and Andrea’s wedding. I’ll be the prettiest bridesmaid, can’t miss me.”

He laughed and gazed down at her, brushing her hair back from her face. “I’ll keep a sharp lookout.”

Just as she’d predicted months earlier, her brother’s wedding wasn’t some grand, over-the-top affair. Andrea’s parents had a large property on Cape Cod that would serve as their venue, remote enough that they’d have privacy but not so remote that trekking into town for the rehearsal dinner or hotel rooms was a hassle. The guest list was restricted to close friends and family only, the officiant was an old and trusted friend to the Adlers, and no one was told in advance if Paul would be attending, to avoid rubberneckers. On the day, Paul’s security team would have the area locked down to ensure no one would interrupt their celebration.

Lydia rented a car and drove up the Thursday before, since her parents had already gone up days earlier. Her dad had designed and built a metal-and-glass arch in his workshop, somewhat indebted to Frank Lloyd Wright; she had seen pictures and thought it was stunning. She timed her arrival in Boston so that it coincided with Travis’s flight coming in from Chicago, and together they drove the rest of the way. “I can’t believe it sometimes,” Lydia joked, “Scott really found someone willing to put up with him.”

“Yeah, must be something wrong with her,” Travis quipped.

“I guess that means there’s hope for the rest of us.”

“For me,” Travis said, “probably not you.”

As soon as they got to the house, they were both ushered off to separate areas – one for Andrea and her bridesmaids, the other for Scott and his groomsmen. Lydia met Andrea’s best friend Dawn and her college roommate Teresa, and learned soon after being introduced that they only knew two things about her. “Oh, you’re Scott’s little sister,” Teresa said, “the one dating Paul McCartney.”

“I’m also a respected journalist with the Washington Post,” Lydia said, not hiding her sarcasm.

Teresa blinked at her, confused. “Okay…?”

“Yeah Lydia’s pretty great,” Andrea said, not picking up on the tension between them. “I’ve read all her articles. You remember that video that went viral last month, with the Congolese restaurant in New York? That was her work too.”

Lydia beamed at Andrea. And she was going to be her sister-in-law.

Everyone else was on best behavior for the rest of Thursday and Friday, not mentioning Paul once, and Lydia started to relax and enjoy herself more. The house was beautiful, a Cape Cod-style cottage that had been updated and expanded over the years, so there was enough room that everyone in the wedding party could stay there. A wide lawn sloped gently down from the back patio to the bay, where a sturdy dock with a boat launch jutted out into the water. The vendors had already started setting up Alan’s arch by the water for the officiant and bride and groom to stand under, as well as the rows of folding chairs for the guests; off to the side a marquee tent was going up for the dining and dancing. She took photos of all of it and sent them on to Paul, interspersed with photos of herself making faces. In return she got back pictures of the Tonight Show backstage, Paul in the green room with craft services, a selfie of him getting his hair styled by a woman who waved to camera.

Don’t forget the powder, she texted him.

Ah yes, for the shine xo, he wrote back.

Paul joined them from Los Angeles before the rehearsal dinner Friday evening, arriving at the Adlers’ house just as they were all about to leave for a restaurant in town. Lydia stayed behind to wait for him to change into his dinner clothes, and when he emerged from their room they took advantage of the empty house to have a very nice welcome back snog. “How was LA?”

“Hot,” he said, his forehead pressed to hers. “Dull, without you. Rich says hello.”

Lydia grinned. “Hello, my friend Rich. What did you think of the selfies I sent?”

“Going in our Christmas cards this year, naturally,” he deadpanned, which made her giggle.

They met up with the rest of the wedding party at a restaurant in the town of Dennis (“Ah yes Dennis, fine old chap,” Paul said in a posh accent, when they drove past the road sign; that led them to enact an entire scene featuring two Oxbridge twats nattering on about their former lawn tennis partner). But as soon as they walked through the door her silly Paul vanished in favor of Famous Paul, a blank slate upon which people could project their love and fan worship. She missed her Paul already.

Lydia’s parents, as hosts, stood up and gave beautiful speeches towards the end of the dinner, relaying a few funny stories about Scott growing up, describing the first time they met Andrea. Lydia was tearing up by the time her dad had finished. When Scott rose to speak next, he had eyes only for his bride. “I’ve always been fascinated by the human heart,” he said. “The actual heart, not the symbol people put on valentines. I went to med school solely because I wanted to learn more about how it functioned, its muscles and chambers and electric pulses. I didn’t realize how little I knew about the heart until I met Andrea.”

Good lord. Lydia was full on crying by then, and Paul put an arm around her as she dabbed at her eyes. People snuck looks at them through Scott’s speech, which annoyed her – it was her brother’s big weekend, not hers – but then she realized Paul was staring openly at anyone who so much as glanced in their direction, getting them to swiftly look away and back at Scott as he finished his speech. She squeezed his other hand in thanks; Paul squeezed back.

The actual dinner itself was merely fine – Lydia thought the cobb salad a bit uninspired – until someone leaked that a Beatle was there. When her dad realized that there were just a few too many people in the restaurant who weren’t eating or waiting for a table, they had to call it a night.

Everyone returned to the house. Andrea’s brother Charlie helped his dad build a fire in the firepit out on the lawn, Scott mentioned something about s’mores, and within minutes Lydia found herself explaining to Paul the fine art of toasting a marshmallow and sandwiching it between graham crackers and chocolate. They stayed up late, a group of them, laughing and talking after her parents and the Adlers had gone in, until she could see Paul himself fighting to stay awake. He’d just flown in from California that same day and must have been exhausted.

Lydia lay in bed after they’d gone through their evening routines, tracing Paul’s face with the very tips of her fingers. He hadn’t had time to shave before dinner so his face was stubbly, the way she secretly liked it. The two of them were quiet a long time, merely staring at each other with the lights out and the silvery-blue moonlight shining through the filmy curtains. Occasionally laughter bubbled up from the firepit, where some of the others were still hanging out.

“I’m ready, you know,” Paul murmured, apropos of nothing.

“Ready for what?”

He buried a hand in her hair, his thumb running across the line of her cheek. “Last spring, you said you wanted to be the one to propose to me. Told me to be ready. Well. I’m ready.”

Her heart rose to her throat. “It’s very poor form,” she said, doing her posh English accent from earlier, “to stage a proposal at someone else’s wedding, you know.”

“Everyone knows that.” He grinned at her. “I didn’t mean you should do it tomorrow. Impatient, are we?”

“You’re the one that brought it up!”

“Had to make sure you knew I was ready, didn’t I?”

“And now I know.” But the smile sank a little from her face. “We haven’t even talked about anything, though.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

“Um, I don’t know, things like finances? Signing a prenup?”

Paul tutted. “We don’t need a prenup.”

“You just told me two weeks ago that the world thinks I’m a gold digger. If we don’t have the most iron-clad prenup—”

“Fine, yes, we’ll have one,” Paul said, impatient. “What else?”

“Would you be offended if I didn’t change my name?”

He blinked, staring, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

“I already changed my name once,” she said. “Against my will, of course, but it changed. I’m rather partial to Lydia Montrose now, and that’s the name under which I’ve published all my work.”

“All right,” he said, sounding a bit bewildered. “What else? Do you still want to move to England?”

“Of course. Cavendish?”

“Probably. Do you want kids?”

Lydia froze. For a few brief moments there were no coherent thoughts in her head at all. “You already have kids,” she stuttered.

“I know I do. Wasn’t what I asked.”

“Do I want– why, because I did such a bang-up job with my other two?”

Paul looked sad. “That’s not what I asked either, my love.”

She turned away, shifting until she was on her back staring at the ceiling, trying not to spiral into a panic. Did she want kids, he asked her. The curtain in the back of her mind – still hanging there, after all these years – rippled, and she recalled the first time he had ever held Julian. The fear, the love, the anguish that coursed through him: fear at the idea that he wouldn’t be good enough for this perfect little boy, love that felt stronger and purer than anything he’d ever felt before. Anguish over the fact that his own father must have held him at one point and either hadn’t felt this, or had and still left anyway.

And then what had he done, he’d walked away from Julian just like good old Fred Lennon had walked away from him. Did she want kids!

After a while Paul leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Right,” he murmured, “I see now, there are things we should definitely talk about before anyone proposes to anybody.”

Lydia turned her head on the pillow. “Do you…?”

He shrugged. “I love kids,” he said. “You already know that. If you wanted them, I’d be thrilled. If you didn’t, I’d still be thrilled. We could adopt some cats and dogs instead, maybe. Get Jeff some siblings?”

When she next blinked she realized her eyes had filled with tears, so she tried to wipe at her cheeks surreptitiously. Paul saw anyway. Without saying another word he shifted forward, gathering her in his arms and holding her tightly.

Lydia’s breath hitched. “Sorry, I don’t know why I’m…”

“It’s all right, love. We can stop talking about it, you don’t need to have an answer tonight. But just think of this.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You coming back – it’s a second chance, yeah? Everything you wish you’d done differently, you can, you know. So having kids… if you wanted to try again, you could.”

I could, she thought, as she curled her hand in his shirt, and sleep tugged her gradually into unconsciousness.

I could.

Chapter Text

She awoke to birdsong the following morning, the gentle sound of the wind blowing off tranquil Cape Cod Bay and the low noises of people moving around, trying and failing to not make noise, in other parts of the house. Within seconds she could sense that Paul had already gotten up, but when she ran her hand over his side of the bed the sheets weren’t cool. Lydia pictured him with his scruffy face, looking at her before he started his day, and she wondered what he’d really made of her over-the-top reaction to what was, ultimately, a simple question about their future together.

No. Her brother was getting married today. Lydia would focus on that, and not on last night.

Paul reentered their room what must have been just a minute or two later, while Lydia was still working out muscle kinks and attempting to shake away the cobwebs; he came bearing two mismatched mugs that he held carefully aloft as he kicked the door shut behind him. “Is that coffee?” she mumbled, sitting up. “Oh my god, Macca, you’re a prince among men.”

“Hope it’s all right,” he said, pleased, “the Adlers don’t drink our brand.”

“I don’t even care, inject it straight into my bloodstream.” She propped herself up against the headboard and accepted the Boston Red Sox mug he handed her, watched as he twitched the curtains open – they had a gorgeous view of the water – then leaned into him once he’d settled himself back in bed beside her. “Many people up yet?”

“Some. Few in the kitchen. Saw Scott out by the water with your dad.”

“Last minute father-son advice on married life,” she surmised, sipping her coffee. Lydia glanced at the bedroom door and snorted as a thought occurred to her. “Speaking of dads, it’s nice that I can be in a room with you and have the door closed now.”

Paul chuckled into his own cup. “If my dad could see us now.”

They both snickered, trading jokes and reminisces about the strict rules Jim Mac had enforced whenever she had stopped by Forthlin Road. “By the way,” Paul said, once they’d gotten their breath back after Lydia’s particularly devastating impression of old Jim, “looking at your bridesmaid dress.”

She glanced at it, where it hung on the back of the closet door. It was deep gray with a slight hint of blue, pretty enough for a dress she’d wear once and never again, she supposed. “What about it?”

“Well, your tattoos are going to be exposed. Do your parents know…?”

“Nope.”

“And when are you going to…?”

Lydia looked at him sideways, smirking. “They’ll find out when I walk past them at the ceremony.”

“Ah.” Paul nodded. “They can’t make a scene in the middle of what’s supposed to be your brother’s special day,” he said, tapping the side of his head. “Good planning.”

“I thought so.”

He hummed a little, grinning. For a while they merely sat in comfortable silence, sipping their coffee (and Lydia really needed to know what brand the Adlers drank, because this stuff was incredible) and twining their free hands together. Despite her best intentions, her mind was still spinning back to the night before – everything they had talked about and the things Paul had said. Maybe it was better to get it out of her system. Rip off the bandage. “How do you know you’re ready?” she blurted out.

Paul looked at her, nonplussed, for a long moment. Then, after a fortifying sip of coffee, he murmured, “I just know, love.”

“Even after this past summer, when things got so… you know, awkward? How could you be sure we weren’t growing apart or, worse, it was 1970 all over again?”

He traced the design on his mug, a touristy logo for Cape Cod. “Well, you know,” he began – then paused.

The pause became a silence. “When our phones stopped sending texts for about seven or eight hours,” she said, urging him on, “the day of your birthday party. You absolutely bottomed out, Paul. Why did you so quickly think that– that something was wrong, that we were fighting or I was mad at you? Because that really doesn’t sound ready to me.”

He tossed his hair back and looked away, out towards the window with its thin curtains letting in yellow-filtered sunlight. Everything about him went still, but for the thumb running restlessly across the back of her hand, up and down, up and down. Whatever protective shields he carried around as a matter of course, even around her at times, had slammed into place. She could only wait until he felt safe enough to be vulnerable.

“Paul.”

He sniffed, looked down at his lap, glanced over at his luggage sitting on the other end of the room, at the lamp on his side of the bed.

Lydia bent and pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “It’s only me, babe.”

A puff of air escaped his nose, too weak to be a snort, but a sign of thawing. “After you left that afternoon, I decided I wanted something from that café we like,” he said slowly. “I walked down – wearing a hat and sunglasses, you know – and I was waiting in the queue when I heard these two women speaking at a nearby table. And one of them said your name.”

Her heart sank. She suspected she wasn’t going to like what she was about to hear.

“Anyway,” Paul said, tilting his head to the side. Towards hers. “They were talking about some recent article in one of the rags. About us. One woman said— It’s silly,” he interrupted himself, laughing in a way that sounded completely false and forced. “She said that the only reason someone as young and beautiful as you would date me was obviously for the fame and money, and you could do better, so they started listing all sorts of celebrities you should date instead who were young and handsome and—” He cut himself off again with an annoyed click of his tongue, staring down into the depths of his cup.

Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle. Did he hear himself right now?

“After I ordered and was walking back home, I texted you,” Paul went on, doing his very best impression of nonchalance. “You didn’t respond. I texted you twice more – no response, you know. So… I had hours to sit there without you, by myself, thinking …” He shrugged. “And when I finally spotted you at the party, you were laughing with Dhani. Who is, you know.” His mien turned dark. “Younger and better looking than me.”

Her first thought had been to toss off a joke – maybe you’re right, maybe I should go hook up with Christian Bale instead, he was pretty hot in The Prestige – but at the last minute she bit it back, knowing it could come across as cruel rather than amusing. Here she’d been thinking all these months that she was the only one plagued by all the voices chiming in with opinions on their relationship, rendered frustrated and upset by the lack of support on so many sides. Surely Paul, who always knew what he wanted and went after it, wouldn’t be deterred by two women in a New York café sharing celebrity gossip about people they’d never met before.

Except… well. She assumed there was a reason Paul hadn’t made another movie since Give My Regards to Broad Street.

Lydia heaved a tired sigh, and rested her head on Paul’s shoulder. “Assuming I have the timing right, you know what Dhani and I were talking about the moment you saw us?” she asked. “A surprise for you and Rich. And you know what else? Dhani told me that night how great things were going with his girlfriend. So I can assure you, he wasn’t hitting on me and I wasn’t hitting on him.”

“I know that,” Paul said, somewhat testy. “I’m not jealous of you with Dhani. Anymore,” he added, when she was about to say that very qualifier. “It’s – it’s my own deal, you know. I…” He tossed his hair back, frowning a little. “I often seek approval and praise from others,” he said, as if remembering something from a therapy session. “Including you. A lot of the time from you, actually. And when I don’t get it I… you know.”

Lydia hoped that Paul’s therapist got every good thing in life and then some, because she’d definitely earned it many times over.

“So when I said I was ready,” he continued, squeezing her hand, “I really meant it, love. I’m sure about you, and I’m sure about us, even though sometimes I…”

“Flail a bit,” Lydia said, snuggling in closer to lessen the sting.

He shot a grin at her. “Ah, so you’ve noticed.”

“Maybe a few times.”

“Remember, once I got all your texts that night, I stopped all my fretting.”

“And wanted to start shagging,” Lydia finished dryly, making them both laugh. After a contented, warm silence and a few more sips of coffee, she nudged his arm with her own. “Now ask me if I’m ready.”

Paul raised his eyebrow, looking concerned. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet. Not because I’m not sure about you and us, because I am.” Her mind spun as she tried to find the right words. “But I need to be absolutely, positively certain,” she said, “that marrying you isn’t the last thing I accomplish on my to-do list.” Lydia turned a little more towards him, hoping to impress upon him how important this was to her. “I have so much that I want to do, professionally and personally. But celebrity has changed a lot since the 1970s, and I just have to be sure – really sure – that I can still get things done from within that ecosystem.”

Paul looked confused. “And… you can’t do those things after…?”

“People will treat me differently as soon as I’m someone’s wife,” she said, shrugging. “Particularly if I’ve married a rich man and don’t technically need to work for a living anymore. My reputation as a serious journalist has to be completely untouchable long before anything happens between us.”

He frowned and stared again into his now-empty mug, but only for a moment. Paul studied her and Lydia remained still, the early morning sun lighting both their faces. Whatever he found there, in her warm eyes or the soft smile she gave him, was apparently convincing. “All right, love,” he said quietly. “I know you’ll figure it out.”

“I will,” she said, her grin broadening. “And then, once I’ve got it all sorted out we’ll—” The words caught in her throat unexpectedly and she blushed, ducking her heated face.

Paul gave her an extremely satisfied smirk. “And then,” he echoed, leaning in and whispering the words into her ear, “we’ll get married.”

“We’ll get married,” she murmured back, her cheek brushing against his.

They were both silent a moment, until – nearly at the same time – they both burst into hysterical giggles, too keyed up with excitement to contain them any longer.

Scott and Andrea’s wedding was as beautiful as they’d all hoped. The weather stayed clear and sunny, the arch her dad had made set off the pristine blue of Cape Cod Bay, and no one forgot where to stand or when to speak. Somewhere outside of Lydia’s eyeshot she knew Paul’s bodyguards were maintaining a zone of peace and quiet around them, but she only cared about the results. The rest of the world was miles away, today.

Lydia had separated from Paul mid-morning, going to the part of the house where Andrea and her wedding party would be getting ready. The photographer snapped them eating breakfast, getting their hair and makeup done, posing with Andrea in silky dressing gowns that were her gift to her bridesmaids. Andrea’s wedding gown was gorgeous, when they all finally got dressed in their finery, and it hit Lydia then that this was really happening: her big brother, who used to patiently help her with her science homework when she was in elementary school, was getting married.

Andrea spotted the tattoos first. “Oh,” she said, looking at them with interest and no judgment. “Because your childhood nickname was Ladybug, right?”

“Still is,” Lydia said. “And the beetle, um—”

“Even I get that reference,” Andrea deadpanned, throwing her a grin. Lydia decided not to correct her.

Later, when the ceremony began and Lydia walked down the aisle arm-in-arm with Travis, she spotted Paul sitting directly beside the aisle, in the row behind her parents. He had his phone out and was snapping photos of her, grinning. She gave into the urge to stick her tongue out at him, but then caught her parents’ eye as she passed them.

Right. They were at a formal event. Time to behave.

The ceremony passed in a blur – Lydia started getting misty-eyed again, though she’d deny it if asked – and then the bride, groom, and wedding party had to subject themselves to an hour or two of staged photos while the guests started making inroads on the open bar and appetizers. Lydia pulled her face taut in a smile over and over, as she was posed with Travis flanking Scott and Andrea, then their parents were added, then just Lydia and Andrea, then Scott with Lydia and Travis…

Paul stationed himself beside the photographer, continuing to snap photos with his phone. The photographer, who seemed nervous at first around him, was soon laughing and caving in to the McCartney charm as he joked around with her. “Not much of a photographer myself,” he said at one point, “though I was married to a rather famous one once, you know.”

“I’m sure the Adlers will make available copies of everything I take today,” the photographer told him a bit later, when all of the groomsmen, bridesmaids, and the families were posing together.

“Oh yes,” Paul said, “but the focus of my snaps isn’t the bride and groom, you see.” Lydia blushed down to her toes, and mightily ignored it as everyone swung their eyes towards her.

After their meal was the dancing. And though Lydia wanted nothing more than to go out and cut a rug with Paul, her father preempted them. “Can I take my little girl out for a spin?” he said, approaching them at the table where she sat with Paul, Dawn, Teresa, and their dates.

She was in a sentimental mood. She said yes.

Lydia could feel her dad’s eyes on her back as he let her lead them out onto the parquet dance floor, laid out on the lawn. Alan was quiet at first, as they moved slowly to “Brown-Eyed Girl.” Lydia rolled her eyes after she couldn’t take the suspense any longer. “Say it, Dad,” she said.

“Your mother and I weren’t aware you had tattoos,” he replied, his voice light.

“Yeah. I got them a while ago.” When he said nothing, she went on “I didn’t do it on a whim. I thought about it for a long time.”

“Now that I don’t quite believe,” he said, but his tone was affectionate, not condemning. “You’ve always danced to the beat of a different drum, Ladybug. And… this thing with you and…”

“My partner,” she said, with a slight edge. “My committed partner.”

He shook his head. “You know,” he said, “maybe you’ll realize this when you have kids – if you decide to have them. But when you have a child, they’re just a blank slate to start. No personality, nothing there at all except this little red thing that sleeps and eats and cries and poops. So as you fall in love with them, you start to imagine what their future will look like, the choices you think they’ll make one day.”

Lydia softened a little at that. “What plans did you make for little Lydia Grace?”

Alan smiled at her. “Big ones,” he said. “Nothing but the biggest for my little girl. A college degree in something like art history or painting. You’d live in a loft in Greenwich Village with other artists and always have paint under your fingernails.”

“Sounds like a lot of projection, Dad,” she admitted.

“Oh it absolutely was,” he replied with a little laugh. “I never made any secret of the fact that I wanted to be a bohemian artist type, but my parents pushed me into architecture because it was a more stable way to make a living. But Ladybug,” he said, “you became your own person very early on. It was so thrilling to watch as you figured things out, gravitated to certain things over others. The choices you made… a lot of them, I would’ve picked differently for you, to be honest. But you knew yourself completely. That’s really the best I could ask for in the end, right?”

She was grinning like a fool at him. This man that the universe had decided would be her father, who had exceeded Alfred Lennon in every way from the moment he opted to stay. Who had topped even kind Uncle George, merely by living longer. Alan had helped give her the steady home life she had so longed for and been viciously deprived of her last go around.

“Your life is going to be hard,” Alan went on, “in many ways I can’t even imagine. Being famous, being in the public eye, having strangers judging your every move and statement – of course I’d want something else for you, kiddo. Something calmer, quieter? But if any of my kids had to end up with that kind of life, you’re the one I’d worry least about. And…” Alan cleared his throat, the only sign that he was getting as emotional as her, “I know with Paul at your side, you’re going to be just fine.”

Lydia sniffled. “Oh my god, Dad, stop making me ruin my makeup,” and she threw her arms around him, squeezing as tight as she could. She looked out at one point and saw Paul, yet again pointing his phone at her to take a picture. He beamed at her and winked.

They danced until the end of the song, after which Alan led her back to the table where Paul now sat alone. No words passed between them; Alan simply offered his hand and Paul shook it. Lydia, needing to take a break from the unrelenting sentimentality of the day, suggested they go out on the dock for some fresher air and Paul followed her.

She and Paul walked all the way to the edge of the dock, the old wooden boards groaning a little under their feet. The sun was setting in the west, washing the broad sky in vivid shades of orange and gold, and Lydia breathed deeply as a cool breeze off the Bay toyed with her hair. “You all right, love?” Paul asked her, keeping his voice low. He took her hand in his, and kissed it as she watched.

“I’m better than great,” she said, about to recount her conversation – and right at that moment she spotted the unusual cluster of motorboats off the shore. “Are those paparazzi?”

Paul’s spine snapped into a straight line, and he peered out where she pointed. “Looks like it,” he said flatly.

“The one part of the perimeter your security detail couldn’t patrol,” she realized, her heart sinking.

Together, not touching, they turned around and headed back down the dock. As the wedding reception carried on under the tent – as Scott and Andrea had their first dance, Andrea threw the bouquet, and her brothers reenacted a dance routine they used to do as kids to many laughs and shouts from their family – Lydia and Paul sat inside the house, in the kitchen, picking through pieces of wedding cake by themselves, away from the all-seeing cameras of the tenacious American paparazzi on Cape Cod Bay.

They had only a little over thirty-six hours in the City together, when they got home. Paul drove Lydia’s rental back on Sunday – “I’ve been practicing” he boasted – and then she had a full day of work on Monday. They went out to dinner at Remy’s Congolese restaurant that night, since Remy had been asking her when she’d stop by again. The subject of Lydia’s partner had of course never come up during her interview with him, and so Remy greeted them at the door with a surprised “Beatle Paul!” The other diners – and Lydia was gratified to see how many people were there, on a Monday night – were similarly stunned.

During dinner, as she and Paul stuffed themselves with Remy and Nathalie’s incredible cooking, Remy disappeared in the back and returned with a battered acoustic guitar. Without any hint of nerves or self-consciousness, he positioned himself a few tables away and started singing “Tu dis que tu m’aimes, que tu m’attendras…”

Paul recognized the melody at once, and Lydia sang the higher harmony part when Remy reached the chorus:

“Tu dis que l’absence,
Rendra plus fort encore notre amour,
On dit ces mots-la, oui,
Qu’on oublie un jour.”

She and Paul applauded with enthusiasm after Remy struck the final chord. “Please tell him,” Remy rattled off to her in French, “that I am a very big fan for my whole life, and my favorite songs are ‘Things We Said Today’ and ‘Cry Baby Cry.’” Lydia translated for Paul, whose eyes shone with delight. He was even persuaded to autograph Remy’s guitar, which Remy promised them he would hang up on the wall for all of his customers and friends to enjoy.

Later, full of the good food and warm feelings of the evening, they returned to the penthouse so Paul could grab his luggage and head to the airport. “I loaded a new playlist onto your iPod,” Lydia said, handing it to him. “And I saw the one you were working on for me, so I grabbed that for mine.”

“Good!” Paul winked at her as he checked over his bags one last time.

“I’m telling you, I know you still think we’re going to get a bunch of nominations for Year 10, but my prediction is that Amy Winehouse is going to run away with all the Grammys this year. I made sure I put ‘Rehab’ and ‘You Know I’m No Good’ on your playlist because they’re fucking incredible.”

“Can’t wait to hear it.” He straightened and framed her face with both of his hands. “Nineteen days, love,” he murmured.

“Nineteen days. And you’re going to text me right before and right after the angioplasty.”

“As promised. Though I’ll likely also text you as soon as we land at Heathrow, when I get home, when I go to bed, when I wake up—”

“You better,” she muttered, right before he bent to kiss her breathless.

This was their routine: the exchange of playlists, the nonstop flurry of texts, the specific day countdowns. Lydia went to work and was a normal human being with a regular day job, and then she’d go home in the evenings and watch her boyfriend on satellite TV. She watched him on various morning programs, and with Paul O’Grady and Jonathan Ross, after which she’d text him with funny critiques on his wardrobe choices, so he knew she’d been watching.

She maybe should have guessed what would happen, when Paul sent her a curious text early one morning New York-time: Quiet Down is a political song, yeah?

Um yeah, she wrote back. It’s about protesting and speaking up when people in power abuse that power.

Brilliant, ta, was her only response. She later saw him on Graham Norton, sitting on the curved red couch with a few celebs she didn’t recognize, expounding on how “Quiet Down” was meant to remind people to use their voices when they saw things they didn’t approve of, especially if they came from the government. Lydia, seated on their couch with Jeff in her lap, nodded in approval as he then brought up the Iraq War, peppering in all kinds of things he clearly remembered from discussions with her.

Ugh. It was such a low bar, but it was so hot having a partner who listened to her. She might never get used to it.

The end of the promo tour for Year 10 came and went. The date for The Procedure (Lydia had been calling it that in her head) came and went; Paul texted her right away and said he was doing great, everything had gone well, and he missed her. Lydia sent him back a string of hearts, knowing that he probably wanted to rest and take it easy for a bit. The day of his return to New York arrived in early October, the date she’d written out and circled on her whiteboard, which now hung on the wall next to the fridge. He was meant to be landing early in the afternoon, while she was still at work, and when she left the office that evening she raced home to see him again.

Only to find the penthouse empty.

Lydia checked her phone to see if he’d messaged her. Nothing.

She looked up his flight online to see if the flight had been delayed for one reason or another. The airline website showed that it had landed at JFK on schedule hours earlier.

Hey you’re not home yet? she texted him.

No response.

After an hour or so she reached out to Paul’s assistant, with whom she had a casual and friendly rapport. “I haven’t been able to reach him either,” was the assistant’s worrying response. “I was hoping he at least would’ve touched base with you. I have no idea what’s going on.”

Lydia inhaled through her nose, remaining calm. “Okay. Um, thanks for letting me know, I guess I’ll keep—” Her phone rang then, and Dirk McQuickly popped up on the screen. “Oh here he is now, I’ll have him call you later!” She ended the call before the assistant could get another word out and switched over. “Paul!”

“Lydia, hello,” he said, his voice stiff and overly formal. “So… funny story, love.”

“Funny ha-ha, or funny I’m about to get really angry?” she said, freezing.

“The latter, definitely,” he replied. “I discovered today that someone in my lawyer’s office forgot to file some paperwork on time, and my US visa expired without being properly renewed.”

“Holy fuck!”

“Oh it gets better, just you wait.” He cleared his throat. God – she didn’t know how she could tell – but Paul was completely enraged right now. “I’m at Customs, still at Heathrow. Been here all day, you know, trying to sort things. Not only do I not have a valid visa to reenter the country, you see, but the US government is telling me now that they can’t let me back in the country at all.”

Lydia gaped, lost for words.

Well, fuck.

Chapter Text

Paul was using his public-facing voice – as in, someone must have been within earshot as he spoke to her over the phone – but he still managed to explain everything that had happened.

He was able to stay for long periods in the US because of the O-1 non-immigrant visa, a category reserved for people of “extraordinary ability or achievement” who were tops in their field. It was mostly used by people like renowned scholars awarded fellowships at one of the big universities, or scientists doing research, athletes coming to take advantage of superior training facilities, or entertainers like Paul who were working and performing. He’d first applied for it in the spring of 2002 (right after they first kissed, she realized) and had finally been approved after a lengthy paperwork and interview process that August. After the initial three-year visa ended in 2005, he’d then had to apply for a one-year renewal every August since.

But someone had fucked up this year – either at his immigration lawyer’s office or at his record company, which sponsored him as an employee. His latest visa had expired this past August and gone unrenewed, so that by the time Paul had left for his promo tour in England, he’d illegally overstayed in the country by more than a month. And the US State Department, under the current administration, looked pretty harshly upon people who overstayed visas.

“I’m sorry, hang on,” Lydia interrupted him, waving a frustrated hand through the air. “How is all this – I mean what the fuck. Whatever happened to ‘Fuck off, I’m Paul McCartney’? Why can’t somebody make a few phone calls and clear this whole thing up?”

Paul grunted. “I’m not looking for any special treatment, love,” he said, his façade at last cracking a bit. “I just want to stay in New York with you, that’s all.”

“Holy fuck.” She leaned against the countertop in the kitchen, shaking her head. “God, this is just…” The bright green numbers on the microwave caught her eye then; she blinked, startled, upon realizing the time. “Paul, it’s almost midnight where you are, there’s nothing else you can do about it tonight. You should probably just go home and go at it fresh in the morning.”

“Yeah, I know. Well then, I’d best—”

“No wait,” she said quickly. “I – don’t hang up. Not yet.” At his questioning hum, she said, bashful, “As soon as you hang up I’ll be all alone here. Jeff’s not in a very talkative mood,” she joked weakly, “and… I was so excited to see you today, and it’s dawning on me now that I won’t.”

He paused. “Hang on, love,” he said, and she sat back and listened as he suddenly started issuing orders: someone to get his bags, to call for a car to take him home, to arrange for an appointment with someone at the American consulate first thing tomorrow. He’d say something to her now and then, to make sure she was still on the line, but he was completely focused on the task at hand.

This was a side of him she rarely experienced, and thank fuck for that. Paul was a bit intense when he didn’t get his way.

As Lydia waited, Jeff sauntered into the kitchen and nibbled at some of the food she’d left out for him earlier. Satiated, he then positioned himself at her feet, begging for attention. She scooped him up in her arms and took him into the living room, phone pinned between her ear and shoulder, listening as Paul said that no, an appointment at eleven wouldn’t do, not if one could be had at nine o’clock; wasn’t there someone else in charge he could speak to? She took a seat on the couch and thought that she’d better settle in for a long night, and not the kind she’d been hoping for.

Jeff purred contentedly in her lap, his eyes at half-mast as she petted and scratched his head. “Jeff has something he wants to say,” Lydia murmured into the phone, and she held it up so Paul could hear him purring too. When she returned the phone to her ear she heard a rushing sound like wind, like Paul was outside now; a few voices spoke, a car door slammed, and then everything went quiet.

Paul sighed down the line, and when he spoke she knew he was all hers again. “Fucking hell, love,” he groaned.

“Fucking hell’s right. Where are you headed, Cavendish or back to Mary’s?”

“Cavendish. Want to sleep in my own bed. Though… bollocks, I’d expected to bed down in New York tonight with you, hadn’t I?”

“Ugh, I know, I always sleep better when you’re next to me.”

“Much,” he agreed. “And now… I hope there’s some way to speed things up, but one person I spoke with at Heathrow told me I may have to go through the entire approval process all over again. Last time that took three months.”

Lydia sank into the couch, dread seeping into her bones. “What if you just came back on a tourist visa? One of the short-term ones? Then you could still be here while you reapplied.”

“I’m not exactly in the State Department’s good books at the moment, love.”

“Then I’ll fly out to you,” she decided. “I’ll get plane tickets right now, I’ll—”

“As good as that sounds, having you here next to me,” he said, his voice warming, “I meant what I told you before, you know. You need to save up your vacation days for your special birthday trip.”

“Oh my god, Paul, stay focused,” she snapped. “All I want, more than anything else, is to see you right fucking now. But what if my birthday’s the next time I get to see you? What if you can’t get this thing worked out and we’re separated all that time? You know how crazy I’ll be by December?”

“Not any crazier than I’ll be,” he returned. “Bloody crawling up the walls over here.”

“Biting people’s heads off,” she said, though she felt a little better knowing that they were both in the same boat. “God I miss you so fucking much.”

“I miss you too, love,” he replied. “Stay on the line with me until I get home, won’t you? You aren’t the only one faced with an empty house as soon as you hang up, and I don’t have a Jeff waiting for me, talkative or not.”

Her heart lurched in her chest, and she pulled her cat closer. “Don’t even have to ask,” she said, and she launched into a retelling of her day. She got him caught up on Scott and Andrea’s honeymoon in Cancun, a commission her dad had recently gotten to update an historic town hall in New Jersey. Paul told her about his promo tour, the TV spots she’d seen and the print interviews she hadn’t yet.

“Christ,” he said abruptly. “What if that’s it?”

“What’s it?”

“Well,” Paul said, with a stunned chuckle, “if you think about it, I’ve spent the past two weeks calling out the American government. I’ve got a lot on my mind, you know, don’t tell me to quiet down,” he sang. “Didn’t say it in private, either. Can’t have made too many friends doing that.”

“Paul, if you’ve become public enemy number one for speaking out against an unjust war, that’s so unbelievably hot I can’t even tell you.”

He burst out laughing, sounding lighter than he had in hours. “That does it for you?”

“You know it does, babe. I’ve always preferred the Paul who protested Thatcherism to any other version of you.”

“Thank you, I think,” he joked, in a broad accent.

“I mean it! Look—” She got more comfortable on the couch. At the start of this phone call she hadn’t realized how much she’d be sharing, but apparently today she was in a sharing mood. “I know a lot of people only see you as the Cute Beatle, with your nice smile and your pretty love songs, but… it can’t be a shock to you that I always saw you as more than that. Was more interested in other parts of you, as a person. I valued our conversations more than how attractive your face was – and I would know how attractive your stupid face was. I shared a lot of microphones with you over the years.”

There was a whole lot of noise on his end then, and she listened as the car door opened, Paul’s driver helped him with his bags, and they made arrangements to go to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square early the next morning. Lydia waited as Paul dragged his bags upstairs and then audibly threw himself onto his bed.

“You still there, love?” he confirmed.

“Of course.”

“I know…” He paused. “On my end, I know a lot of people only saw you as the Clever Beatle. Sharp, caustic, witty. But that was why I always preferred you when you were sleeping.”

Lydia winced. “Why, because I’d finally shut up?”

“No, because the protective shell had lifted. You’d taken off your armor, and the real you showed.”

She felt tears sting at her eyes, and she dabbed at them delicately. What a time for a revelation like that. Now she felt even further apart from him, could feel every drop of the Atlantic Ocean that sat between them. “You haven’t been taking pictures of me while I’m asleep, have you?” she said, trying to steer the conversation back to less fraught territory. “That’s creepy stalker shit, Paul.”

“No,” he said, not taking the bait. “I don’t need to anymore. The shell’s gone.” He stopped again. “But that’s why I loved your hands, you know,” he murmured, almost whispering. “You could be so cutting with your words, but your hands gave you away. They were so… graceful. Gentle.”

“Ah. You discovered my deep dark secret.”

“It’s safe with me.”

Lydia laughed. “I guess it’s true what they say. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Feeling very fond of you at the moment, my love,” he teased.

They stayed on the line as Paul got ready for bed, as Lydia tried to find something to watch on TV, as Jeff got bored and leapt from her lap, vanishing downstairs somewhere. But when the hour got too late to ignore, she told him to quit stalling and go to sleep. “After you go to the embassy, text me,” she said. “Let me know what’s going on. If it turns out this really is some kind of retaliation for speaking out against the Iraq War, I’ll put up such a stink in the media they won’t know what hit them. Non-immigrant visa holders have First Amendment rights too.”

“I will,” he promised. “You’ll go to bed soon too, yeah?”

“Won’t sleep as well without you.”

“No,” he agreed, “but we’ll do our best, won’t we?”

They went through a protracted good night, but eventually Lydia hit the red button to end the call. And then the penthouse went quiet, all the life and warmth sucked out of it, as she sat alone in their living room with an old Law and Order rerun playing low.

Lydia never checked her phone first thing in the morning; her brain was still too fuzzy and slow to wake up that she needed to stumble out of bed, exercise, shower, and suck down some coffee before she had the wherewithal to read emails and messages. But when she finally did unlock her phone, it rapidly became obvious that the news had spread far and wide while she slept. She had dozens of texts, some from saved contacts but mostly not, of journalists and reporters looking for her to comment on the fact that Beatle Paul was being kept out of the US. When she checked her voicemail there were another twenty or so brief messages, all along the lines of “Hi Lydia, Jake Tapper with ABC News. Would love to get your thoughts on the recent reports that the Bush administration denied Paul McCartney reentry into the country. I can be reached at…”

Paul’s text was buried in their midst, and basically confirmed what they’d discussed the night before: My lawyer says the official reason is because I overstayed on an expired visa, he wrote, but unofficially it’s because of everything I said promoting Quiet Down.

I’m changing how you’re saved in my contacts list, she wrote back. From now on, Dirk McQuickly shall henceforth appear in my phone as Enemy of the State.

Ha bloody ha xo, he texted back later.

Ringo had reached out to her too, she saw: What have the two of you been up to???

No good, obviously, she replied. You’ve met us, right? ;)

When Lydia got to the office it felt like all eyes immediately were on her. All her colleagues, it seemed, stopped what they were doing to watch as she swiped her keycard at the front, walked through the building, and put her lunch in the break room fridge. “Morning!” she chirped to Matt, passing by the metro desk. “Anything big happening?”

He snorted and shook his head. “Hope you’re ready for today,” he said. “I overheard the editors talking and it sounds like you’re booked solid.”

“Ah well, a journalist’s job is never done,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder as she walked to her own desk.

Matt hadn’t been kidding. The second she got to her desk in the video department she was whisked away by an assistant, who led her to a conference room to meet with several of the higher ups. Her schedule for the day was in fact already filled, wall to wall, barely leaving her any time for a cup of coffee or a bathroom break. They talked at her incessantly, telling her who she’d speak to first, what she’d say, what the position of the Washington Post was (in what was really a personal matter, Lydia thought, not that anyone had asked her) on this issue of the First Amendment and immigration policy.

Before she knew it she was in the small soundproof room where they did TV spots, having good old Mikhail blot her nose and cheeks for the shine, run a hand over her hair to smooth down fly aways, and give her an earpiece. The BBC was first, because of the time difference. And then Mikhail stepped away and turned the TV screen towards her and there was Paul, in a London news studio thousands of miles away, having a lavalier clipped to the lapel of his blazer. He looked up and Lydia knew right away that he’d seen her too.

The BBC clearly didn’t broadcast in HD yet, unlike some of the US news networks, but the quality of the video feed didn’t detract one iota from how wonderful it was to see him, in living color. She reached up and brushed the upper part of her arm, casually, as if she were scratching an itch. A few moments passed, as Paul thanked the sound engineer. He blinked slowly and then brushed his long fingers against the top of his arm too.

They were both okay. She released a small, relieved sigh.

Mikhail counted her in and then a blandly handsome BBC anchor had popped up on screen and in her earpiece, launching into breaking news. “…Sir Paul McCartney, who has spent much of his time over the past several years based in New York, was just last evening denied reentry into America for what the Bush government insists is a simple paperwork mishap, but what some consider to be retaliation for Sir Paul’s politically-tinged anthem ‘Quiet Down’ from his most recent album. With us now in London is Sir Paul McCartney, and also with us remote from New York his partner Lydia Montrose. We’ll begin with you, Sir Paul…”

Lydia felt her heart in her throat. His partner? What about her affiliation with the Washington Post, a newspaper of record? Her job title? His partner? She shot a panicked look at Mikhail, and beyond him to the editor that hovered outside the room, but both of them merely gestured for her to stay focused on what was happening.

“…I can only blame myself for the paperwork angle of it,” Paul was saying, in his guileless way. “I could have been more on top of things, you know, you can make that case of course, but at the same time I had hired people to take care of it for me – lawyers and such. And they should have done!” he said with a little laugh, as if this whole thing were just a minor nuisance.

It felt like ages, and many questions later, before the anchor thought to ask her anything. “Lydia Montrose,” he said, “I imagine this must be quite distressing, being separated from Sir Paul for such flimsy reasons.”

He finally remembered she was here and she got a fucking softball question? Lydia seethed. “It is distressing,” she said, lifting her chin slightly, “but, honestly, not that unexpected. A 2005 study done by the American Civil Liberties Union clearly shows that since 2001 the Bush administration has made a habit of going after protestors, either by unlawfully arresting and detaining them, or by limiting their First Amendment right to protest at events where the president or vice president appear. It goes without saying that such actions are completely unconstitutional. So if Paul wants to write and perform a song about speaking truth to power and not remaining silent, he should, and must, be able to do so without any threat of retaliation hanging over him from the White House.”

“That’s right,” Paul said, over whatever lightweight nonsense the anchor was going to ask her next, “even though I’ve still got an English passport, as a visa holder I’m also entitled to protection under the American First Amendment.”

“These opinions Paul expressed were made on English TV, on English soil,” Lydia added. “Last time I checked, the American government can’t dictate what appears on television in other countries.”

“Some people may be surprised,” the anchor cut in quickly, “to hear you publicly holding such a specific political viewpoint, Sir Paul.”

“They shouldn’t be,” Paul replied, with an indulgent expression on his face. “The Beatles refused to perform in front of segregated American audiences decades ago.”

“And they also refused to appear with Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in Manila,” Lydia chimed in. “And lest we forget, ‘Get Back’ was initially written in response to Enoch Powell’s racially-charged ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968.”

“Enoch was a drag,” Paul said mildly, tossing his hair as if to accentuate his massive understatement. “We were hardly the only ones who thought so.”

Lydia pursed her lips, trying not to laugh. “So no,” she concluded, “no one should be shocked to discover that Paul, a citizen of the same world the rest of us all live in, has thoughts about the political climate in which we currently find ourselves.”

The anchor, perhaps sensing that he’d lost control of the interview, sought to end it quickly after that, which Lydia was more than okay with. Once he’d thrown to the next story Paul gave her one last look, a dozen or more unspoken thoughts in his eyes, before the video feed abruptly ended.

And that was just their first interview. Next they were on French television, where Lydia took over the majority of the questions. Even more than in the BBC interview, she spoke baldly about the White House’s appalling record on free speech issues, and making room for people to speak out against the unpopular wars in the Middle East. Paul wasn’t expressing a particularly unique viewpoint; he just happened to be the victim of an administration taking advantage of a simple paperwork error to push its own narrative.

Paul texted her after: I know I’ve said it before, but your French is so dead sexy xoxo

Keep talking First Amendment and free speech to me babe, it turns me on ;), she texted back.

They didn’t interact when they were on camera together, not in any real way. Once they moved over to the American networks and appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN, some of the anchors tried to get them to say something personal and private in front of the world, but neither of them rose to the occasion. The first time a reporter for CBS asked if they had anything else they wanted to say to each other, Lydia piped up with “Hey Paul, while you’re out do you mind picking up a loaf of bread? We’re running low.” Humor, like flirting, was always a great distraction from the seriousness of what was going on.

Because after spending most of the primetime hours live on TV that day – which she’d done alone after about 3pm, with it growing late in London – she had the false sense that they might have actually accomplished something meaningful. Maybe the State Department, not wanting to look bad by making an example of a globally-famous celebrity, would cave and make all this bureaucratic garbage disappear. But when she returned to her desk at the ass-end of the afternoon, emotionally drained and dragging her feet, she saw one more text from Paul.

If I’m lucky, I might get an interview for a new visa in November. Late November.

How long would the review of your case take? she asked.

I’m feeling hopeful about early December, he replied.

Lydia sank back in her desk chair, boneless and despondent. So her worst fears would come to pass after all.

Chapter Text

Every day was more or less the same. Had been since they brought Sean home from the hospital, over four years ago.

It usually went like so: He woke up to his clock radio asking if he liked pina coladas and getting caught in the rain, which meant it was time to start his morning. He got himself and Sean up and fed, looked after his son until about lunchtime, and then the nanny took over so that John could “work,” though he somehow never ended up working very much. Mostly he read books Yoko told him to read, or got stoned and watched TV, or listened to music and tried to work out the chords to songs he enjoyed (so his guitars wouldn’t forget what he looked like, as he told Fred one day; Fred just stared at him like he was losing it). And the next day was the same thing, and the next day after that, and the day after that too.

On bad days, when John thought he might go completely mad and no one would even bother to notice, he’d go walking in Central Park to feel the bracing sting of fresh air in his lungs, the sun warm upon his face with its English tan. Sometimes he went out even when his star chart advised against it. The reason was obvious, if less than admirable to confess out loud: going out in public guaranteed crossing paths with at least one person who recognized him, who wanted an autograph or a picture or a friendly word. It felt good to still be liked by someone, somewhere.

Underneath that was an even more shameful reason, one John wouldn’t fully admit to himself. But the truth was that there were times when those fans in Central Park were the only people who touched him, aside from Sean, for weeks on end.

He wondered sometimes why Hazza and Richie didn’t ring him up more often, drop by for a visit from time to time. They always made some excuse about not being able to get through because Yoko screened his calls, which was complete bollocks. But he’d check with Fred just to be safe, to make sure Fred knew calls from the lads were to go straight to him without delay. It wasn’t like he was asking for much, but a lousy phone call every now and then would be nice. They were his friends, weren’t they? As for Yoko, she made an appearance once every few days or so, and only perfunctory ones at that. She slept somewhere else, in the downstairs apartment, because she was apparently far too busy to go up a single flight of stairs at the end of the day to the bedroom they used to share. He didn’t want to bother her, though, so he didn’t ask what she was up to.

One particular afternoon, no different to any other, John was looking out the window to see if a Central Park excursion was a feasible way to pass the time before dinner. It was mid-January, which in New York could be a dodgy prospect. Dismayed by the sight of snow, unwilling to stretch his legs at the cost of getting frozen solid, he shuffled back to his music room and turned on the television. He switched a few channels, seeing nothing interesting, and eventually settled on the six o’clock evening news.

He was about to reach for his stash box and start rolling a joint when the news reader said Paul’s name.

“…late breaking news this evening from Japan,” Peter Jennings said to the camera, “where former Beatle Paul McCartney has been arrested at Tokyo’s Narita Airport for possession of marijuana. The British musician, who was traveling to Japan with his wife Linda McCartney and the band Wings for a series of concert performances, apparently was discovered with more than a half-pound of the illegal substance in his luggage…”

“Fuck a pig,” John blurted out. He watched in shock as the broadcast switched to video of Paul being escorted away by two uniformed policemen, looking like he was just as stunned by recent events as John was.

He laughed, at first. So much for spending the night at his and Yoko’s Tokyo hotel; Paul instead would be treated to the dubious hospitality of the local constabulary. “You prize idiot,” John shouted at the telly, ignoring how his heart lodged in his throat, “how could you be so fucking stupid? Why didn’t you have the roadie carry it? That’s what they’re bloody for!”

Fred stuck his head in the door. “Everything okay in here?” he asked.

“Oh fuck off,” John snapped. Sometimes it got so a body could hardly have any privacy in this godforsaken flat.

The following night happened to be one where Yoko graced him with her attendance at dinnertime, so John regaled her at length with everything they were saying on the news. Paul had spent the night in jail, and it was looking like there’d be a second night as well – a first in his and Linda’s magical fairy tale of a marriage. Yoko, inscrutable, merely sat there on the other side of the table through John’s entire monologue, which was complete with sweeping hand gestures and dramatic impersonations that he thought were pretty accurate.

“What’s that look, Mother?” he said at last, frowning. “Don’t act like you don’t feel even a little bit of schadenfreude at this whole thing.”

Yoko took a sip of her drink. “I don’t, actually,” she said.

“I don’t think I believe you.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, “but I don’t waste very much of my time thinking about what Paul and Linda are up to. I don’t really care what happens to them, to be honest, and I’m a little surprised that you do.”

John sat up straight. “I don’t either,” he was quick to say, “it’s just… you know. Paul fucked up!”

“Yes, I heard you the first time.”

He deflated a little, frustrated by not getting the reaction he’d wanted. “It must be eating him up inside,” John tried, “knowing that he did something less than perfectly.”

“I suppose.” Yoko speared a slice of cucumber and chewed it slowly.

“Bloody hell, Mother!” He threw his fork onto his plate, furious. “You’re acting like you knew this would happen!”

Yoko only stared at him.

“Did you?” he asked, startled. “We knew they were going to Japan on tour and going to stay in our hotel. Did you—” John’s voice dropped to a whisper as he leaned across the table, eyes widening. “Did you and Green cast a spell? Is that how they caught him?”

“Oh, John,” she said, her tone never changing. She raised an eyebrow. “What an idea.”

Which, he realized later, laying in his bed alone, wasn’t exactly a denial. Of course he hadn’t wanted Paul and Linda staying in the same hotel suite that he and Yoko considered theirs – it was just bad karma, everyone knew that, he wasn’t being unreasonable. But nor had he wanted all of this. Paul in some manky jail cell, separated from his family. Facing, so the news said, up to ten years in a Japanese prison if he was found guilty on all charges.

Not that he cared what happened to Paul, mind. He didn’t let Paul live rent-free in his head, not old Jock Lemon. But somewhere, somehow, they’d gone wrong. Maybe there was another spell Yoko could cast to undo it all, or undo it just enough to let Paul out of jail and out of Japan, unmolested.

That would be all right. John could live with that. Paul had gotten his comeuppance and that was enough; it was time to end all the nonsense and let him go back home so they could share an umbrella the next time it rained…

—stand under my umbrella -ella -ella, eh eh eh, under my umbrella—

Lydia jolted awake as her alarm clock started blasting pop music. Groaning in exhaustion, she reached over to her bedside table and blindly bashed around until she hit snooze and Rihanna went silent. Her arm dropped, dangling over the side of the bed, limp with relief. She’d been burning the candle at both ends lately, and today was probably going to be another long grind of trying to juggle her work, field dozens of media requests, and research the American immigration system. What it actually meant was little progress and less sleep.

The moment she rolled onto her back and her head hit the pillow again, however, her last dream came flooding back. Her stress levels of late meant she was having flashbacks almost every night, though most of them had been benign, even pleasant, up to now: remembering the first time they played a gig with Rich; the pride she’d felt handing Mimi the keys to her new cottage; walking across the golf course in Allerton with Paul as the sun set overhead, painting them gold like antediluvian gods. But this 1980 memory, a sad, lonely snippet of his life from after Sean was born but before work started on Double Fantasy, had been very different. Unhappily so.

She sat up, pushing back the covers, and Paul’s empty side of the bed stretched out to her right. He should have returned home to her over three weeks ago. For twenty-five full days she had missed him, dreamed about him, raged against the people and government policies that currently kept them apart. But she wouldn’t think about that just yet, not before she’d had her coffee.

Her days all started the same way, more or less. When she awoke there was a text for her from Paul, letting her know he was thinking of her and hoping she had a good day. He often sent a selfie too, which he usually took while sitting out in the back garden of Cavendish. She’d study every line of his face, worrying about him, wondering what he might not be telling her about how he was, and then she’d send him a selfie back. That morning, feeling tired and unwilling to put forth the effort, she sent him a picture of herself without makeup, her hair loose around her face.

By the time she was dressed, fed, and ready to leave for work, he’d sent his response: How do you get more beautiful each time I look at you? xoxo

She stayed in the lonely safety of the penthouse for as long as she dared, then descended in the elevator and walked out into the scrum of paparazzi that always waited for her outside. They dogged her for the multiple blocks it took to walk to the nearest subway station, peppering her with questions about Paul, how she was fighting against the system to bring him home, asking what she thought of the fact that “Quiet Down” had shot to number one on the Billboard charts in response to his troubles. Lydia kept her head lowered and eyes focused on the pavement beneath her feet until her train stopped at the platform and she managed her escape. Only then, once the train doors slid shut, could she breathe.

It had been a lot, these past few weeks. The amount of attention she’d been getting had actually been on the wane that summer, with the media much more interested in the likes of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams splitting, or Brad and Angelina and all their dozens of kids. It had been a relief to see the number of photographers dwindle over time, and a gut punch to see them come surging right back.

Once she arrived at the office and got to her desk, she touched base with Curt, the editor assigned to oversee her and make sure that every interview she did put the Washington Post in a positive light. Though the TV news cycle had long since ground onto the next big thing, Lydia was still doing print and radio interviews almost daily. She’d been trying hard to shift the narrative away from her being just the sad left-behind girlfriend, to her being someone who actually knew a lot and had a lot to say about the US’s visa programs. Whether she was actually changing people’s minds… well.

She had another full day scheduled, though she was quick to spot that her first interview, with The New Republic, wasn’t until 10:30. “I need something fancier than the break room coffee,” she declared, out of the blue. “I’ll be right back.” She darted out of Curt’s office before he could object.

Stopping by her desk to grab her purse, and then swinging by the metro desk to talk Matt into joining her, the two of them walked down the block and around the corner to the café on Sixth Avenue that was a favorite amongst most of the Post staff. “You look like you haven’t slept in days,” Matt remarked cheerfully.

“Why thank you,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes. “Funny how that works, when you don’t get enough sleep.”

“Why aren’t you sleeping?”

She gave him an incredulous look. “Um… the obvious reasons? I don’t need to spell out what’s been happening, right?”

“Not precisely,” he said, opening the door for her as they entered the café. It was busy this time of morning, the air thick with pop music and the hissing of the espresso machine, so they got in line. “But there is such a thing as pacing yourself.”

“Tell that to Curt.”

“I would, if you think it’d help.”

Lydia frowned and turned away, pretending to study the menu. “You don’t have an inside track at the State Department, do you?” she asked dryly. “Particularly the Bureau of Consular Affairs? That’s probably the only thing that would help right now.”

“Mm, I can offer you a corny joke instead. What’s that one I heard, the one about the chiropractor…”

“Don’t think I know that one.”

“Someone in the office told it to me,” Matt said, smirking, “about a week back.”

Lydia snorted, caught by surprise. “You dork, that was awful!” she cried, and they both laughed.

While they ribbed each other, an older woman suddenly walked up to Lydia, a deep frown on her face. “Well,” she snapped, cutting Lydia’s mirth short, “it’s a good thing Paul can’t see how unconcerned you are about everything he’s going through right now!”

Lydia inhaled through her nose and released it slowly, clenching her fist at her side. “Paul will be gratified to hear how worried his fans are,” she said evenly, remembering just in the nick of time what Paul’s media rep had told her to say in situations like this.

“More worried than some people, clearly,” the woman grumbled. Nose in the air, she marched out of the café with all the offended pride of a fan club president. A few people around them, in line and seated at tables, stared at her until Lydia stared back, silently challenging them.

A man in paint-spattered coveralls, who had just gotten his own coffee at the counter, stepped up to her then. “Don’t listen to that lady,” he confided in her, ducking his head a little closer to hers. “She don’t know what the hell she’s talking about.”

Lydia gave him a tight smile. “Thanks.”

“Yeah. Anyway, that song Paul wrote is pretty great, me and the wife love it. You take care now.” He saluted her with his coffee cup and continued on his way.

Both she and Matt were quiet a long time after the man left, stepping forward slowly as the line shortened in front of them. Lydia could tell Matt was shooting her sideways looks but she didn’t return them, instead glaring at the menu again like it had done her wrong. “Everyone’s busy thinking about Paul,” Matt said, keeping his voice low, just loud enough to be heard. “Who’s thinking about you, Lyd?”

She stared at him, startled. “I’m fine.”

“Sure,” he said with a shrug.

“What? You think that’s new? That lady’s like the fifth person this week to come up to me and say shit like that.”

Matt gave her a look that was endlessly sympathetic, and his eyes dropped to her side. Only then did Lydia realize her hand was still tightened in a fist; she loosened it, shaking out her stiff fingers. And that night, when she and Paul had their usual evening call, she just talked to him about what she’d gleaned from her contacts at the State Department regarding his case. She made no mention of what she was forced to deal with in public.

“You’re a wonder, you know,” Paul said, as they said their goodbyes.

“Bet you say that to all the girls,” she brushed him off.

“There aren’t other girls, love,” he said, sounding confused. “There’s just you.”

On Saturday she invited Nicole out for drinks, which her friend readily agreed to. Nicole let her rant nonstop about all the interviews she’d had to do, the number of people who had approached her with their unsolicited opinions about her behavior. “I ask you,” Lydia said, waving a wild hand, “what the fuck is wrong with my behavior?”

“Nothing,” Nicole swore. “Way above fucking reproach, babe. Your interviews are smart and informed and you are never anything less than a classy lady.”

“Also,” Lydia said, “lest I forget, I’ve refrained from punching a very high number of people in the past week. I want credit for that too.”

Nicole gestured like she was touching Lydia’s shoulders with a sword. “Credit!”

“I am a modern woman with a degree from an Ivy League university,” Lydia declared, holding up her drink. “I work for a prestigious paper of record. I am not just somebody famous’s girlfriend.”

“Girl, preach! Burn down the patriarchy!”

Somewhere around her third drink the delicate balance tipped. It had been building up inside her for so long that the dam would’ve eventually burst – if not that night, then on some other occasion. The public wanted her to act in a specific way, either as the gold digger they thought she was or as the tearful girlfriend forcefully separated from her man, totally unable to function without him beside her. But she was neither, and wanted none of it.

The paparazzi had kept her from celebrating her own brother’s wedding, and stalked her every time she set foot outside her home. Music fans, lavishing praise on Paul for the subversive lyrics of “Quiet Down,” didn’t realize that she’d written eighty percent of them, that those were her political convictions on display, and that line so many of them kept quoting – A line drawn in the sand with a gun in your hand, That isn’t fair play at all – that was hers. She’d written that, not Paul. And yet right now he was doing spots on various British TV programs performing that song to wild applause, while she was being treated like a joke. The celebrity media published unflattering photos of her, plastering them all over TMZ and Perez Hilton and Page Six and the Daily Mail, making her look fat and ugly and stupid and slutty. They acted like they had the right to vet Paul’s dates, and the authority to declare her lacking.

It was a lot. And finally, it had become too much. Lydia, letting go of all her grievances in one fell swoop, forgot to pace herself and ordered round after round of drinks.

She blinked and found herself stumbling through the Meatpacking District, the night air cool on her bare legs, moments before Nicole led her into a dark, throbbing dance club heaving with bodies. Her vision melted into prisms of light and lasers piercing endless black, vibrating with music almost too loud withstand. After listening a moment, she realized the song thumping over the sound system was the same one she’d been hearing so much the past several months: “Now that it’s raining more than ever, Know that we’ll still have each other, You can stand under my umbrella…”

The edges of the world went fuzzy. All the insults and annoyances of her life over the past seven months fell away, shoved to the side where she didn’t have to think about them anymore, into the slippery darkness of oblivion. They’d all tried but no one could define her. She wasn’t anyone or anything but herself, the Bitch Girl Wonder, the same person she’d always been, or at least the same person she’d been since 1940—

The person who loved Paul. God did she miss him, with an ache that felt bone deep. Did anyone know how hard it was to wake up each morning to an empty bed and an empty house? To have just his voice or his picture on her phone instead of the solid physical presence of him – the weight of his hands on her hips, the clean scent of his cologne, his deep voice murmuring in her ear – the soft heat of his mouth, the bristle of his unshaved cheek as it brushed against the bend of her neck. Her love for him was like a living thing, her need a desperate curl in her belly…

“Back off, motherfucker!” Nicole was shrieking. Lydia blinked again and found herself with her friend’s arms wrapped around her, Nicole placing her body between Lydia and some guy who looked like he’d just been cast in a movie to play Jersey Shore Bro #2.

After a few moments that passed too slowly, Lydia realized her dress had been rucked up above her waist. “Fuck,” she said, and started shifting around her clothes.

“Bitch was asking for it,” the bro yelled back, looking smug. “Practically threw herself at me!”

“You touch her again I’ll murder you dead!” Nicole screamed, creating a little open circle around the two of them. She bent down awkwardly to grab something off the floor – Lydia belatedly recognized her own purse.

“Oh hey,” she mumbled, “that’s mine.”

“Come on, Lyd, we’re going,” Nicole said, her voice shaking. She pressed the purse into Lydia’s hands and then guided her through the throngs, through clouds of cigarette smoke and seas of neon glow sticks, until Lydia stepped out and heard her shoes hit the concrete of the sidewalk.

“Nic,” she said. The reality of the past few moments was finally catching up with her. “Did that guy – did he—”

“I don’t know,” Nicole said with a dry sob. “I turned away for just a minute and you’d disappeared. You scared the ever-living bejesus out of me, Lydia.”

She blinked again and they were in the back of a taxi, speeding away. Lydia gulped as tears filled her eyes. “Can I stay at your apartment tonight?” she whimpered, her voice edged with panic. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Of course,” Nicole said. She threaded her arm through Lydia’s and held on. “I’m not letting you out of my sight until I know you’re okay.”

“I’m not,” Lydia sobbed. She rubbed ineffectually at the tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m not okay. I’m not okay.”

Nicole had a fold-out couch in her apartment, which she opened and made up with an extra set of bedsheets and blankets. Lydia would have helped but the room was spinning too much, so she sat as still as she could in a kitchen chair and willed herself to not be sick. “I should’ve known this would happen,” Nicole muttered. “At least I stopped drinking early on. You’re lucky I’m mostly sober right now.”

“I’m not mostly sober,” Lydia confessed. “I’m very drunk.”

“No shit, Sherlock. If I’d known you were dealing with so much I would’ve cut you off too, but…”

Whatever else Nicole said, Lydia didn’t hear it. Vaguely she recalled Nicole nudging her until she took the sweats her friend was loaning her, and she had a swimmy memory of stepping into the bathroom to change and wash her face and gargle some mouthwash. But after that her head hit the pillow and there was nothing else, that was all there was.

“…say it again, you’re not talking to her until I say you can.”

Lydia buried her face in her pillow, wondering who was being so rude as to awaken her. Her sweats were nice and warm and the blanket on her bed was so soft. The pillow smelled off though, she realized dimly, as she became more and not less awake. It wasn’t the detergent she always used; it was someone else’s brand.

“Cool story bro, but you’re not talking to her until I’m satisfied that you’re not going to blame her for what happened last night. If you even think of suggesting that she brought it on herself, I swear to god, I don’t care if the queen knighted you or made you emperor of the universe, you’re not getting within a hundred miles of her.”

Lydia groaned and rolled over, feeling like she was adrift on a violently rocking boat in the middle of the ocean. Was it possible to be drunk and hungover at the same time?

“Hey – we both care about Lydia. But only one of us can legally be with her at the moment, right?”

She hadn’t been like this since college. Lydia groaned again, hoping for mercy or pity.

Nicole – because she now remembered she was sleeping on Nicole’s couch, not in her own bed – took her phone call into the other room. Lydia blinked open her eyes just as she heard a door shut. On the end table beside the couch she found a tray with water, orange juice, and a bottle of Tylenol, because her friend was the real queen, no matter what that old lady in England thought. As she popped the cap on the Tylenol and swallowed two white pills, she tried to remember what had happened the night before. Not enough of it came back, a realization that made her shudder.

By the time Nicole returned Lydia was sitting up, arms wrapped around her knees, feeling slightly more human by inches. Nicole sat down on the edge of the sofa bed and handed Lydia her phone. “Hey,” she said hesitantly, “how are you feeling?”

“How bad is it?” Lydia asked her bluntly.

Nicole winced. “So… there’s pictures from last night. TMZ published them a few hours ago.”

“How bad?” she whispered again, her stomach dropping. She’d gone out last night to push back against media attention; was it possible she’d only made it worse? “Like… on a scale of one to Britney Spears shaving her head, how…”

At the heartbroken look Nicole gave her, Lydia felt the world tilt sideways. “Oh god,” she cried, as she dissolved into a puddle of tears. Nicole scooted around until her back was against the back of the couch, and she held Lydia tightly as she wept.

“That guy,” Lydia cried, “that Jersey asshole, did he—”

“Shit,” Nicole hissed. “No, don’t you remember? That girl came up to us after and said she saw the whole thing. He stuck his tongue down your throat but he didn’t put his hands anywhere, which I know isn’t much better. Your dress got pulled up when I yanked you away from him.”

“I don’t remember,” Lydia wailed. “How much don’t I remember? Oh fuck.”

Her phone started buzzing on the mattress between them. “It’s your mom,” Nicole said, glancing at the screen.

Lydia answered immediately. “Mom,” she whined, “Mom I didn’t mean to drink so much.”

“My sweet Ladybug,” her mom sighed, and Lydia cried even harder. “I can be there in an hour or two—”

“No, don’t – the paparazzi will be worse today, don’t come down here, promise me.”

“Then promise me you won’t be alone, Ladybug,” her mom insisted. “Promise me someone’s looking after you right now.”

She handed her phone over to Nicole, who took it and said “I’m here, Carol. She’s okay.”

Lydia couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried so hard and for so long, or spent so much time in bed, doing nothing but feel sorry for herself. After hanging up with her mom, Nicole sat with her and out it all came – everything she’d tried to drink away the night before flooded out with her tears, all her frustration and rage and sadness and self-consciousness. It was like throwing open the curtains and getting all the dust bunnies out of every nook and cranny, dragging out the hundreds of little injustices, insults, and jabs she’d endured but forcefully shoved away, determined not to think about them.

“You’ve been keeping all this bottled up for months,” Nicole marveled, shaking her head. “And you’re the one in therapy, girl. You’re supposed to know how to deal with all this stuff the right way.”

“My shrink doesn’t know,” Lydia said, her voice hoarse. “The past seven months, it’s all… public attention. Fame. My shrink doesn’t know anything about that, she’s just a regular person.”

Nicole paused. “Speaking of celebrities, Paul called you earlier this morning. I answered your phone.”

Lydia pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Yeah? Did he—”

“He saw the photos. But no pressure, Lyd,” she said, squeezing her forearm. “Don’t feel like you have to call him back right away.”

“Was he angry with me?”

“No,” Nicole hedged, “not quite. He was really worried and wanted to make sure you were somewhere safe, but I also got the sense from him that he was at high risk of blurting out something unhelpful, so I told him to back off for now until you were ready.”

“Unhelpful how?” Lydia asked, frowning.

Nicole gave her a look. “What do men always say when a woman gets in a sticky situation? ‘What was she wearing?’ ‘Had she been drinking?’ Like it’s entirely our fault.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Lydia said. She hugged the blanket to her chest. “It wasn’t.”

“Exactly.”

She ended up staying throughout the day, huddled on Nicole’s couch, drinking coffee and nibbling plain toast. After a hot shower where she scrubbed every bit of herself with rough, frantic strokes, she stayed in Nicole’s borrowed sweats with no plans to go anywhere beyond the couch. They spoke only of other subjects: how badly the Jets were playing, who each of their friends were dating at the moment, how Nicole’s doctoral studies were going, what had happened on the shows they were watching. Neither of them went online for anything, not even when Nicole said something about expecting an email from her advisor, or Lydia was trying to recall the name of a guest star from the second season of The Office. If there were photos of Lydia out there it was as if, for that afternoon at least, they didn’t exist.

When it got dark enough, Lydia pulled back on her dress from the night before and called a taxi to take her back to the Upper East Side. Nicole offered to go with her but Lydia declined, saying she wanted to just go home and sleep. They hugged before she left. “Call me,” Nicole said. “Text me. Send me a telegram or semaphore signals, anything. Please don’t let yourself get in a bad way like last night again.”

“I promise. Nic…” Lydia blushed. “You know you’re like my long-lost sister, right?”

“And I like you more than my actual sister,” Nicole replied, smiling sadly, “so there you go.”

Lydia felt wrung out and limp in the backseat of the taxi, watching the streets of New York glide by. When the car pulled up outside their building and she saw the crowd of photographers lying in wait, it almost made her want to drive away, out of New York, out of the country forever. How could she keep dealing with this? But she dug deep for strength, clung to her courage, and ran as fast as she could past them to the door. To where it was safe.

When the elevator reached the penthouse and the doors slid open, there were lights on. Noises in the kitchen. Had Paul managed to get a new visa after all? She ran up the stairs, her heart lodged in her throat—

—only to find Rich and Barb making dinner at the stove. They both turned at the sound of her footsteps, and Rich gave her a kind smile. “Lydia!” he exclaimed. “There you are, love. Dinner’s almost ready, if you’re hungry?”

The disappointment she felt was profound, a heavy brick dropping in her stomach. As if she hadn’t cried rivers of tears earlier that day, her eyes filled again. “Richie,” she burst out, “it’s a fucking mess.”

He cast aside his spatula and strode across the kitchen to her, pulling her into his arms. “I know, love,” he murmured. She threw her arms around him. “Paul sent me. I’m here until he can come back home.”

She had no words for that, nothing adequate to express the extent of her gratitude. So she just hugged him harder.

Chapter Text

As soon as her clock radio went off the following morning, she had but a few moments of ignorance before she remembered all. Lydia felt such profound dread about the day to come that she promptly called in sick at work. “Good idea,” Curt responded, instead of saying something normal like Take care, rest up, feel better soon. That was proof enough that she had to stay away from the office today.

Jeff meandered into the bedroom soon after, feet padding softly on the carpet. “Hey there, baby boy,” she cooed, holding out her arms. He took the hint and jumped up onto the bed to join her, and they had a nice long cuddle as the sun rose over gray, rainy New York. It was a moment she could live in forever, she thought wistfully. How nice it would be to stay here, feeling Jeff purr contentedly in her arms, while the rain came down and people ran around outside with places to go, things to do.

If only it were that easy. What she really needed was a time machine, one that would take her back to Saturday afternoon, so she could opt for dinner instead of too many drinks with Nicole later that night. Or maybe she should go back to early August instead, and she could ask Paul about the status of his US visa before it ever expired in the first place and started this whole fucking mess. Or maybe back to the spring, April or May, when they were being photographed all over Manhattan and she had opted to just not think about or notice the media following them around. As if the photographs they took went into a void and weren’t viewed by hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people around the world.

And that was the real root of the issue, wasn’t it, that as soon as she had paparazzi tracking her on the regular again, she had regressed back to bad habits? As John her superpower had been compartmentalization, a fast way to deal with issues but ultimately not a very healthy one. Had she learned nothing in the past several years? Why did she keep making amateur mistakes like this when she knew better? “Jefferson, my airborne darling,” she murmured into his gray fur, “how fucked am I?”

When her stomach started growling too loudly to ignore, she went downstairs with Jeff in tow, following the scent of whatever Rich and Barb had started cooking up for breakfast. “Good morning, love,” Rich said gently, seemingly remembering how fragile she’d been the night before. He kissed her cheek and offered her a vegetarian spin on a traditional English fry up. “Food’s on, if you’re hungry.”

“You’re my favorite, Rich,” Lydia declared, before sitting at the kitchen table and tucking in.

Barb and Rich kept a lively and wide-ranging conversation going between them, talking about their kids and grandkids, recording and touring, holidays and parties. Lydia merely nodded, with an occasional “Mmhm” or “Yeah” thrown in as required. In actuality, she was still a hundred miles away. Now that she’d gone longer than twenty minutes without being hungover or crying for the first time in thirty-six hours, the full import of what had happened over the weekend was sinking in. Somewhere out there on the Internet, there were horrible pictures of her appearing drunk and out of control – beyond that, like if someone had captured the moment when her dress got pushed up, she didn’t dare speculate. But drunk and wild was enough; drunk and wild meant days (if not weeks or months) of damage control and mending fences. It meant hoping that she hadn’t totally destroyed her chances of ever working for the New York Times or any other reputable news source.

Lydia looked up from her plate when she realized Rich and Barb had both stopped talking. They were merely looking at her with quiet understanding. “Paul rang me this morning, you know,” Rich murmured. “He’s hoping to hear from you soon.”

“Not until Nicole says it’s okay,” she said with a snort. “Besides, I…” She looked down at her lap and petted Jeff, rather than finishing her sentence.

“I’m here as well,” Rich added. “Anything you want to talk about.”

“Like what? Like how to deal with negative media attention?” Lydia chuckled darkly. “No offense Rich, but this is something of a different animal.”

He looked down at his own empty plate, frowning a little. “Reckon you were a kid then, and it wasn’t on your radar,” he began slowly, “but… I was a right drunk bastard back in the Eighties, you know. Loads of photos of me out there, making a fool of—”

“And how many of the tabloids speculated on how many people you’d fucked to get to where you were?” Lydia snapped. Jeff meowed as her hands tightened on his fur. “How many times did they point out how fat and undesirable you looked? How many photos did they carefully crop to make it look like you were fooling around with someone other than Barb? How many millions of people saw them on the Internet?”

Rich’s face went carefully neutral, and then Lydia really felt like shit. “Love, I know it’s not exactly the same, but—”

“Putting it mildly,” she blurted out, and she grabbed Jeff and headed upstairs to the roof.

It was chilly and still drizzling a little when she stepped out onto the patio, so she pulled her robe close and cradled Jeff in the gap at her neck. Only when she’d sat down and gotten comfortable on the couch under the canvas awning did she look down at Jeff and tell him “I just need everyone to stop pitying me. I can’t stand it.”

Jeff blinked his green eyes up at her in sympathy.

“I got myself into trouble this weekend,” she announced, staring out at the treetops of Central Park across the street. “Big trouble. But I can get out of it. Because I’m smart and pretty and capable.”

Okay. So. That was her mission statement. The question was how to go about actually salvaging her reputation, which was easier said than done. Lydia pulled her phone out of her pocket. Hey, she messaged Nicole, should I grow out my bangs?

Five minutes later Nicole responded GIRL what have I told you about making hair decisions when you’re emotional

Lydia snorted. Maybe I should ask Paul.

You’re not being sneaky, Nicole warned her. Talk to him if you’re ready.

She smiled and shook her head. Before she could open her text thread with Paul though, the patio door opened and footsteps came up the stairs to the roof. Lydia sighed and sat up a bit straighter. She prepared to apologize profusely to Rich for being a moody bastard and biting his head off earlier, but the words caught in her throat when Barb appeared on the patio instead.

“This seat taken?” she asked, her hand on the back of a chair. Lydia gestured and Barb sank into it.

“I have something I want to say,” Barb said, clasping her hands together. “You can hear me out and decide to take my advice or not, I won’t be offended whatever you choose. But I actually think I understand what you’re going through right now better than Richie does, as much as he loves you and wants to help.”

Lydia looked down at Jeff again, frowning. “I was an asshole before,” she mumbled. “He didn’t deserve that. I know he wants to help, it’s just…”

“It’s different for men,” Barb finished, “in ways they’ll never know. But I was a Bond girl, so I do.”

Her eyes snapped towards Barb. “Oh god,” she breathed, wilting in embarrassment. “I’ve been so caught up in my own misery I didn’t even…” Barb waved a hand, signaling that it was fine. “But that’s kind of what happens, isn’t it?” Lydia wondered aloud. “The paparazzi shoves their cameras in your face over and over until you feel like you’re at the center of the universe, all by yourself.”

“It can be a heady feeling when it feels like the entire world is cheering you on,” Barb agreed. “But then the more time women spend in the public eye…”

“The higher the odds that you somehow fail to meet expectations,” Lydia said, “or you dare to get visibly older.” She felt herself getting choked up again, so she hugged Jeff tighter. “Oh god. Is this going to get worse?”

“Not necessarily,” Barb said quickly, “which is why you need to surround yourself with a solid support system. Paul tells us you have a great family, and your best friend who was looking out for you yesterday. And you know you can always count on us too, me and Richie. The media has said awful things about me in the past, and Richie was so amazing through it all.”

“He got me through a lot of the Sixties too,” Lydia admitted with a weak laugh.

Barb grinned. “Then you already know. But that way, every time the media prints something awful, you can counter it by speaking to the people who actually know and care about you.”

Lydia just looked down at Jeff, who stared back. She sniffled and wiped at the corner of her eyes. “Thanks, Barb,” she whispered.

“Richie and I will be downstairs if you need us,” Barb said, with a kind smile; she stood and left Lydia alone on the roof.

She continued to stare out at Central Park for a while longer, running her hands over Jeff in soothing motions. Exhaustion crept in, and for a moment she let her head sag back on the couch as she stared up at the awning above her. Not only did she have to deal with repairing her reputation, she also had to make the effort to reach out for help when she needed it. Which, at this point, sounded like a lot. She’d bottled everything up for months so that no one had known she was struggling, but now they all knew. If they really wanted to be there for her, create a support system like Barb had said, it would be nice for it to just… be there, sometimes. Not be something she had to ask for each and every time she felt down. But maybe that was too much to ask, who knew.

Lydia had to psyche herself up first before reaching out to Paul, remembering now how Nicole had said that Paul was “not quite” angry about the TMZ photos. What the fuck did that mean? Lydia mulled over that until it started getting too cold out, so she bundled up and ran down to her bedroom. Curled up on the couch, she finally texted Paul: Nicole says you have permission to talk to me now.

Her phone rang less than thirty seconds later. “All right, love?” Paul asked urgently, and despite his clear worry the sound of his voice warmed her all over.

“Oh, you know me,” she drawled. “Same old same old over here.”

“Christ, when I saw those pictures—”

“I don’t want to talk about the fucking pictures,” and in spite of her best efforts her voice wavered on the words, like she was going to start crying again. Lydia had had quite enough of that, thank you. “I just wanted to let you know I’m okay, and I miss you, and… yeah, still no luck with the State Department. If diplomacy fails altogether, I’m going to start offering sexual favors in exchange for expedited visa applications.”

“Don’t even joke—!” Paul cut himself off abruptly. “I don’t want to talk about the fucking visa,” he forced out. “I’ve done nothing but for the past month and I’m so bloody sick of it, all of it. I want to talk to you. About…” He sighed, long and long-suffering. “I don’t know, anything you want, love.”

“Anything I want,” she echoed. “Okay. Remember that brownstone we liked on the Upper East Side? We got outbid yet again. I think we need to end our quest to move to a new place, the real estate market is just too hot right now. Maybe next year.”

“Good to know, but I don’t really want to talk about house hunting either,” he said, after a brief pause.

“Hm, what does that leave.”

“Ah… How’s work?”

Of course Paul would opt to be distracted by work, his or someone else’s. She rolled her eyes. “You said you didn’t want to talk about the visa,” she replied. “My job is all about your visa and lack thereof these days – I haven’t pursued any new reporting in weeks. My supervisor has been trying to convince me to stage a dramatic scene at the White House, by showing up at a briefing and asking the press secretary why President Bush won’t let you come back to the US. Or, barring that, he suggested I get some cameras to follow me around as I visit senators and State Department officials and try to pin them down on why the visa can’t be renewed right away.”

“What did you say to that?” Paul sounded wary.

“I said no, obviously,” she half-yelled. “Fuck, Paul, you know I’m not about to seek more media attention right now!”

“No need to get loud about it,” he grumbled.

“Then stop—” asking me stupid ass questions, she bit back. She counted to five before speaking again. “So obviously I’m doing great at the moment,” she said dryly instead. “Even keel. Steady as she goes.”

“Lydia, love, I… Richie’s there with you, yeah?”

“He and Barb turned up yesterday.”

“Oh good. I’d hoped… yeah. You know.”

The conversation meandered to a halt. She swallowed back a lump in her throat as the silence stretched on. This was the moment, Lydia realized – the moment where she had to muster up the energy and courage to ask for help, to ask for support, love, comfort, maybe with a little pinch of flattery to top it off, all the things that would get her through the days ahead—

“Lydia,” Paul interrupted her thoughts, “I – I’m going to send you some photos, all right?”

She blinked. “Um. Okay?”

“Great, hang on.” The line went quiet again, though she occasionally heard him hum a little under his breath, or mutter something too low for her to discern.

She laughed after a few moments, needing to lighten the awkward mood. “Uh, Paul, you aren’t sending me nudes, are you? Not that I wouldn’t love that, but—”

“What? Oh, no!” he said. “Christ, is that what people do these days?”

“Some of them, yeah. Except you have to be careful about it, because if things end badly, some guys will use a girl’s nudes as revenge porn online.”

“Christ,” he said again. “Just when I think I understand what it’s like for modern women… Right, check your phone, love.”

It wasn’t instantaneous, but after about ten seconds her phone started vibrating. She opened up their text thread.

And saw the selfie she’d sent him last week, of herself first thing in the morning. She still didn’t think it was a great photo, but since he’d chosen to send it back to her, she could maybe see its charms now.

And then she saw the next photo, from months ago, on a night they had seen an indie band play in Brooklyn. They’d stopped at a Mexican place after and Lydia had fallen in love with a neon sign on the back wall that read MAKE TACOS NOT WAR. Paul had snapped the green light shining on her face, her manic smile as she held up a greasy bag full of tacos. Of course he’d like that one, she thought; that was a face she used to make as John, too.

Then the third photo: her with her brothers, at Scott’s wedding. The photographer had had the three of them pose by themselves but Paul had caught them in a candid moment, when Lydia was gesturing wildly as she told some forgotten joke, Travis was rolling his eyes and grinning, and Scott was looking at his younger siblings with equal parts love and exasperation.

And the last: a photo of herself from the night they wrote “For You (The Sun Comes Up).” Paul, despite his protests that he was a mere amateur, had managed to capture the sun striking her hair just so, her head tilted back and a knowing smirk on her face, the cigarette smoldering between her fingers. She had the casual cool of one of those old photos of a young Joan Didion, an air about her that made it seem like she’d just said something brilliantly witty that the viewer could only wonder at. It was one of the best photos she’d ever seen of herself.

Lydia sat there with her jaw dropped, flipping back and forth between the four pictures nonstop. If she didn’t know better – if this had been someone else – she hardly would’ve known that this girl was the same one who always showed up in the tabloids looking like a pitiable disaster all the time. Those girls were miles apart from one another. Because one of those girls was a manufactured character, one born from the minds of editors and tabloid writers and spiteful people online. The other was a real person, someone loved and cherished.

Paul texted her in their thread: All things being equal, I prefer these pix of you best xoxo

She put the phone back to her ear. “Oh,” she stuttered. “Um.”

“These are the pictures I looked at,” Paul admitted, “after TMZ published the ones they had.”

Speech failed her; she was smiling too hugely to force her mouth into the shapes needed to form words. Even when she felt like absolute garbage, and the media was mocking her mercilessly, Paul somehow never saw anything less than the best of her.

“Are you still there, love?”

She finally pushed out a chuckle. “Yeah,” she said, hoarsely, “I prefer those too. Much better than the crap TMZ has.”

Paul hummed, sounding much happier than he had at the start of their call. “But now wait, tell me more about this nude photo business—” and Lydia burst out laughing harder than she had in days.

True to his word, Rich stayed with her at the penthouse and made no sign of taking off. “It’s been a while since we spent much time in New York,” he said when she asked. “Barb and I are enjoying the sights.” They were there when she got up in the mornings to head to work, and sometimes they were there when she got home, usually with dinner all ready to go. They took her out to eat, out to see shows, out to forget about the world and its judgments for a few hours; whenever Lydia needed to talk Rich was there, and whenever she wanted space he wasn’t. After weeks of living alone in the penthouse with only Jeff and the TV for company, it was nice to feel the place full of activity again.

She heard from Dhani and Julian too, checking in on her, and she assured them multiple times that she was really okay. Dad would probably throw a glass of water at them, Dhani wrote her, so anytime you need me to do that lmk. Lydia laughed out loud at that message, even as she felt a sharp pang. She missed George so fucking much she could hardly bear it sometimes.

Often, over the past few months, she’d found herself wondering what he’d say about this situation. Be Lydia, he’d told her before he died, and though at the time she’d pushed back she understood what he meant by that now. She couldn’t carry herself like she used to as Beatle John, with confidence and wit and intelligence, because the media didn’t treat her like that anymore. She was treated as a person who dared to be female, dared to date a famous man, and she had to act accordingly.

So she tried to do that, in the small space she was still allowed. Paul had had his publicist reach out, and Lydia was finally (reluctantly) learning the ground rules for being a so-called public figure in the year of our lord 2007. The paparazzi didn’t let up on her, so she stopped taking the train to work – rather, she started using Paul’s car service. Instead of taking trips to the Sixth Ave. café for coffee during work hours, she’d give Matt her money and he’d pick up an order for her, without her leaving the safety of the office. She invested in a larger, darker pair of sunglasses and a fashionable wide-brimmed hat, so she could go into Celebrity Incognito Mode when needed. If the photographers closed in on her despite her precautions and got right up in her face, she put on a blank mask of indifference and kept her mouth shut. Any glimpses of her “eccentric” personality were now kept behind closed doors. Move briskly, keep quiet, don’t make any facial expressions: it was a lot of little rules to remember, overwhelming to cope with at times, but if the tradeoff was never seeing herself on TMZ again it seemed a small price to pay.

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, Paul had been barred from reentering the US for sixty-seven days – not that she was counting. He’d filled out another extensive sheaf of paperwork, he’d told her, and gone through the interview process all over again, but no one would tell him how soon he’d have a response. “So that shoots down my political theory,” she mused.

“What theory’s that?”

“That Bush was using you as a campaign tool,” she replied. “It’s an off year, election-wise, and Bush can’t run for president again, but I thought maybe he wanted to look like a tough law-and-order conservative so that some down-ballot Republicans could win in their races. But the elections were already held, and you’re still not cleared to come back, so.”

“Hm,” he said, drawing out the sound. “Maybe it really is just free speech, then. They’re doing to me what they already did to… what’s that country girl group, who said they were ashamed of him?”

“The Dixie Chicks?”

“Yeah, them. Dared to speak out against the administration.”

Lydia snorted. “You’re enjoying this whole Voice of Protest thing, aren’t you?”

“I’m really not, you know,” Paul confessed, with an annoyed sigh. “I’ll happily sing nothing but love songs for years to come if I could just be back with you.”

“Speaking of love songs,” she said, blushing, “I started writing a little something the other day. Not much. Needs some of that old McCartney magic, I think.”

“Brilliant,” he said, sounding thrilled, “let’s hear it!”

Because of all the public furor of the past several months, Lydia’s parents had decided to host their own Thanksgiving dinner at home, with none of the extended family present. Lydia, Travis, and Scott and Andrea made their way from their respective homes up to Westchester and arrived at the house the day before, in the afternoon, as Carol was putting the final seasonings on the turkey. Lydia hugged her mom and hung on longer than she usually would. “My sweet Ladybug,” Carol murmured, and she kissed Lydia’s forehead and brushed her hair back from her face.

“I’m okay, Mom,” she said.

“Are you telling the truth?”

“Mostly,” she admitted. Carol hugged her again and Lydia let her.

Later that night, when Carol and Alan had gone to bed and the four of them were hanging out in the den, catching up and debating what to watch on TV, Lydia glanced at Travis. Scott had known about her for months now, and she’d been agonizing for a while about the right moment to tell Travis. No time like the present. Decision made, her heart pounded in her ears in a steady, fast beat. “I have something important I want to tell you guys,” she declared, during a lull in the conversation.

Scott glanced at her, knowing. Andrea and Travis merely turned towards her and waited.

Lydia sat up a little straighter in her armchair, rubbing her shaking hands together. Had she ever actually said the words out loud, in such a direct way like this before? Everyone else who knew about her had either figured it out on their own, or been told by someone else. Fuck, this was hard. “Um. So… I have memories. From a past life. I remember living another life, before I was Lydia.”

Travis frowned. “What, like you were reincarnated?”

She just nodded, biting down on her lip.

“Huh,” Travis said, in his inflectionless voice. “Cool, I guess.” He tilted back his bottle of beer.

“Is that all you have to say?” Scott asked him, incredulous.

Travis shrugged. “Um… it’s really cool?”

“You’re unbelievable,” Scott cried, throwing his hands into the air.

“When did you realize you had memories of a past life?” Andrea asked.

“Long time ago,” Lydia said, grateful to her sister-in-law for directing the conversation. “When I was in high school, I started doing research to see if anything I saw in my head could be backed up with real evidence. I remembered things like movies I’d seen, books I’d read. And it all checked out, you know?”

“Wow,” Andrea said. “Did you ever remember enough to figure out who you were?”

“Yeah, actually.” Lydia sat up a little straighter. “Uh… In my past life, I was John Lennon.”

Silence fell on the room like a bomb. Travis and Andrea just stared at her. Suddenly anxious, Lydia looked down at her lap, twisting and twisting her fingers together.

“Yeah, okay,” Travis said with a snort. He took a long drink. “You know what the odds are that a, not only do you remember a past life, but b, you happen to have been someone widely known?”

“It explains a lot, though,” Andrea said slowly.

“It does?” Scott asked.

“Yeah. Lydia’s beetle tattoo, when I first saw it, I thought it was supposed to represent Paul. But it looks just as old as the ladybug tattoo, like she got them at the same time. So really, it represents her. Because she’s a beetle too.”

“Wait, seriously?” Travis said, looking at all of them. “You’re not joking?”

“Not joking,” Lydia replied. “Really reincarnated.”

“Remember that cartoon character Lyd always drew when she was little?” Scott prompted. “She called him the Skeptical Man? Wouldn’t you say he looks kind of like Paul McCartney?”

She could practically see the gears turning in Travis’s head. “Holy shit,” he mumbled.

“And remember how she’d get all squirrely every time Beatles songs came on the radio?”

“Now you’re just making shit up,” Lydia complained.

“No, she did,” Travis agreed. “You remember that one time in the car, ‘Yesterday’ came on and she went ‘Not this crap again!’ She was like two years old at the time.”

“Mom yelled at us when we got home,” Scott told Andrea, “because she thought we were teaching Lydia bad words.”

“Lydia knew so many bad words, she was the one teaching them to us,” Travis said, nodding. “Because you were fucking John Lennon,” he declared, turning to her. “So what’s Elvis like in person?”

She gave him a dark look, feeling sick to her stomach. “Who says I met Elvis?”

“Well you did, though. And Little Richard, and Roy Orbison, and Eric Clapton, and…” He looked to Scott. “Help me out here.”

“The original lineup of the Stones. Elton John. David Bowie.”

“Fuck, you met David Bowie,” Travis groaned. “Like back during the Thin White Duke era, right?”

“I don’t think she likes this, guys,” Andrea murmured.

“Did you ever see Jimi Hendrix play live?” Travis asked. “Was he really as good as I hope he was?”

“Obviously, he must have been,” Scott said to him, hitting his arm. “He was fucking Hendrix, man.”

Lydia stood up, holding herself tightly. “Can you just—” She took in a deep breath and let it go. “You’re my big brother and I love you,” she said, glaring at Travis, “even when you’re being a dick, which you kind of fucking are right now.”

He spread his arms. “What the fuck am I—”

“I am your sister,” she insisted. “I’ll always be your sister. I’m the same person I was ten minutes ago, and last week, and last year, and twenty years ago, when we were growing up together in this house. Was I famous once? Did I meet Elvis and Jimi Hendrix and whoever the fuck else? Yeah, I did. But I didn’t tell you who I am so I could brag about – I just…” Her anger lost steam, and her spine sagged. “I just wanted to be honest with you. The past few months have sucked, and I… I’m trying to be more open with the people I care about. Paul and Rich know, and George knew, so I wanted you to know too. I just wanted to be honest.”

Sniffling, she left the room and went upstairs, leaving more silence in her wake.

Chapter Text

All through breakfast the next morning, Lydia felt her brothers darting looks at her across the table in the solarium. Anytime she happened to catch their eye they looked away quickly, thereafter keeping their gaze focused on their parents or their food, even if Lydia spoke to them directly and asked about something, like the Macy’s parade or the Packers-Lions game that afternoon. Only Andrea ventured to speak to her, but that was just to ask her to pass the orange juice. Lydia figured that didn’t really count.

If her parents picked up on the tension at the table, they didn’t let on. There was too much work to do for their holiday dinner anyway, and no time to waste. Carol enlisted everyone to help out with various jobs, from setting the table to making the bread rolls to tossing the salad, and ran the kitchen like a military operation. Lydia was grateful to get pulled into helping her dad make the mashed potatoes, the most time-consuming task; together they methodically washed and peeled three pounds of potatoes while they chatted and caught up.

Though catching up really meant Alan asking variations of “Are you sure you’re okay, Ladybug?” over and over until Lydia finally threw her hands into the air and cried “Yes, Dad, I swear! I’m really okay!”

“All right kiddo, just making sure,” he said mildly, returning to his task.

Carol had timed everything to be done by four, once the football game was over, and right on schedule they were seated in the formal dining room, at a table practically groaning under the weight of all the food they’d made. Alan started pouring everyone champagne and they all went around the table to say what they were thankful for.

“Got a promotion at work,” Travis said, shrugging.

“Our beautiful wedding,” Andrea said, smiling at Scott.

“The honeymoon in Cancun,” Scott said, grinning back.

“I’m thankful for my beautiful family,” Carol said, reaching out and taking Alan’s hand. He joked, “No, I’m thankful for my beautiful family.”

Lydia tipped her champagne flute at them all. “Well, I’m thankful—” She jumped as her phone started vibrating unexpectedly with a call. “God, I’m so sorry,” she mumbled, grabbing it out of her pocket. She was about to send the call to voicemail when she saw who it was. “Hang on, it’s Paul.” Putting down her drink, Lydia ran into the kitchen, knowing how her mom felt about taking calls at the table.

“Love, it’s happened!” Paul said when she picked up. In the background, she could hear the unmistakable hum of a car in motion. “I’m on the way to Heathrow now, my flight leaves in ninety minutes.”

Lydia gaped. “Wait – you got a new visa?”

“Yes! I’m coming home!”

Lydia shrieked. “Oh my god, oh my god!” She screamed and jumped around the kitchen, creating such a ruckus that her mom stuck her head in the room. “He’s coming home!” she yelled to her mom, and she immediately ran for the back door, where her shoes and purse and the keys to her rental car sat.

“And where do you think you’re going?” Carol said.

“Paul got a new visa,” Lydia cried, as if it weren’t already obvious by that point. “I have to go home to meet him!”

Carol gave her a look. “Not right this minute you don’t.”

“Love, I won’t be home for ages yet,” Paul said in her ear, snickering. “Accounting for the flight time and traffic and customs and all that, you won’t see me for another ten hours.”

“But…” The immediate high of his impending return faded somewhat; common sense came back. “I hate when you’re right, you know,” she grumbled, with no heat in it. He just laughed.

Lydia turned back to her mom. “Get started without me,” she said, waving towards the dining room. “Oh – I’m thankful for Paul’s new visa and I’m not thankful for the State Department,” she rattled off over her shoulder as she headed to another part of the house for privacy.

She ended up sitting on the front stoop, curled up in the crisp autumn air, as she asked Paul how the visa had finally come through. It had, ultimately, been pretty anticlimactic: a couriered envelope with the proper forms all signed and dated, sent to Cavendish from the US Embassy. “I thought they might do this, you know,” he told her. “Approve everything on a major American holiday whilst people are distracted by parades and food and things.”

“Yeah, makes sense,” she said. “Maybe it was about optics and politics after all, then. The administration felt that they’d made their point and now they’re done with you, so they want to bury the story and move on.”

“But enough about that,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I want to know what you’ll be wearing when I show up at the penthouse.”

“Sir Charmly!” she gasped, faking shock. All the while she could feel the slow pulse of her blood, the hitch in her breathing, a shivery lick of arousal sparking to life. Paul was finally coming home. “What kind of a girl do you think I am?”

“One who hopefully believes that less is more.”

Lydia burst into giggles and buried her face in her lap. “So that’s not a vote for a nice turtleneck sweater, then.”

“A sympathy vote for the sweater,” he allowed, “but the majority of your constituents are clamoring for something easier to take off.”

“Holy fuck,” she groaned, “are you really going to get me all worked up and then make me face Thanksgiving dinner with my family?”

He laughed again. “You’re right,” he said ruefully, “I don’t want to be hot and bothered on a transatlantic flight.”

“But at the end of the flight you’ll be home,” she said, then she winced. “Ugh, I don’t know why I’m being so weird about it, it’s not like we haven’t been apart before, and for much longer than—”

“This was different, though,” Paul insisted. “Because we didn’t choose it, or plan for it. We weren’t apart, we were kept apart, you know? It was…” He cleared his throat, sounding awkward. “This time felt different.”

“Difficult,” she agreed, with relief. “Really just… shitty all around.”

“Bloody awful. But it’s ending soon.”

“Yeah.” She grinned like crazy up at the trees in her parents’ front yard. “Very soon.”

The noises in the background changed on his end, getting louder and busier. “We’ve arrived at Heathrow,” he said. “I’d stay on the line until I get to America if I could, love.”

“I know. Text me the exact second you land at JFK.”

“I will.” Paul sighed, and chuckled a little. “I fucking love you,” he murmured.

“Language! Are you planning to kiss me with that mouth?”

“Thoroughly,” he replied.

This man was going to be the end of her. “I fucking love you,” she echoed breathlessly, “and I’ll see you tonight.” The moment she hung up, she set a timer on her phone for ten hours; a thrill went through her at seeing the numbers counting inexorably down.

Paul was finally coming home.

The hours dragged. There was no other word for it, how the rest of the day unfurled. Normally, Lydia loved Thanksgiving: the warm nostalgia of being in her childhood home, surrounded by family, stuffed with good food. She always ate way too much (especially when her mom brought out the homemade pumpkin pie), but now she was too excited to enjoy it. Too excited to fully participate in the conversation as Andrea told them about her and Scott’s plans to move from their apartment to a house in Brookline, out in the Boston suburbs. Far too excited to appreciate her mom’s stories about her adventures as a substitute teacher in the local school district.

In the end, she lasted four hours – four hours that felt like four decades. They had finished dinner and dessert by then, cleaned up the kitchen, and were in the den with the TV on. When her dad caught her checking her watch for the hundredth time he shared a look with Carol and made a sweeping motion with his arm towards Lydia. “You’re good to drive, right, Ladybug?”

She instantly leapt from her chair. “I only had one glass of wine with dinner,” she swore. “I’m fine.”

“Well, far be it from us to keep you—”

“Thanks, Dad!” She dove towards him and Carol both, giving them big hugs and planting smacking kisses on their cheeks. “I promise I’ll obey all the speed limits and rules of the road.”

“You better. And text us when you get home!”

She crossed the room to hug Scott and Travis too, then bounded upstairs to her room to pack her suitcase as quickly as she possibly could. When she returned to the back door, Travis was standing there, awkwardly waiting for her.

“Escorting me out?” she asked, as she tugged on her boots and coat.

He frowned. “I just wanted to say… um, about last night. If you were really being serious about the whole, uh, reincarnation thing.”

Lydia rolled her eyes at him. “No, I was just making small talk.”

“You mean it, then. You’re really…” He gestured vaguely.

“I’m really your sister,” she said, looking him in the eye. “I won’t be weird about it if you won’t.” When he looked down at his hands, struggling to say anything further, she smacked his upper arm. “You think about that, Trav. Meanwhile I’m getting out of here. Sayonara.”

The roads back to the City were deader than she’d ever seen them before, what with nearly everyone else in the New York area still at home lazing around in a food coma. Lydia cranked up the radio and sang along with the music as she sped faster and faster, completely disregarding her promise to obey the speed limit. Miraculously, it took just over an hour from her parents’ driveway until she pulled into the garage behind Paul’s building and parked the rental, a new personal record. Not that she’d ever tell anyone about it, but still.

Rich and Barb were in the foyer with their bags when the elevator reached her floor. “Held out longer than we thought you would,” Rich teased her, making a big show of checking his watch.

“Hey, it’s still Thanksgiving,” she said, stepping into the penthouse. “You guys heard the good news from Paul?”

“He called us earlier,” Barb confirmed, slinging her purse over her shoulder, “so we thought we’d better get scarce once we knew you got back from your parents’ okay.”

Lydia pressed a hand to her check, blushing a brilliant shade of red at the implication. “I, um. Well.”

Rich chuckled. “We don’t take offense, love,” he assured her, stepping forward to give her a quick hug. “We’ve already got a room at the Plaza, so we’ll just be off.”

He made to step away to grab his bag, but Lydia moved with him and hugged him again, hanging on tightly. After a surprised pause, Rich returned it with interest. “Ta, Richie,” Lydia murmured, “my dear, dear friend.”

“Of course, love.”

“I’m sorry about all the dickish things I’ve said over the past few weeks.”

“Eh,” he shrugged, pulling back from her, “you’ve been saying dickish things to me for years. Reckon I’m used to it now, you know.”

“Right,” Lydia said, grinning. “Now if I were you, I’d fuck off, because positively filthy things are going to be—”

“Don’t need to hear about it!” Rich sang out, covering his ears while Lydia cackled in amusement.

She maintained her patience until they had dragged their bags into the elevator, hugged her one last time, and the doors shut with a pleasant chime. The moment she knew they were on their way she grabbed her own suitcase and lugged it up to her bedroom, tossing it into the closet to unpack later.

Five hours.

She checked to see that the housekeeper had changed the sheets on the bed, then laid out one of Paul’s white button-down shirts on the bedspread. A hot shower to wash off the rental car, scrub herself head to toe, use Paul’s favorite shampoo. Lydia let her hair air dry into loose waves and pulled on his shirt with nothing underneath it. Jeff, who had meandered into the room sometime earlier, watched her as she danced around the room, singing to herself, setting out and lighting some candles. Anxiously, she checked the countdown clock on her phone.

Four and a half hours.

“Fuck a pig, bro,” she groaned. She looked at Jeff. “Calm down,” she said. “That’s what I need to do. Calm the entire fuck down.” Jeff meowed, which she took as a full-throated agreement.

After blowing out the candles, Lydia shucked off Paul’s shirt and put on her regular pajamas, then headed down to make a cup of tea and watch TV. She had the news on first, and what should come up after a few minutes but a re-airing of an earlier on-the-fly interview with Paul, as he strode purposefully through Heathrow. He looked so good in his dark wool coat, with that dashing grin on his face, she could just eat him up. “Yeah, glad to be going back to New York,” he said into the reporter’s microphone, and when he said New York, he really meant her. Lydia squirmed happily.

Once the news moved on to other headlines of the day, she changed the channel and settled in to watch reruns of Frasier, and if she was still looking at her phone every few minutes to check how much time was left on the countdown, well, Jeff wasn’t telling anyone. But the potent combination of the late hour, a mug of hot tea, and a bellyful of Thanksgiving food knocked her out before long.

Her phone buzzed sometime later, rousing her from a sound sleep. Her neck was stiff from the awkward way she’d lain on the couch arm; Jeff was nowhere to be found, probably lurking wherever it was he went when he couldn’t be bothered with her. Blinking fuzzy eyes, Lydia focused on the tiny words on her phone screen: Landed! xoxoxo

Heart pounding, she shut off the TV. Tossed her mug into the dishwasher. Back into the white shirt, pajamas cast aside. Candles relit. She jumped onto their bed, absently fixing her hair as she wondered how much traffic there was between JFK and the penthouse. And his bag – how long would it take to get from the plane to luggage claim? She nodded off again trying to guess the exact number of minutes.

Sometime in the very small hours of the morning, Lydia found herself snapping awake without quite knowing why. The candles had all burned down even lower, lending the room a warm, dreamy sense of unreality.  She checked her phone and saw that there were still about sixteen minutes left; she canceled the timer and tossed the phone aside. Inhaling deeply, stretching a little, Lydia looked around the room, wondering what had disrupted her sleep.

Then she heard the footsteps on the stairs up from the foyer. The roll of suitcase wheels on the kitchen floor. Keys falling to the countertop.

Lydia sat up at once and positioned herself on the bed so Paul would see her the moment he walked in. She fluffed her hair, making sure it lay just so on her shoulders—

Fuck this. What was she doing? She’d waited long enough.

She leapt from the bed and ran out of the room down the hall and there he was, at the top of the stairs, mere feet in front of her. He stopped on the topmost stair and she launched herself towards him, landing in his arms and squeezing him as hard as she could, hands scrabbling across his shoulders and the back of his head, unable to settle in just one place at first. She clung to him so forcefully she trembled, muscles straining with the effort of hanging on, but nothing on earth could have persuaded her to let him go. His arms around her were locked just as tight, tightly enough that she could feel every feature of his coat and shirt pressed against her chest and stomach. He was here, he was home, he was here.

“Love,” he said. He held her even closer. “Do you remember, in ’64, ’65—”

“The elaborate handshakes,” she said. “All the back slapping.”

“Isn’t this—?”

“God, so much better.”

They both chuckled at that, thinking back to the big performances they’d put on when they reunited after a long time apart. As if they’d fooled anyone, least of all themselves. Her world was just better when Paul was in it, and Lydia had long ago ceased denying that fact.

After a long, fraught silence, Paul murmured in her ear, “If we stay like this much longer, you know, we might get stuck here forever.”

“Is that a promise or a threat?” she asked.

He let loose another breathy laugh, brushing his lips under her ear. Lydia shivered against him, feeling warm all over, and tears unexpectedly welled in her eyes. She blinked furiously to clear them away.

“Are you crying, love?”

“No way, how dare you,” in a blatantly watery voice.

“Yeah, me neither,” he said, just as she felt a drip against her neck.

Lydia moved away then, drinking in the sight of him. She pushed his hair back from his forehead, traced the unshaven line of his jaw, brushed her fingertips against the curve of his lips, as if making sure he was exactly as she’d last seen him. “Hi,” she whispered.

Paul smiled brilliantly, eyes darting all over her face. “Hi.”

“Are you really okay? The angio—”

“I’m absolutely fucking amazing, love. Are you all—”

“Better now,” and she hugged him again, hanging on for dear life. “But I’ve been on pins and needles for the past ten hours.”

“I could’ve flown across the ocean under my own power,” he said, his voice vibrating in her bones. He pressed a lingering kiss to her collarbone that shot through her like fire, and started slowly mouthing a line of kisses up the side of her throat. “Wanted to. Anything to go faster. Get back to you.”

Lydia sighed, arching a little to give him better access. Whatever else she might have wanted to say melted under the softness of his lips, the urgency of his hands pressing against her lower back. Gently, she extricated herself, and took his hand to lead him down the hall, into their room. He glanced around at the low-burning candles, but just for a moment, because they only had eyes for each other.

She took another step back. Lydia could see the precise moment he realized she was wearing one of his shirts – the head-to-toe sweep of his eyes, the quick intake of breath. He rapidly closed the distance between them again and kissed her hard, one hand tangled in her hair to hold her in place as he pressed himself against her, tilted her head to the best angle. She moaned low, dragging her fingers down his chest, and he thrust shallowly against her. It wouldn’t take very long to set her off, she realized, but he was right there with her.

The November chill from outside permeated his heavy coat. Lydia pushed at his shoulders, tugged and yanked until it had fallen into a heap on the floor. Then the blazer underneath. He helped her pull off his t-shirt and fumble with his belt and jeans. She backed up onto the bed and he crawled after her, pinning her beneath his weight and settling in the cradle of her thighs as he unbuttoned her shirt so slowly she thought she’d go insane. “Unwrap you like a present,” he mumbled into the crook of her neck, and Lydia keened – every kiss he gave her, every brush of his hand, the scratch of his blunt nails against her skin, the slide of his legs against hers, made her hotter and hotter. She panted with it, sucking in each breath like it was her last but kissing him like if she didn’t she’d die.

“What do you want?” he asked her, when they were both wrecked and frantic.

She looked up into his dark eyes, breathing hard. And his words brought her hurtling back to earth – she thought of all the silent, lonely nights she’d spent in this very bed over the past several weeks, trying to figure out what she’d missed, if there were anyone else she could contact at the State Department who could help her. All the dreams she’d had of Paul, missing him, wanting him. All the days of enduring sideways looks and backhanded comments, people looking at her askance and deeming her to be unworthy.

“Love,” he said. He brushed his fingers underneath her eyes and Lydia realized she’d teared up again, all kinds of emotions bubbling up inside her and jostling for dominance.

“What do I want,” she repeated. “So many things.” He kissed away her tears, lingering on each one. “Can you make me forget the last two months?”

“Sorted,” he said, with a rueful grin. “I’ll have one of those as well.”

She gave him a tremulous smile. “I want – I want to be the Lydia you fell in love with,” she whispered, embarrassed, “not the Lydia who’s been in the tabloids.”

He paused, frowning down at her. “You always have been,” Paul said, “you never stopped, you know.”

“I know, but…” She looked away. “Never mind,” she said quickly, “I’m being stupid, let’s go back to the part where you were—”

Paul bent and pressed another heated kiss to her collarbone. “You know what I thought, the first time I saw you? That day at the Plaza?” He brushed his lips against the shell of her ear, making her shudder beneath him. “I laid eyes on you that first time and I thought ‘Christ, I’m in so much trouble.’”

“Did you know right away?” she asked him, suddenly needing to have his answer.

“Not that day,” he admitted. He kissed lower, and lower again, heading for her navel. “But I thought you were so fucking beautiful, even if you weren’t who you said you were. Would’ve fancied you either way.” He slid down her body and rested his cheek against her lower stomach, thinking. “I reckon I knew for sure… Hm.”

“When?”

“I think it was actually at your waitressing job, you know.” He tilted his head up to smile at her broadly, his nose crinkling. “You putting on that ridiculous French accent, yeah? Banging on about socca, and I made that crack about the English calling it football. You made this face like you were holding in your laughter, and I recognized it immediately. Heather started complaining about you as soon as you walked away and I had this thought of ‘I knew it, I knew Heather and John wouldn’t get along.’ Like I’d already decided without realizing.”

“Figures,” she said with a snort. “Of course me acting like an idiot is what settled the question.”

He rose up above her, looking serious. “You’re not an idiot.”

“Tell that to Perez Hilton.”

He grunted, annoyed, and pressed a hard kiss to her mouth. Claiming her. She thrilled to be claimed. “You’re the cleverest person I know,” he insisted. He pushed aside her unbuttoned shirt so she lay completely bare before him. “And the kindest. And the funniest. And the sexiest.”

She shivered. “Don’t get out much, do you, Macca.”

“I like that no one really knows who you are,” he said, lining himself up and slowly pushing inside her; she whimpered at the easy glide. “I like that I do. I know you. I know—” He cut himself short with a choked off noise. “Bloody Christ, Lydia, were you always this tight?”

“Flatterer,” she gasped. “Maybe it’s because no one’s fucked me since you left,” and at her words he jerked his hips helplessly against hers, burying himself even deeper.

“Yes,” he hissed. “Because you’re mine.”

“So predictable. You possessive bastard.”

Paul pulled back just enough to wink at her, at the same time that he withdrew and snapped his hips against hers again. “You love it.”

“I love it.” She locked her ankles around him and pulled him closer. “I love it. I love you.”

“I fucking love you,” he groaned, “I’m so fucking in love with you.”

Lydia threw one hand above the pillow, bracing herself on the headboard. “I’ve loved you my whole life.”

“Show off,” he said, laughing breathlessly. “Always… need to go one better.”

“Pot, kettle, Macca!” He laughed a second time, hard enough that his movements slowed to a halt. “Wait, no, don’t stop Paul, I take it back, come on, keep going, fuck—”

He pressed his forehead against hers, his body curling around hers. “Let’s never be kept apart again, love. Yeah?”

“Deal.” She sealed her promise with a kiss, her whole heart behind it.

She thought that her tears would be gone for good by the time she finally came, gasping and shouting his name, but instead they flowed more furiously than before. They left winding trails down her cheeks, which she brushed at until Paul took over. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No, no,” she assured him. “Happy tears.”

“Christ,” he marveled, when he’d regained his breath, “I’ve only been home a few hours and I feel so…” He ran a hand through his hair, looking a bit stunned.

“Well Paul, that’s what happens when you get your end away.”

He poked her in the side. “My eardrums tell me I’m not the only one who did, you know,” and they giggled. She crowded in close and kissed him, which he lazily returned, not trying to start anything up but just be as near to him as possible. He hummed after a long while. “Soft,” he whispered against her lips, with a warm smile.

“Yeah, you are now,” which reduced him to laughter again.

He buried his face in the crook of her neck. “So much better,” he said quietly. “After these last two months…”

“Yeah.” Lydia put her arms around him; he mirrored her a moment later. “Same.” When she at last fell asleep they were still lying like that, entwined together.

The next morning, Black Friday, Lydia had already requested and gotten the day off from work. While her original intention had been to research the immigration system, the same as she had nearly every day for the past several weeks, Paul had a much better plan that involved them being in bed most of Friday getting reacquainted. It wasn’t until the following day that she finally came up for air and bothered to check her phone, and saw that Nicole had texted her late Thursday: Saw the news! Get it girl!!!

It's been GOTTEN ;-* Lydia texted back.

Never able to be still for very long, Saturday morning found Paul back to his usual routines: getting up early, doing yoga, making business calls. He was in the kitchen when she shuffled downstairs, bustling around making coffee and toast and scrambled eggs and whistling a chipper tune. Lydia made a beeline for him and dotted kisses all over his face until he decided she’d adequately paid the breakfast tax and gave her her plate.

It was amazing that she was able to eat anything. It was far more enticing to just sit at the kitchen table and flirt outrageously, snog extravagantly, poke and tickle each other and talk the other’s ear off. Long before she’d finished her toast she ended up in Paul’s lap. Her coffee tasted better sitting there, she argued, and Paul had laughingly decided he couldn’t fight that logic as he pressed his mouth to the back of her neck.

After a comfortably quiet lull in their conversation, his arms tightened briefly around her. “We’ve had a shit few months,” he began slowly.

“Oh, so you noticed?” Lydia deadpanned.

“Which is why I think I should let you know now what my plans are for your birthday.”

She lifted her head from his shoulder. “This the super-secret vacation you’ve been mentioning?”

“None other, love. I know your birthday is still a few weeks away,” and he shifted around until he could reach into the pocket of his dressing gown. “But I thought it might be a nice change to have something, you know, fun to look forward to.”

On the table landed two nondescript plane ticket envelopes and Lydia, apropos of nothing, found her heart in her throat. “Domestic, right?” she asked, frowning. “Your new visa—”

“I can leave the country if I like,” Paul said with a smirk. “And as it turns out… I like.”

“Okay, Mystery Spice,” she snarked. She reached for the envelopes to peek inside. “For all the buildup around this whole thing, you better…”

The rest of her words died unspoken when she saw their destination. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t real life. Any moment now she was going to wake up and Paul would still be in London, fighting to get back to her.

Paul squeezed her, looking excited. “Of course, I can always change the trip if it doesn’t suit the lady.”

“Don’t you dare,” she blurted, staring at him. “Oh my god. Don’t you dare – Paul!” She tossed the envelopes back to the table and grabbed him by the ears to shower him with more kisses while he laughed.

“I take it you approve, love,” he murmured against her mouth.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” she murmured back.

“I see what you did there.”

“Oh good, I was worried I wasn’t being obvious enough,” she said, and they both burst into ecstatic giggles.

She grabbed the envelope to look at the tickets again, just to make sure their reservations hadn’t changed in the last thirty seconds. They hadn’t.

In three weeks’ time, she and Paul were really going to Paris.

Chapter Text

He pleaded the need for a ciggie after a long day of sightseeing, and it worked. Exhausted, relieved, John shuffled out to the wide balcony of their hotel suite, threw himself into a chair that was horrifically uncomfortable, actually, and lit up. His first exhalation of gray smoke rose and dissipated into the balmy night sky. The anger simmering under his skin didn’t.

Go to Paris, they’d said. You’ve been touring nonstop and need a break; you’ve earned it, they said. So has Cynthia, your good little wife who loves you and supports you and had your son. The two of you deserve this little belated honeymoon, they said.

And he’d agreed, at first. Once Brian suggested it, he’d latched onto the idea of a visit with both hands, like a lifebelt. Paris. Paris, with its parks and restaurants and air of romantic suspense. Walking through its streets you felt like anything could be around the corner: an unprepossessing museum with incredible paintings by the European masters, a bustling café with the smell of delicious bakery treats wafting through the air. The flea markets, where merchants sold all sorts of bits and bobs so you had something unique to bring back to the family at home. The French were obsessed with American jazz and blues, the record shops full of imported discs from across the ocean, and the thought of digging through stacks of albums and taking the most likely offerings into a listening booth for hours appealed to him. He was sick of the sound of his own manky voice, sick of his twanging electric guitar, the endless screeching of mad preteen birds, and needed a palette cleanser like the newest Little Richard record, or Roy Orbison. In Paris he could feel something like himself again.

So off they went, just as the heat of summer started fading into the sharpness of autumn. They stayed at a very posh hotel, the George V, because that’s what posh people did and he was apparently posh now, though John hesitated at the suite’s threshold when he saw how daunted Cyn looked. It was far bigger than anything they were used to, far more intimidating. Everything in the elegant room was screaming out for John to stomp his dirty boots all over it, to put out his cigarette on the armchair or spit chicken bones on the carpet. Maybe they should’ve just gone to the seaside, like Paul and Richie. And for a moment, even though they’d been in each other’s hair for weeks on end, John desperately missed Paul and Richie.

“How lovely,” Cyn finally decided, putting on a brave face that showed she was going to make the best of things. “What a lovely room, John, isn’t it?” He supposed that meant he wouldn’t be spitting on the carpet after all.

But, the room sorted, something else felt off from the moment they arrived. This was a wrongness that felt more than the mere sensation of being a fish out of water. By their third day in Paris John realized that he had only ever known this city as a single lad, utterly skint, with a few quid in his pocket and only a vague idea about what he wanted to do each day. There was no pressure to ‘do Paris,’ like he had to cram as much tourist shite as possible into each day. Now, as a famous pop star and a wealthy man, he and Cyn couldn’t just aimlessly wander about; they had a personal guide, and a chauffeured car, and a discreet plainclothes copper Brian’d hired who acted as their security. Now, Paris hid certain attractions and put up more mundane ones on offer instead. He and Cyn went to the Eiffel Tower and looked out from the very top, because that’s what you did in Paris and Cyn had never been. They visited a restaurant Cyn had read about in Reader’s Digest, which was fine, nothing special. Every place they went to felt like an item dutifully checked off a to-do list, and the more they did the more John felt he had to do even more, because no matter what he knew he couldn’t ruin this trip for Cyn. So they also went to the Champs-Élysées and he spoiled her with presents, like a real Hermes scarf and a bottle of Chanel No. 5., which made prim Miss Powell blush and smile in delight, and that was all right, he reckoned.

(Was this all it meant, being rich? Buying more and more stuff? He’d thought having money would mean more than this. He’d think about that later.)

All the while, with every passing day, there was this feeling of creeping dread. Gone was the thrilling anticipation of earlier visits, where John felt his heart beating in his chest and knew he was alive and about to discover something brand new. This wasn’t the Paris he remembered – it was somewhere else. An entirely different city. The quality of sunlight setting overhead wasn’t the same; the smell in the air, the looks on people’s faces, the sounds of bustling markets. All distressingly off.

John exhaled through his nose, watching the cherry on the tip of his cigarette shifting in hues of red and gold and orange. They were headed back in the morning so John and the lads could finish recording their next album. Both of them were ready to leave: Cyn missed Julian, she said, and come to think of it John did as well. Or he missed someone, at any rate – he kept looking over his shoulder as though expecting to see someone where there was no one at all.

“John,” Cyn called from inside. “Shut that window when you come back in? It’s so cold out.”

“Yeah, will do,” he called back. He dropped what was left of the cigarette to the floor of the balcony and ground it under the heel of his boot. Without looking out at the view of the city, he stood and reentered their hotel suite, thinking about their train to London the next morning.

As asked, he shut the balcony door and drew the curtains for good measure, blocking out the view. What did he care? Paris was a bit shit, anyway.

They arrived midmorning, after flying all through the night from JFK. Lydia, who was hardly ever able to sleep much on planes, managed to convince Paul to take a nap with her so they could be fresh that night for dinner – their first meal together in Paris since 1966.

As they curled up in their big soft hotel bed, she kissed the corner of his mouth. “First kiss in Paris,” she murmured.

“First of many,” he said, grinning sleepily back at her.

The sun was still hanging low in the sky when she unglued sticky eyes and forced them open several hours later. Paul slumbered away, breathing softly, one of his hands curled around hers. Taking advantage of one of the rare times she was up before him, she snuck into the bathroom, showered, and pulled on one of the new outfits she’d bought just for this trip: acid wash skinny jeans, a deep green turtleneck sweater, and a black vegan leather jacket.

Paul, with a magnificent case of bedhead, was humming under his breath and digging through his suitcase when she emerged from the en suite in a puff of steamy air. His cheery tune cut off abruptly when he looked up and saw her standing there.

Lydia shivered at the heat in his eyes. “Did you have someplace specific in mind for dinner tonight?” she asked innocently, as she put her hair up in a ponytail. “Or should we just head out and see where our feet take us?”

“You’re not wearing that,” he blurted out.

She smoothed a hand down her hip. “Hm. Fact check says… no, actually, I’m wearing it at this very moment.”

He shuffled closer, his eyes running up and down her body. “No,” he said, sounding dazed, “you’re absolutely not.”

“Oh really?” she teased. “Who’s going to make me take it off? You and what army— Paul!”

Later, as Lydia lay naked in bed watching an equally naked Paul order room service, she nudged him with her foot. “Just so you know,” she said, after he hung up the hotel phone, “all the tops I brought with me are turtlenecks. Hope that’s not a problem for you.”

“Evil one, you are,” he growled, and she cackled and squirmed as he started mouthing along her neck and sliding his hands to some rather interesting places.

Paris, she thought excitedly. Twelve days in Paris. Twelve days of nothing but this.

But the next day was Lydia’s birthday, so Paul insisted that they should at least try to see some of the city. Both of them got into Celebrity Incognito Mode, coordinated with Paul’s ever-present security detail, and set off for a proper French breakfast at a café down the street from their hotel. When the waiter stopped by their table Lydia ordered their food in French, and Paul stared at her like she’d hung the moon.

“What should we do today?” Paul asked her later. “Birthday girl’s choice.” He had a smudge of cherry filling on his lip from his tartine; Lydia brushed it away.

“Oof,” she groaned, when a huge yawn cut off her first attempt at answering. “Ask me again when I’m not suffering from jetlag. Besides, you said you’ve been planning this trip for months, so I assume you have some ideas.”

“A few,” he said, shrugging, which Lydia interpreted to mean he had lists and lists. “But I thought you should get the pick of the lot.”

“Birthday girl picks whatever her sexy, thoughtful partner wants to do first.”

Paul blushed and looked down into his cup, swirling the bit of coffee left at the bottom. “All right,” he said. He gazed up at her through his eyelashes. “I’ve wanted to bring you to Paris a long time, you know?”

Lydia bit her lip, trying to temper the big goofy grin that wanted to split her face. “I know. Months and months, you said.”

“Years and years,” he corrected. “Since… I don’t know, maybe since we started dating.”

She rolled her eyes, to hide how her stomach had swooped at that. “You’re batting a thousand right now in the romance department,” she teased. “Will you be able to keep it up during the entire trip?”

Paul tossed his hair. “Haven’t had any trouble keeping it up so far, have I?”

Lydia giggled at that and hit his arm. He knew she turned into a twelve-year-old when it came to dirty puns and double entendres.

Breakfast was perfect for exactly forty minutes. That was when Lydia noticed someone a few tables away, trying to take a photo of them. And two people standing in a doorway across the street, gesturing at them while they fumbled for their own phones. And a double take from someone walking by, who stopped and nudged the person with them.

Lydia polished off her second cup of coffee. “Time to be on our way,” she said to Paul, who’d already seen what was happening. He sent a text and a few moments later a black car pulled up on the street, to whisk them away from prying eyes – and the now growing crowd of people loitering around the café.

As it turned out, her initial guess had been right: Paul had made all kinds of plans for this trip, all of which were flexible and easy to start depending on what they felt like doing at any given time. He’d arranged for them to get a private tour of the Louvre, so that was their first stop. An elegant tour guide greeted them when their car pulled up and took them through various galleries, giving them history and fascinating details about some of the more prominent masterworks housed there. Lydia was attentive, drinking in the sight of paintings she’d been aware of her whole life but had never had the chance to see in person. Far off they could hear the dull roar of distant crowds in other parts of the museum, but where they were, they had the great masterpieces all to themselves.

But Lydia didn’t really start having fun until Paul bent and mumbled in her ear, “Ask her something in French.”

She ducked to hide a little smirk before turning to the woman. “What was the original purpose of the Nike of Samothrace, do you think?” Lydia asked. “Was it part of a larger piece?” Their guide, surprised, replied back in French, and they chatted about the statute possibly being part of a fountain, or perhaps an offering to the gods, but how of course all theories were speculative due to the missing dedication inscription. As the three of them moved from one side to the other of the majestic, broken Nike, Lydia could feel Paul’s hand pressing at the small of her back, his thumb moving in tiny circles. As Lydia asked about when the statue had been first discovered, the throaty French words rolling off her tongue, he slipped his entire hand under her shirt, leaving a hot brand against her skin.

When the guide turned to lead them to the next stage of the tour, Lydia whirled on him. “And I’m the evil one?” she muttered, before she tugged on the lapel of his coat and kissed him hungrily. He returned her ardor in full force.

Their guide coughed somewhere behind them, cutting things short. Lydia’s face was hot with embarrassment for a solid twenty minutes afterwards.

It was slightly less than an hour later when they reached the gallery housing the Mona Lisa: La Joconde herself, the most famous portrait in the Western world. And after a lifetime of being bombarded nonstop by the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic expression in pop culture – on t-shirts and coffee cups, on kids shows, in movies – Lydia was dismayed to find that the actual, original painting was… somewhat underwhelming. Far smaller than she’d expected, it was encased behind bulletproof glass and lit with a modern LED lamp that the guide explained was made specifically for the Louvre. She was safe, Mona Lisa: no air, nor UV light, nor clumsy human could touch her or hurt her in her glass coffin.

Without the usual crowds of people jamming close to get a glimpse, with just the three of them in the entire gallery alone, Lydia thought she looked small and tired and forgettable.

They had lunch and visited another museum after that – the Marmottan, home to the largest collection of Monets in the world, and Lydia spent the afternoon strolling past water lilies and train stations and cathedrals in the dying sunlight. She spent an inordinate amount of time in the gift shop (she had multiple people to buy souvenirs for, after all) and Paul stood next to her as she did, talking about how he had a dinner reservation at a tapas bar and tickets that night for the Nutcracker at the Paris Opera.

“Then maybe we can get a nightcap after, yeah?” he said, once he’d gone through the itinerary for the evening. “Great way to start our trip. And this is just our first day!”

Paul wasn’t incapable of relaxing. And yet today, that seemingly wasn’t what he was aiming for. So far I’ve been in a train and a room, and a car and a room, and a room and a room, Lydia thought. Blinking it away, she pasted a smile on her face. “Sounds perfect. Let me just buy this paperweight for my dad and we can head out.”

She was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. She held her tongue through dinner (which was absolutely delicious) and the opera (which was stunningly beautiful), but by the time they were sitting at a tiny table for two, sipping cocktails while her phone ticked over to midnight, Lydia leaned forward and threaded her fingers through his. “Is… is my birthday hard for you?” she asked, not caring to beat around the bush.

Paul frowned. “Why would it be?”

“The obvious?” When he kept frowning at her, genuinely confused, she took pity. “There’s only one reason,” she said, “why my birthday is in December now. I wondered if maybe… I don’t know, that night was on your mind. If you wanted to talk about it.”

He looked away and sipped at his drink, rather than answer right away. “On my sixth birthday,” Lydia said into the silence, “I started crying right after we cut the cake. I didn’t know what I know now, so everyone just thought I was upset because I’d finally realized what a raw deal December babies get.”

“Raw deal?” Paul repeated.

“My birthday is eleven days before Christmas. People usually only give me combo gifts, one present for both days.”

“Is that why you cried on your sixth birthday?” he asked, his voice low.

Lydia sighed, rubbing her thumb over the back of his hand as she thought back. “I cried because… I don’t know. I didn’t remember it clearly yet, couldn’t have said what it was, but there was some residual terror, I think. Of being in New York in December.”

His hand tightened around hers. “It was… that was the worst day of my life,” he said, looking down at the table. “But I don’t hate your new birthday. I—” He tossed his head and gazed around the cocktail lounge, probably scanning the room for nosy eyes and ears, and Lydia saw the glisten of unshed tears there. “It’s one of my favorite days, actually. The fourteenth of December, 1980, and the second of June, 2001. The days you came back.”

Lydia teared up too, and squeezed his hand. For a moment they just grinned at each other, a hundred words unspoken between them. “Still batting a thousand,” she whispered, and he laughed.

On their drive home, as Lydia thought longingly of their luxuriously soft bed, she gazed out the car window at the passing scenery. The elegant shapes of the lampposts, the bustling happy noises from cafes still doing a rigorous business this late at night, Christmas trees and wreaths adorning outdoor markets strung through with twinkling fairy lights—

--and a small fountain that she was certain she’d seen before.

She sat up in her seat to look at it before their car sped away. “What is it, love?” Paul asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just thought… I don’t know, I’m tired.”

At the hotel, Paul handed her a wrapped package that was obviously a CD case. “Just so you know,” he said, “I didn’t get you a combo gift. Happy birthday, love.” Heart in her throat, she tore off the paper to reveal a blank CD, another mix with his familiar handwriting all over it. “It’s um, you know, a lot of the songs we liked and listened to on repeat back then.”

“Back when that meant lifting and lowering a needle in just the right spot,” she said, and she skimmed over the titles and saw songs by the Del Vikings, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and her first true love, Elvis. “Damnit, I don’t have my Walkman anymore,” she said with an annoyed groan.

“Ah, but luckily for you your sexy and thoughtful partner already thought of that,” Paul joked, and he pulled out his iPod and a headphone adapter. “The mix CD’s already been turned into an iTunes playlist.” He shook his head as they untangled their respective headphones wires and plugged them in. “Could you’ve ever imagined something like this, the last time we were in Paris?”

“I thought we were all going to be living on the moon by the year 2000,” Lydia deadpanned, while Paul snorted, “I hadn’t thought about how we’d listen to music.”

“Still waiting for my flying car,” he joked. Once their headphones were in place he hit play and Lydia closed her eyes as Roy Orbison started crooning about only the lonely. Paul gathered her in his arms and they swayed a little, side to side, her head pressed to his heart as it beat steadily in her ear. She held him close and wrapped herself in a time long gone that they’d once shared together, a time which had felt like it would last forever and yet seemed so perfect it must never have happened at all.

The relentless tourism didn’t stop, though. Every day was packed with things to do, places to go: the Notre Dame, and the Champs-Élysées, and the Arc de Triomphe, and and and. Lydia was tired of faking her smiles by the fourth day, especially once the world media figured out where they were and were on alert for their every appearance. Walking through the Tuileries while trailed by a crowd of yelling photographers wasn’t exactly her idea of fun on vacation.

Her phone rang on the fifth morning, while they were in their room getting ready for a drive out to see Versailles. She glanced at the caller ID and picked up. “Isn’t it the middle of the night in New York?” she said.

“Three AM,” Nicole announced, slurring her words a little. “We just had a balls to the wall surprise engagement party for Robby and Megan. Should’ve been there, babe, it was insane.”

“Robby and Megan are getting married?” Lydia echoed, jaw dropping. “Oh my god.” She turned away as Paul entered with the room service breakfast they’d ordered. “Is she pregnant?”

“What a question!” Nicole cried, howling with laughter. “What is this, 1962?”

“No, it’s just he’s kind of a man whore, and they’ve been majorly on-and-off for a while, haven’t they?” Lydia said, through her prick of annoyance. Sometimes people got married because of unplanned pregnancies; it wasn’t anything to make fun of. “Trying to figure out why they’re getting married when it doesn’t seem like a such great idea on the surface.”

“Yeah, some of us were pretty shocked too. Shocked he proposed, and shocked she said yes, frankly.”

“Oh my god, right? Marriage isn’t for everybody,” Lydia said, taking her coffee from Paul. “There a pool going yet for when they break it off?”

“Victor wanted to start one but Jessica thought that was too mean,” Nicole said, the eyeroll audible. “But anyway, the inside story is I guess Megan’s, like, the youngest in her family, and all the rest of her siblings are married now, so there might have been some pressure to just go ahead and pull the trigger.”

Lydia sipped her coffee. “Well that’s a great reason to do something,” she snarked. “Everyone else’s doing it! Might as well! Hey baby, let’s get married!”

Paul left the room just as Nicole replied, “So I take it that means Paul isn’t popping the question as we speak.”

She almost choked on her next sip. “I’m sorry, hi, what?”

“Hi,” Nicole said, with a tipsy laugh. “Lyd, you’re in Paris at Christmas with like the most romantic man on earth. You two are either fucking on every available flat surface, or getting engaged under the Eiffel Tower. Or both, jeez, you two definitely strike me as really good multitaskers.”

“Oh my god,” Lydia groaned, just as Paul reentered with their breakfasts and set them down on a table by the window. “Would you cut that shit out? I’m not getting engaged anytime soon, I swear.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Paul go very still.

Lydia froze too, realizing what she’d just said. Realizing what he must’ve heard from her half of this ridiculous conversation. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck—

“Hey, I have to go,” she said, making up some lame excuse. She hung up as soon as she could and tossed the phone onto the bed.

“Was that Nicole?” Paul said, his voice too bright. He sat before his plate and started hacking away at his omelet like it’d insulted him. “We’ve got thirty minutes before the car arrives to take us to Versailles.”

Lydia sat across from him. “Paul—”

“I ordered you the parfait, hope that’s all right,” he said over her. “How’s your coffee?”

“Fine. Babe—”

“You know what, let me call my assistant, I forgot to check if our tickets for the Philharmonic are all arranged,” and he stood and left the room.

He hadn’t swallowed a bite of his breakfast.

Versailles was a shitshow.

Paul was distant and quiet the entire day, stone-faced, whatever he might have been feeling hidden behind dark sunglasses that he didn’t take off even when they were indoors. The paparazzi hovered outside, never far away, and when two Australian tourists approached Paul for a photo he did the unthinkable: he turned them down and turned his back on them before they could even say another word. Lydia followed in his wake, her heart in her throat. She distracted herself by chipping away at her lengthy souvenir list in the gift shop, but that only occupied so much of her time.

In the ride back to Paris, Paul stared out the car window, thwarting all her attempts at starting up a conversation. After awhile even she gave up.

And she turned to look outside just as she spotted that fountain again. It was there and gone before she could properly study it. But this time, on a hunch half-formed, Lydia opened up the Maps app on her phone and dropped a pin on the spot where the fountain sat.

Paul collapsed into a chair once they were alone in their hotel suite, frowning darkly down at the rug. Lydia put her gifts away in her luggage and returned, planting her hands on her hips. “Dinner, then?”

“Sure,” he mumbled.

“Anyplace in particular?”

“Room service is fine.” He heaved a sigh and said, “Don’t go to too much trouble.”

Lydia shook her head. Then, kicking off her shoes, she strode across the room and draped herself across his legs; his hands jumped up to steady her as she settled on his lap and lay her head on his shoulder. “Paul,” she murmured. “You know that whatever you heard this morning was taken completely out of context, right?”

She could actually feel the grumpiness seep out of him, a deflation of his pique and a reduction in his ire. If she were in a poetic mood, she would’ve said he removed his armor. “I know, love,” he murmured.

“And do you also know,” she went on, “that when the time is right, I’m going to marry the shit out of you?”

“But why isn’t the time right now?” he challenged, turning his head towards hers. “What would be so wrong about getting engaged this Christmas? It’s Paris, the snow is beautiful and all the fairy lights—”

“I got married at twenty-one on my last go round,” she shot back. “Can you really blame me for wanting to wait a little? Sow some wild oats?”

“And who’s sowing these wild oats of yours?” he asked darkly.

She rolled her eyes. “You, obviously. Once a day and twice on Sundays, I thought we agreed.”

He snorted at that, but he held her closer, so she supposed that meant she was at least somewhat forgiven. “Are you happy, love?”

“Of course.”

“No,” he pressed, “I just meant that over the past few days, I’ve been looking at you and you haven’t seemed… you know.”

“I’m fine. It’s fine, it’s—”

“But we’re in Paris,” he said, like that made all the difference.

Unbidden, the fountain she’d spotted reentered her mind, tickling at something she couldn’t quite identify. Why? Had it been in a movie she’d seen recently? Was it famous, sculpted by someone well known?

Or had she seen it before, decades ago? Before anyone knew who she was?

“Do you trust me?” she asked, before she could think it through.

“Yes,” without hesitating.

“Okay.” She kissed his cheek. “Cancel our plans for tomorrow. I want to try something.”

Their first order of business – once Paul had called his assistant and asked him to wipe their diaries clean for the day – was to ditch the paparazzi. They took special care in disguising themselves the next morning, not even wearing baseball caps since those screamed American! to all Europeans for miles around. When the time came, they snuck out a back entry and slipped into the crowds on the sidewalk with no one the wiser. A lone bodyguard trailed them some distance away and others were on call, but other than that, it was just the two of them.

Lydia took them back to the fountain and now, in the sharp December daylight, she could finally get a good look at it. It was a Wallace fountain, the Internet had told her the night before, dispensing free drinking water to the citizenry for the past century. But it was one of dozens of similar fountains scattered across Paris – why had this one jumped out to her?

She circled it slowly, staring at it from every angle, while Paul gazed at their surroundings. Mining her past memories wasn’t an exact science, if in fact she remembered this fountain from before, so she merely tried opening the curtain at the back of her mind and—

“This way,” she said, and she grabbed Paul’s hand and tugged him down the street.

It was a Wednesday in the middle of the day, but it was also the Wednesday before Christmas and the French weren’t workaholics like Americans, so the streets were packed. Bells chimed above doorways as shoppers moved in and out of quaint stores, and every so often they stumbled across a group of carolers on the sidewalk singing Christmas songs and holding out hats for donations. Bundled up as they were against the chill, with their thick scarves and knitted hats, walking kept Lydia warm in the frigid air. Walking, and Paul’s hand locked trustingly with hers. They weaved their way through the city, stopping when she wasn’t sure and moving only when she was, and nobody bothered them along their meandering route.

Just before noon, Lydia managed to pull them towards a small bistro somewhat off the beaten path, a few roads away from the main drag. Fewer people were over this way, browsing in fewer shops, and it was quiet enough that when a satisfied customer left the bistro she could hear some of the music playing inside. A faded awning bore the name of the owner, and a sign in the window detailed the food on offer.

“Here,” she said, stopping. Lydia turned to him as the memory played itself out in her head. “Paul,” she said, grinning broadly, “I bought you a banana milkshake here in ‘61.”

His head snapped up. “Serious?” He looked at the bistro with new eyes.

“Same place, even. Same owners. Menu’s somewhat different I’m sure, but—” She was cut off as Paul tugged her inside, already insisting that they get something to eat.

The winter weather meant that there was no outdoor seating, so they couldn’t recreate the scene of their last visit even if they’d wanted to. Instead, they staked out the far corner, sipping hot coffees that warmed her through, and picked over blueberry scones as they laughed and reminisced. “Wait,” Paul said abruptly, just as they were finishing up, “if this is the milkshakes place, then that means the hostel where we stayed can’t be too far, yeah?”

“Let’s give it a shot,” she agreed. “Bear in mind that some of my memories are unusable, but I’ll try.”

“Unusable?”

“In some memories I wasn’t wearing my glasses and everything’s blurry,” which made Paul snicker for much longer than he should have, if you asked her.

The hostel was ultimately not much of a stop on their history tour, mainly because it wasn’t a hostel anymore – at some point, someone had purchased it and turned it into two private homes. “Let’s see if we can knock on the door and get a look inside,” Paul suggested.

“Um, people don’t just let strangers off the street look at their houses,” Lydia said, and she was vindicated when Paul knocked on the front door and no one answered. Only then did they realize that the curtains were closed in every window, the residents probably out of town for the holidays. The other home was equally empty.

Paul stepped back into the street, looking up at the two townhouses with something akin to awe. “Can’t believe this is the same place,” he murmured. “Looks so different to the way I remember it.” He pointed up at the third floor, at the window all the way down on the right. “That was our room, wasn’t it? With the horrid floral wallpaper—”

“And the bedspread that matched,” Lydia finished absently, not looking. Something else had caught her eye. She clasped Paul’s hand again and tugged him further down the street, to the corner where a yellow mailbox was bolted to the brick exterior wall of an apartment building.

This, she’d seen before too.

She turned and looked all around them, back at the former hostel and at the other structures in their immediate vicinity. She’d had success twice before – but she hoped the third time was the real charm.

Paul let her lead him out of the area, away from the old hostel and the bistro where they’d gotten milkshakes, deeper into a city that paid them little heed as they marched forward on their mysterious adventure. Lydia got jumbled up at moments when her memories failed her, when she made a left turn instead of a right. The sun started sinking in the west and the wind grew chillier, so Paul tucked her under his arm and they walked together, trying to keep warm.

“Let’s go back to the hotel, love,” he said, as the restaurants started filling with the dinner hour crowd, “my feet are turning to blocks of ice.”

“We’re almost there,” she insisted.

“Almost where?”

“I don’t know,” she said, frowning, looking around. “I’ll know when we get there.”

And she did. She knew it right away. Like the hostel, the exterior had changed drastically over the decades but there was just enough of the past peeking through for her to recognize: a specific architectural detail carved over the doorway. A distinctive window in the building next door. Lydia stared at it from across the street a moment in sheer disbelief, breath gusting out in lacy clouds of condensation that captured the lamplight. She’d really found it.

And of course it was a bookstore.

When Paul started blowing on his hands to warm them, she remembered herself and dragged him inside. “Almost there,” she muttered, looking around the dimensions of the room, the layout of the shelves.

They ended up in a short, dead-end aisle, surrounded by tall shelves of books on three sides. Only once they were in just the right spot did Lydia turn to Paul and grasp both of his hands. “Paul,” she whispered. She was so excited she could barely get the words out – that, or her lips had gone numb from the cold. “We found it, babe. We found it.”

“What did we find, love?” he said, smiling fondly down at her.

She laughed helplessly. “In ’61, this wasn’t a bookstore,” she said. “It was – Paul, it was a record shop.”

He understood right away. She could see it, the moment his eyes lit, his back straightened, his lips parted. He looked around at the stacks of books and did what she’d already done, swept them away with her mind to imagine the old rows of record racks, the posters of Miles Davis and Peggy Lee and Chubby Checker stuck haphazardly to the windows; they both traced the faint lines on the old tiled floor with their eyes, the ghosts of long-gone walls, the ones that had divvied up the far end of the shop into individual listening booths for customers to pick out records and hear them before deciding which to purchase.

The booth where, in 1961, they had first heard Elvis’s latest single “Can’t Help Falling In Love."

“Right here,” Paul said softly.

“Close enough,” she allowed.

“Right here.” Paul turned back to her, and bent his head forward until their foreheads pressed together. Lydia laughed again, and both of them grinned so hard they looked a little crazy.

“If you could take a picture of us,” he whispered, “right now, and show it to those two lads in ’61…”

“I’d have some questions,” Lydia deadpanned, which made Paul snort uncontrollably. “Like – girl, what’s your skincare routine, your skin is glowing.” He buried his face in her thick scarf, to smother his laughs. “And then I’d also probably get upset that you were actually getting sexier as you get older, which just doesn’t seem fair at all.”

Once Paul had a handle on himself again, he straightened back up with renewed purpose. “We need a souvenir,” he declared. He started studying the shelves around them.

“What, can you read French now?”

“Know enough to read this,” he countered, and he pulled out a translation of good old Hunter Davies’ The Beatles: The Authorized Biography. Because of course they were in the arts and music section of the store.

As they left with their purchase, Paul started patting at his pockets. “Got to get a snap,” he said, “stand by the door, love, I’ll—”

“Welcome to 2007, babe, they’re called selfies.” She plucked his phone from his hand and positioned herself next to him with the bookstore signage over their heads. Just as she started tapping on the button to take their picture, Paul turned and pressed a kiss to the side of her face.

In the photos, Lydia beamed. Now, finally, they were in Paris.

Chapter Text

As was becoming routine for them this year, the lingering joy from revisiting their old haunts lasted less than twelve hours.

Paul came to her the morning after their trip down memory lane, mouth twisted into a negative shape. His assistant had relayed that a cruel photo of them was making the rounds of Twitter, with the caption Take your daughter to work day. That photo going viral had also caused an old picture of Lydia, messy drunk at a New York night club, to rear its ugly head again with a new caption: Take your slut to the club day. Lydia would've laughed if she weren't so enraged.

“I’m going to strangle them,” she seethed. “I’m going to strangle a hundred thousand people, one by one. Just let me know where they’re lined up.”

“You’re a pacifist,” Paul reminded her.

“For now! Starting to rethink my worldview a little bit here, babe!”

She threw out Paul’s touristy itinerary after that. While there was a certain amount of bragging rights in saying that she’d visited certain historic landmarks and destinations in Paris, the constant media presence was also making them both miserable. Instead, Lydia snuck out to a newsstand and bought a copy of Time Out and used that to come up with fun events and happenings for them to try, far off the beaten path. So instead of visiting the Centre Pompidou, they went to the oldest café in Paris, Le Procope in the Latin Quarter, which had been in operation since the 1600s and might have once served Napoleon. They went to a Truffaut Film Retrospective and sat in the very back row, so Lydia could whisper translations to Paul. They visited a massive, sprawling flea market and walked amongst the stalls, picking out gifts for friends and family; Lydia alone interacted with the sellers, speaking her French with its Marseilles accent to hide her Americanness, and so that Paul’s distinctive voice wouldn’t catch someone’s ear. Bit by bit, they salvaged some of their trip.

When she awoke on Christmas morning Paul was already awake, running his hands through her hair and humming under his breath. “Happy Christmas, love,” he said, his voice deep and scratchy. She yawned and moved closer, snuggling against his chest as he held her and pressed slow kisses to the top of her head.

“Merry Christmas,” she mumbled, blinking her eyes open. “Presents now or later?”

“Now, if you’re up for it? Or we can wait a bit.”

“Mm. Waiting sounds great. Wait… for coffee.” He chuckled as she drifted off again.

At a much more reasonable hour, once the sun had actually fully risen, he dragged her out of bed to a sumptuous breakfast spread out in the living area of their suite. A Christmas tree had been delivered to their room yesterday while they were out – and not some little tabletop decoration, but a full-on pine tree decked with twinkly lights and blue and gold ornaments, positioned by the window. As she gratefully drank her coffee, Lydia saw that the package she’d placed under the tree the night before had been joined by two others.

“Weather’s supposed to be rather cold today,” Paul told her as they ate. “Hardly above freezing. Did you still want to do the Eiffel Tower this afternoon?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re still on. Hopefully the holiday will mean that there won’t be too many people there.”

Paul’s knee was jumping through most of their meal, she noticed. He also pushed her to finish her food faster. Apparently he was feeling pretty good about whatever he’d gotten her for Christmas, which made her even more excited to see just what was in those packages. She rushed through her food and grabbed a fresh cup of coffee before he tugged her to sit on the floor with him by the tree.

“Me first,” she said, grabbing her package and handing it to Paul.

“Oh, it’s heavy,” he said, surprised, and he tested its weight in his hands. Grinning, he tore open the paper in a flurry of movement, but she still saw the moment he realized what he held in his hands.

“I was trying to clear out some of my old stuff, back when I was moving in with you,” she explained, “and I came across my notebook with our first two songs in it. Figured I should save them. You’d want to save them.”

He laid them across his lap, the two framed pieces of frayed notebook paper bearing “Way That I Feel” and “You and Me,” a thrilled little smile on his face. She realized at that moment that he probably hadn’t seen them since the night they wrote each of them, or, in the case of the latter, since the Concert for New York City. “Love,” he said softly. With his fingertips he traced the lines of her neat handwriting intertwined and intermingled with his own. “Lydia. This is…”

“I just hate it every time I see something of ours pop up in an auction, you know?” she said. “The original lyrics for whatever, now they can be yours to hoard in a private collection for just a hundred thousand dollars!”

“We wrote the songs for free,” he agreed, looking up at her.

“Well, not for free, for however much they’re getting on iTunes now,” she snarked. “But regardless, I thought you should have those. I have no idea where you can hang them where people won’t see them—”

“Why wouldn’t I want people to see them?”

“Um, because I have very girly handwriting? And we’ve been telling the world for years now that Monty Hayes is a man?”

Paul snorted, and muttered girly handwriting under his breath like he didn’t understand the concept. “They’re going up in our music room in New York,” he declared, “and when we move to London, they’ll hang up in the music room at Cavendish.” He set them aside and winked at her. “So let it be written, so let it be done.”

But when he leaned in to kiss her she held up a hand. “That’s not the only present. There’s a third part, didn’t you see it?”

He returned to the pile of torn paper and felt around until he picked up a CD in a slender jewel case. The only thing written on it was For Paul in thick black marker, which Lydia had consciously done trying to emulate her old handwriting. “What’s this?”

“Well, you—” She swallowed, suddenly overwhelmed with apprehension. “You told me a few years ago that during Anthology, you, Richie and Hazza worked on some of my unfinished songs, right? ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’? And you tried working on ‘Now and Then’ too, but didn’t get anywhere with it because the tape was so low quality.” Paul was staring at her now, eyebrows raised. “So… I um, I finished it myself. I finished ‘Now and Then.’ Rewrote some of the lyrics that were crap. And uh, recorded myself playing it.”

When he said nothing, Lydia clasped both her hands around her coffee cup to hide how they shook. “I didn’t have access to any fancy recording equipment,” she babbled, “and you know I can’t play drums for shit, even if I could record multiple tracks, so it’s just me singing with a piano, and I did it on my phone – had to do it a few times to get the sound right, and do it over a few more times when Jeff thought he’d been hired to sing backup—”

Paul carefully set aside the CD case, resting it atop the framed song lyrics, took her face in his hands, leaned forward, and kissed her. “Come on,” she said, ducking her chin, “I’ve got major coffee breath—”

“My favorite,” he teased, and in a moment he’d tipped her over until she was laid out on the floor amidst the wrapping paper, kissing her as she laughed. Once she was sure her mug was out of the way, she carded her hands through his hair and returned his kisses, melting beneath him as her nerves vanished and fled. Who needed presents on Christmas morning when they could have this instead?

“I love it, Lydia,” he murmured, when they came up for air. “I really, really love it. I can’t wait to hear you sing.”

“I just…” She looked away a moment, hanging onto him. “This year was the very first time people knew about us. We’ve literally never been together when other people knew about us, and… so far it’s really sucked. I figured – I don’t know, I wanted to remind us both that no matter what other people might think? You and I are solid, okay?” She looked back up at him, hoping he understood.

“We are, love,” he said. “We’re solid.”

She nodded decisively. “Okay then. Now get off me, because I think I saw some presents for me under that tree too.”

Giggling, they both sat up, and with great ceremony Paul took the smaller of the two boxes and placed it in her hands. Another CD case. She was picking up on a theme here. “I was going to give you this on your birthday,” he said, as she tore off the paper and found another mix, “but I was going back and forth on giving it to you at all, really.”

Lydia frowned at him. “Why?” She glanced at the track listings and was mildly surprised by what she saw: Depeche Mode, Huey Lewis and the News, The Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead. In fact, if she weren’t mistaken, not a single one of these songs dated earlier than—

“Maybe it’s silly,” Paul said, with a self-deprecating laugh. Now he was the nervous one. “It’s Christmas, it’s a happy occasion, I don’t want to bring down the—”

“Paul.” She reached out and took his hand. “What’s the theme of this mix?”

He worried his lower lip between his teeth a long moment, staring at the CD in her lap. “They’re all the songs I heard on the radio,” he said finally, “in the years after 1980. That I thought you’d like, and that I wished you could hear.”

She squeezed his hand, grinning. “I don’t know whether to be upset or flattered that you know my taste in music this well,” she said, waving the case. “I loved almost all of these exact songs when I was a kid.”

“Yeah?” Paul said, his eyes lighting up.

“Yeah! But this CD better be an iTunes playlist too, because otherwise I can’t listen to it until we get home.”

Paul tsked, pretending affront. “Like I’m some amateur giver of gifts. Where’s the trust, I ask you?” While she laughed at that, he shoved forward the second, larger gift still under the tree. “But now this one, open this one.”

Lydia set aside her CD case and pulled the box towards her. Though larger, about the size of a document box, it wasn’t much heavier – she made a show of lifting it and shaking it a little, and all she could hear was what sounded like paper sliding around. Without further ado, she tore open the wrapping and lifted the lid off the box inside, and discovered about two dozen plain white envelopes, all addressed to Lydia Montrose in various unfamiliar handwriting. She looked up at Paul, awaiting an explanation.

His excitement had visibly turned to nerves: as she watched he shifted his position on the floor, tossed back his hair, nibbled on his fingernail and then sat on his hand. “This past summer,” he said, “when you and I weren’t doing so well – I was, ah, scrambling to figure out how to fix it. Spent endless sessions with my therapist talking about what was happening, going over every little thing. I didn’t – I didn’t want a repeat of 1969.”

Lydia felt her heart knock against her ribs. She set the box aside and grabbed both of his hands, tight, in hers.

“She told me about love languages,” he said, shrugging, looking down at the carpet. “Suggested maybe… we communicated in different languages, and that was what was leading us to be at cross purposes? So I started, you know, testing them all out. Started sending you flowers at work and things.”

“Receiving Gifts,” Lydia murmured. “Yeah, that’s not my love language.”

“Well I know that now,” he joked. “Worked out mine’s Quality Time, by the way. Which I reckon explains why the whole visa bollocks was so…”

“It was hard for both of us,” Lydia murmured, leaning her head against his. “But that’s not my love language either.”

“It was, though,” he said, looking up. “Back in the Sixties, which makes sense when you think about how you grew up – thinking someone who must really love you would stick around, yeah? But it’s changed now. Of course a journalist’s love language would be Words of Affirmation.”

“Breaking news, tonight at eleven,” she teased him, and he chuckled.

“So I decided I had to get better about texting and phone calls and all that,” he concluded. “Which I think has helped loads. Still room for improvement.”

“You don’t share easily,” she agreed. “But you’ve been doing great, I promise you,” she said, squeezing his hands again. “Now when are we coming to this box full of envelopes you just gave me?”

“Impatient,” he said, winking at her. “I wanted to – look, I know you’ve had a rough go of it this year, career-wise? Getting taken from the department where you wanted to be and stuck doing YouTube videos, all that. I thought you could use some encouragement for the new year, but what do I know about the news world?”

A wild thought entered her head. Her heart started to pound. “What do you know about the news world?”

“Oh, a little,” he said, with a happy smirk. “Enough to know the names of the leading female journalists of today. And a few men, since I didn’t think that would go amiss.”

Gaping, Lydia released his hands and rooted around in the box until she’d grabbed an envelope at random. She tore it open to reveal a multi-page letter, addressed to her, and at the end the elegant sign off Best wishes, Christiane Amanpour.

“Fuck off,” she blurted. She dug out another one: Dear Lydia, it began, and it ended Above all else, keep pursuing the truth. It matters. Sincerely, Bob Woodward.

“Holy fucking shitballs,” she cried. A third letter: Ms. Montrose! went the jubilant salutation, and at the bottom of the page Kick ass and take names— Gloria Steinem.

“What in the actual shit is happening right now,” Lydia wailed.

“It’s a very selfish present on my part, actually,” Paul said, with obvious delight as he watched her melt down in front of him. “If you get inspired, and advance further in your career, we can get married and move to London sooner rather than later. And that’s what I’m really aiming for, you know.”

She tossed aside a letter from Jane Pauley and launched herself at him, and laughingly he let her pin him to the carpet, covering his face with frantic kisses that eventually slowed and sweetened, becoming deeper, more heartfelt.

“I love it,” Lydia murmured sometime later. “Paul. Holy fuck.”

“Your excessive outpouring of emotion was rather ambiguous,” he said, grinning up at her, “so thanks for clearing that up.”

“You got famous journalists to give me professional advice. I can’t even.”

He laughed and looped his arms around her, holding her close. “No, I think you can, love. That’s the whole point.”

“I had a bet going with Nicole,” she said, lifting herself off of him. “I just won.”

“Oh? What was the bet?”

“She was convinced you were the type to get me something practical and clueless, like a vacuum or a coffeemaker.”

He pointed off to the side. “Well if the letters weren’t a hit, there’s a new Dyson with a bow on it in the front room—”

Lydia laughed so hard at that her stomach hurt.

After they tidied up their shredded wrapping paper, Paul hopped onto video chat to speak with his kids and grandkids in turn, all of their families in their cozy, decorated homes. As he sat in front of his laptop exclaiming over everyone’s gifts and making a big fuss, Lydia got ready for their outing to the Eiffel Tower. None of the kids asked after her, or mentioned where Paul was or who he had chosen to spend his holiday with. Lydia passed her morning off-camera reading through her letters, which she carefully returned to their envelopes after like they contained top secret intelligence. Despite his family not caring a whit about her, she stayed in the room with Paul the entire time, which she knew he appreciated based on the number of times he glanced up to see her still curled up on the couch with her box of letters. With their discussion of love languages still fresh, it was an effort not to think of Paul at fourteen, newly motherless, and the parade of aunties coming through the council house on Forthlin Road making sure the three McCartney men were never alone or at loose ends. Quality Time indeed.

Once it was getting on towards lunchtime, and Lydia knew the eastern US was finally awake, she swapped with Paul and got her family on Skype next. “Oh Lydia,” her mother said, once they’d all wished each other a Merry Christmas and boasted about their presents and the content of their stockings, “sweetheart, I wish you could be here with us. We just got the best news!”

“Andrea’s pregnant!” Scott cut in, which made them all start cheering and yelling, Lydia included.

After she and Paul had lunch in the restaurant on the ground floor of their hotel, they left for the Eiffel Tower. Paul hadn’t been kidding earlier: it was freezing out, the ground coated in fine white powder that was thankfully dry instead of slowly turning into ice. The locals clearly were staying home where it was warm, but the tourists were all out in force. Lydia heard multiple languages spoken as they walked towards the Tower; Portuguese and Italian and Hindi and Canadian-flavored English bubbled up from the families around them as they made their way up the Avenue Anatole France on foot.

“Here,” Lydia said, when they were close but still not yet at the Tower’s base. She pulled out her phone and turned her back on it and Paul. “Say cheese!” He wrapped both arms around her and grinned as she snapped selfies of them with the Eiffel Tower jutting up behind them.

It was so cold out, though, that Lydia had a hard time positioning the camera to get them both in the frame. “No, a little higher, love,” Paul said.

“It is higher, Reginald!”

“In what way, Albert?” He put his gloved hands around hers and shifted her phone just so. “Now press the—”

“So bossy, Reg. Like I don’t know the basic mechanics of a selfie by now.”

“Well you know what they say, Bertie, if at first you don’t succeed—”

“—skydiving’s not for you, I know.”

Paul was still laughing hysterically when she hit the button.

While he led her the rest of the way she sent the best of their pictures to Julian and Sean separately, wishing them both a happy holiday and sending them a little personal message. Hand in hand, she and Paul finally reached the base of the Eiffel Tower. At its very top, she could just about see the French tricolor snapping violently in a frigid wind.

“Should we go up?” Paul asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably even colder up there than it is down here. Who decided Christmas should be during the winter?”

“The pagans, so I hear.” His hand tightened on hers. “We should come back to Paris during the summer next time, yeah?”

She could hear the note of hope and hesitance in his voice. As if she might not want to come back to this city that she’d claimed as theirs years ago. As if she hadn’t been having a (mostly) wonderful time here, with him, and wouldn’t be thinking about this trip for months to come. “Drag me back, if you must,” she told him, grinning.

Her phone buzzed, and she unlocked it to see Julian’s response. He was at home in Morocco with his girlfriend and his cats, she knew, and so he’d sent her photo of his Christmas tree with one of said cats staring down the ornaments with sinister plans in its eyes. Happy Christmas to you and Paul xx, Julian wrote.

“Do you think Julian likes me?” she blurted out, after she showed Paul the photo and text.

Paul blinked at her. “Of course he—” he began, then he swallowed what was obviously just an automatic, knee-jerk response. He grasped her hand again, swung it a little between them. “He’s getting there,” was his eventual answer. “Jules likes your sense of humor. He enjoys talking politics and things with you.”

“He’s told you that?”

“Yes, of course, love.” He tugged on her hand a bit, and Lydia allowed herself to be pulled to his side. Together, their steps in synch, they continued walking forward until they were directly underneath the Eiffel Tower, centered right in the middle. “Sometimes… things take longer to build back up than they did to break in the first place, you know?”

“I don’t suppose Julian also likes how impatient I can be?” Lydia said.

Paul snorted. “Didn’t mention that specifically, no.” He dropped a kiss onto her hat and pulled her closer. “But you’re doing so great with him. I hope you realize that.”

Someone nearby had recognized them; Lydia could see it. She looked up at Paul, hoping to hang onto this moment a little bit longer. “Am I really?”

“Yes, my love.” He brushed back some of her hair, after an icy gust of wind blew it between them. “You really are. Jules is cautious but he’s not, you know, unwilling. And neither are you, and that’s what matters, yeah?”

Her phone buzzed again with a text. “That’s probably Sean,” she said, and she pulled out her phone. A tourist some distance away had her phone up and was blatantly taking photos of them, with the flash on and everything. Another pair was headed slowly towards them, awed looks on their faces.

None of it mattered once Lydia read what was on her screen.

Sean doesn’t have this phone anymore. He gave it to me.

The phone buzzed again as another green bubble popped up in the thread: Cute photo.

“Oh,” Lydia said, unaware she’d even spoken. Numbness spread through her body, shock, the raw terror of being left out in the open and unprotected. She didn’t drop her phone or throw it away from her, nothing so dramatic as that, though it suddenly felt radioactive in her hand. It tethered her to someone who would think nothing of hurting her or taking something away from her, and Lydia had so much now that could be taken away.

“What is it, love?” Paul said, still innocent of what had happened.

Lydia turned away from him, her arm hanging limp at her side. Dimly she was aware of him reaching for the phone, of him seeing what was there in the text thread. She looked directly above them at the labyrinthine steel lattice work of the Eiffel Tower and it felt like she’d been shoved down the barrel of a giant cannon. Someone had lit the fuse. She was about to be shot off the face of the planet and out into the lonely stars.

The curtain in the back of her head started wavering.

“Christ,” Paul hissed. He shoved her phone into his coat pocket, out of sight. “He changed his number and didn’t even tell you? Fucking hell, Sean.”

“And now she has that picture of us,” Lydia said dully. “Paul… fuck, I don’t want to have a flashback but—”

“No, no, love, stay here with me.” He wrapped his arms around her, his mouth close to her ear. “No need to go somewhere else. I’m right here. We’re both here, don’t bugger off just yet.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, a hard shiver wracking her from head to toe as he continued to murmur in her ear. His voice kept her grounded. But she looked around to see that even more people had figured out who they were, shyness keeping them but temporarily along the edges of the base of the Eiffel Tower. They had phones. Boxy little digital cameras. Big eyes rounded with admiration. Hands outstretched, mouths ready to ask for autographs. And now the first proper paparazzi photographer had arrived, fixing an expensive lens onto his camera, raising it to his eye to snap a photo of a famous person, because what did it matter that it was Christmas when a paycheck was on the line?

Lydia looked up at Paul. “Kiss me.”

“What, right here?” he said, stiffening, pulling slightly away from her. Every twitch of his body screamed out not in public, I couldn’t possibly where people might see.

“Right here. Right now.”

“But I—”

“Because I want to. And I don’t care who sees.” She ran her hands along the lapels of his coat, feeling him beneath the thick wool, and stood up a little on her toes to make them closer in height. “Because we’re in Paris, and we’re in love.”

Later, she wasn’t sure if that was the argument that swayed him. She knew he saw the crowds slowly closing in on them, the paparazzi multiplying like rabbits, all the surreptitious photos that must’ve already been taken and texted off to friends and family around the world. A photo of them kissing would be worth thousands of dollars to the right editor, and it would be guaranteed to go viral, to draw derisive comments across the width and breadth of the Internet.

Going public meant other people knowing about them, and feeling free to weigh in with their opinions. But going public didn’t mean Lydia had lost the right to reject all that fucking noise.

Paul slid his hands to her hips, to the small of her back, and drew her in until there was no space between them. Lydia smirked at him. “Kiss me slowly, I don’t feel like rushing. Not on Christmas.”

“No,” he agreed, grinning as he leaned in, “meant to take it easy on the holidays, aren’t we,” and before she could laugh at that he’d pressed his mouth to hers. She sank into him, forgetting everything else the way she always did when he kissed her.

In the end, Lydia figured, that was what it came down to: they were in Paris, and they were in love.

That was the only reason they needed.

Full stop.

Chapter Text

He probably asked May at least four times before lunch. “What time were they arriving again?” he’d say, looking at something else, as if he’d just plain forgot because the answer mattered so little to him. He wasn’t waiting at the door whining like a dog left in the house alone, not him.

“Paul said about two o’clock,” May would tell him with a small smile. This last time she added “He sounded really excited to see you.”

And wasn’t that a fucking trip and a half, because now John was half hope, half terror for the remaining two hours.

He was conveniently in the kitchen fixing a drink when the doorbell at the front rang, and May padded away in her bare feet to get it. As soon as Paul and Linda walked in it was like the room brightened, the hot California sun coming out from whatever nonexistent clouds it’d lingered behind. “There he is!” Paul said when he saw him, doing a bit for the benefit of their audience. The hug he gave John felt all cold, all wrong, all fake.

But then he pulled John briefly aside. “We need to talk,” he murmured.

John, who had once known him so well, better perhaps than anyone else in his world, couldn’t read anything into his tone at all. “Yeah, all right,” John mumbled back, and he fished a ciggie out of his pack to hide how his hands shook.

This time it’d been years since they’d last seen each other – such a strange thing to realize, when they’d once happily lived in each other’s pockets for months on end. What did Paul have to say? There were so many possible topics to choose from, all kinds of conversations in danger of getting dusty from lack of attention. I’m sorry about all that rotten Allen Klein business, that was one. We should write together again and never stop, that was another. I want you back. I miss you desperately. Linda’s given us her blessing.

 John picked some ash off his lower lip. Well, maybe not that last one.

Their moment came later, when the drugs were really starting to kick in for everyone else. There was a cannonball competition happening in the pool and chlorinated water was getting everywhere, so they moved indoors, to a living room at the front of their rented house that hardly looked used. Linda came with Paul, hanging off his arm like she needed it to walk upright. Why she always insisted on appearing like a simpering, clingy bint when John knew she was anything but, he’d never understand.

He took an armchair, so Paul sat on the edge of the sofa nearest to him and Linda crowded up against Paul on his other side. “Right,” Paul said, nervously rubbing his hands on his legs.

Look out world, here come the Nerk Twins. “I’m all pins and needles,” John said dryly.

Paul smiled; it didn’t reach his eyes. Didn’t even look remotely happy, just… determined. That should have been the first warning. “We’ve come with a message from Yoko,” he declared. “She says she’ll have you back, but there’s certain things you need to do first.

                                                                                               …penny for ‘em, love.”

Lydia blinked, confused by her surroundings for a moment. “Hmuh?” she said inelegantly, looking around. Right: they were still on the flight back from Paris. December 2007, somewhere over the Atlantic. The ice cubes from her earlier drink had melted and watered down the remains of her Coke, so she sipped it for something to do.

Paul took her left hand and held it gently on the armrest between them. “You looked a bit lost in thought there,” he said. “Penny for ‘em?”

“Oh.” Her heart swelled. Ugh, he tried so hard, and it was so amazing, but sometimes she needed time to process things at her own speed. She couldn’t look at him at first, instead studied the seatbacks in front of them, the people off to the side asking the flight attendant to refill their Bloody Marys. One passenger in the row behind them had asked Paul for his autograph at the exact moment First Class had finished boarding, and when Paul very politely but very definitively said no, it felt like the whole cabin had cringed. They’d all been stewing in it ever since the plane had left Paris, and Lydia imagined it would persist right until the moment they pulled into their gate at JFK. Great way to travel, in a miasma of awkwardness.

Since they were still surrounded by sharply listening ears, Lydia bent her head towards Paul’s; he moved to mirror her. “Just…” She sighed and leaned her head against the seat. “Your Christmas gift was so fucking great,” she whispered, “and I started having all these ideas, like I thought maybe I’d reach out to all those journalists for coffee. Fuck, if I could actually get coffee with Gloria Steinem? Pinch me. But then… that text from…”

“What happened to living your best life?” Paul whispered back, after a thoughtful silence. “I thought that’s how we were tackling this?”

“Yeah, but then she took my son away from me, so.” Lydia tried to stop it but it didn’t matter; tears welled in her eyes. As best he could, in their narrow airplane seats, Paul put his arms around her and held her close.

“We don’t know the whole story, love,” he murmured, his lips in her hair.

“Pretty sure I know the whole story, actually.”

“You must be very smart, then, to figure it all out from just two brief text messages,” he teased. “Let me talk to a few people and see if I can’t get us some more information, yeah? Maybe it confirms your theory of the case, you know, or maybe it doesn’t.”

She sighed again. “Fine.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he said, a note of relief in his voice. “You’ll see. And you can tell Gloria Steinem all about it over coffee.” Lydia snorted and buried her face further in his warm sweater.

She swore not to think about it over the next several days. Instead, she busied herself with all the annoying little errands involved in coming home after a long trip: picking up Jeff from her parents’ house, giving him enough cuddles so he knew he hadn’t been abandoned forever, going through their mail backlog at the penthouse, catching up with what was happening at work, sorting through her texts and emails. A whopping three of her friends had gotten engaged on Christmas Day, in addition to Robby and Megan, and all four couples were having their ceremonies in the summer and fall of 2008. Two of them wanted Lydia to be a bridesmaid.

Hm. Paul was planning to go on tour to promote Year 10, and had hinted at wanting her to come with him for part of it. That would have to be a discussion.

A few days after they returned from Paris, in that weird dead time between Christmas and New Years, Lydia came back from work to find Paul standing over an elaborate, expensive-looking gift basket in their kitchen. “Ooh, fun,” she said absently, barely interested, as she untucked her work blouse, piled her hair atop her head, and started rooting around in the fridge for something to heat up for dinner. “Any chocolate candies in there?”

“Look sharp,” and that was her only warning before he tossed a packet of gourmet candy towards her. She caught it with the very tips of her fingers. “You’re welcome to anything here, love, it’s from the Grammys. We got nominated for five awards.”

“Damn, better than The Great Hiatus,” she said, still mainly focused on foraging for food.

He turned away from the basket and now she saw he was holding a card in his hands, which he offered to her. Awards and trophies mattered far more to Paul than they did to her, but Lydia dutifully grabbed the card and glanced down the list. “Best Pop Vocal Album,” she read. “Best Solo Rock Vocal, Best Solo Pop Vocal – whoa, Song of the Year and Record of the Year too?”

“For ‘Quiet Down,’ which has apparently become the political anthem of 2007,” Paul said, tossing his hair with a smile. “How about that for the McCartney-Hayes byline?”

“Not all that shocking,” and she teased him by dramatically belting out the first few lines of “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” as she shoved a precooked meal into the microwave and set the timer. Chuckling a little, Paul countered by singing a few lines of “Gimme Some Truth” while he crowded her against the countertop. She let him, twining her around his neck as he bent and kissed her. “Hi,” she murmured, smiling. “How was your day, dear?”

“All right. Long. Yours, dear?”

“Trying to edit a video about this new initiative from the governor’s office,” she said, “but Governor Spitzer is a Class-A micromanager and keeps getting in my way. That’s why I’m so late tonight. Such a fun way to pass the time, five stars, no notes.”

“Poor love,” Paul crooned, and kissed her again. When she pulled away she saw he’d gotten serious. “I’ve got some intel for you, you know. About Sean changing his cell phone number.”

Lydia’s heart sank. For a moment she just pressed her forehead to Paul’s shoulder, inhaling slowly as the microwave hummed behind her. Whatever he had to say, she was probably as ready as she’d ever be to hear it – which was hardly at all. “Okay,” she said, straightening up, “lay it on me.”

“He bought a new phone about a month back,” Paul said. “Everyone got his new number except for you, me, Rich, and Barb.”

She stared at the button at the top of his shirt. “And nobody knew about—?”

“No, Jules had no idea you didn’t have Sean’s number. Didn’t know about any kind of, you know, argument, or misunderstanding. I asked Rich if he wouldn’t try to ask Sean for his number, like he didn’t know what was happening and thought maybe it was just an oversight? He said he’ll let us know how it goes.”

“Not an oversight,” Lydia murmured. The microwave gave a loud series of beeps, so she untwined herself from Paul’s arms and went to deal with her dinner. “This is what I get for telling him the truth back in May. Yoko got her version of events told next, and he believed her over me.”

“Love, you can’t know that for—”

“But I do know,” she cried, slamming her fist down on the countertop and glaring at him. “I know! We were doing so much better this summer, me and Sean, I really – I really felt like we were getting somewhere! I texted him like once or twice a week, it was good. But then during all the visa bullshit I got distracted, and…” Her eyes filled with tears; viciously, she turned back to her dinner and started mashing it with her fork. “She wins,” Lydia spat. “That’s the way the game’s played. She wins, I lose. No video reviews by the referees.”

Out of the corner of her eye she could see the determined set of Paul’s shoulders – the shape that meant he was trying with all his might to come up with a positive spin. “Maybe if we—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said. “I’m done. I’ll think about it later.”

“All right,” Paul murmured. There was silence a moment, as Lydia started inhaling her food. “Stella said we can do a fitting next week, if you’re available.”

Lydia paused and stared at him. She ran back over what he’d said – nope, made no sense. “Come again?”

“For the Grammys?” Paul said. “Our eveningwear for the ceremony?”

“But I’m not going to the…” Her words died unspoken as it hit her. Every other time Paul had been nominated for an award (which happened with annoying frequency), or was given an honorary degree, or any kind of recognition, she had never been able to go with him. But now, for the first time in four years, she could. “Oh, um,” Lydia stuttered. “Is she okay with that? I mean, dressing me?’

“Sure!” he said brightly. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

I can think of a few reasons, Lydia thought, like the fact that I’m not Nancy. “I did really like Stella’s Winter 2007 collection,” she said, trying for diplomacy instead.

Paul beamed at her, a proud dad. “Brilliant, then I’ll tell her we’ll see her next weekend!”

“Cool,” Lydia said weakly. She hid her trepidation by shoveling more food into her mouth.

They went to a New Year’s party, their first as a couple, at a penthouse on Fifth Avenue – some music mogul that was relentlessly sucking up to them. Paul’s staff had been digging into it and had uncovered that it was the record company’s fault Paul’s visa had expired that summer, by not filing some vital paperwork in a timely way. Ever since, the making of amends had been nonstop and over-the-top. She and Paul were treated like royalty from the moment they arrived, even though they’d barely been there an hour before Lydia found herself wishing she was at home in her pajamas instead.

Just before midnight, they went out to the roof with the other guests to ring in the new year. Paul, smiling happily, bent and kissed her as fireworks began exploding over the city. “Happy New Year, my old friend,” he murmured.

“Happy New Year, my love,” she said. “Only good things for us in 2008.”

“Only good things,” he agreed.

Stella had a combination office and showroom down in Chelsea, and so the following week they headed over to there to try on and get fitted for their award show outfits. As soon as they walked into the cavernous workroom, Paul called out “Where’s my Stelly!” and she immediately came trotting over to give her dad a huge hug. They chatted happily with each other, asking about their holiday celebrations and mutual friends. Lydia stood next to them completely ignored, like a bump on a log.

“Dad, I’ve got something bloody perfect for you, it’s just back here,” Stella said, getting to the purpose of their visit at long last. Arm in arm, she and Paul walked to the back of the room; Lydia trailed behind. Stella led them to a long metal rack of menswear and shuffled through a few suits in clear garment bags before pulling out one in particular for them to see. And damn her, it was perfect: a tuxedo of deep hunter green, trimmed in black with a slight shimmer.

“What do you think, love?” Paul asked Lydia.

“Looks awesome,” she said, plastering on a smile. “Can’t wait to see it on.”

“Oh, we should try our clothes on separately,” he said, clasping his hands together. “That way it can be a surprise on the day, yeah? What the other’s wearing?”

“I think people only do that for their wedding day,” Lydia said, “and I’m not wearing a white dress.”

“Not yet, at least,” Paul said, winking flirtatiously at her. Lydia was pretty sure she was the only one of them who saw Stella’s face go stony and emotionless.

Stella handed over the green tux to her dad and finally, for the first time, deigned to look in Lydia’s direction. “You’ll be a bit trickier,” she announced. “All our sample sizes are a US 2 and you—” this with a blatant head-to-toe look “—aren’t a size 2.”

“No, my mom and dad always said I was number one,” Lydia said.

Ignoring her, Stella strode over to a rack of women’s wear and started shuffling through garments. Unlike with her dad, she appeared not to have given any thought as to what Lydia should try on, a theory which proved accurate when Lydia got sick of waiting around and just started looking through the rack herself. “Go try on what you’ve got,” she said to Paul, “I’ll need a minute to decide. I’ve never dressed for one of these events before,” as a woman, she filled in mentally.

Normally, Lydia loved clothes. Normally, she would’ve luxuriated in spending an entire afternoon looking at designer couture, trying on various pieces, studying herself in the mirror. When it came to dressy outfits she always had two goals: to feel bold and confident, and to make Paul’s tongue hang out of his mouth, and with those being her guiding principles she’d never yet gone wrong. She thought longingly of the wonderful shopping trip she’d had with Barb in London several years ago, and how Barb had been so engaged and encouraging and given great tips. It was an entirely different kind of experience, trying on formal dresses in front of someone determined to point out how fat she was, or how unflattering certain colors and cuts were, no matter what she put on.

“No, you can’t wear that,” Stella said, after Lydia stepped out of the curtained dressing area in a gown that was fitted through the waist. “Not with those hips, love, you can’t pull that off.”

Lydia eyed the more shapeless, A-line offerings on the rack and wondered why the fuck she’d been encouraged to try on this specific dress in the first place, then.

While Paul contentedly tried on various tuxes, eventually settling on the green one Stella liked, Lydia endured her passive aggression. Allowed Stella to think that somehow she’d gotten the upper hand, or that eventually Lydia would burst into tears and run out of the building, swearing off attending the Grammys at all. Then, right when Stella had turned to her dad and started to say “Well, I think that’s all I’ve—”

“What about this one?” Lydia had spotted the dress shortly after they arrived, and it had kept catching her eye. It was made of shimmery satin in a very pale blue, pressed into knife pleats, with a halter top neckline cut into a deep V that looked like it would go down almost to Lydia’s belly button. When she pulled it off the rack she saw for the first time that the dress had almost no back either. If she got her wish, Lydia would wear the shit out of this dress.

“I’m not sure about that one,” Stella said bluntly. “It’s a size 2—”

“And I’m a flat-chested size 4, so luckily for everyone’s virgin eyes all the naughty bits will still be covered up,” Lydia said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. She didn’t wait around to see their reactions, instead heading straight into the dressing room with her prize.

The look on Paul’s face when she stepped out with the gown on was almost – almost – worth all the slings and arrows of the afternoon. It definitely made up for how grumpily Stella said she’d get their clothes tailored before the ceremony in February.

It didn’t assuage the doubts that sprang up in the following days, though. She was out with Nicole getting lunch a few weeks later when Nicole suddenly waved a hand in her face. “Earth to Lydia,” she said. “I know talking about my dissertation is crazy fascinating, but you’re usually better at faking your interest.”

Lydia sighed. “Sorry. I just…” She shook her head. “No, I do need a distraction, and your dissertation is—”

“Bitch spill before I cut you.”

She snorted uncontrollably at that. “Wow, okay,” she said through laughs. “So… Paul got nominated for several Grammys and we’re going to the ceremony together, right?”

“God, your life,” Nicole said, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, I follow.”

“But all the press around us for the past year is all, like, Paul’s a dirty old man, I’m this airheaded sugar baby – he wants me just because I’m young, I want him just because he’s rich – like really offensive, shallow shit. Like no one knows how to use the Internet to see, I don’t know, how many articles I’ve published? Or how amazingly talented Paul is as a musician?”

“People are idiots,” Nicole agreed. “Having instant access to the Internet hasn’t changed that, unfortunately.”

“So the thing I’m wrestling with is this,” Lydia said. She placed her hands flat on the table and leaned in. “Am I obligated to look attractive and put together in public? If people insist on thinking false things about me no matter what I do, does it even matter?”

“Damn, wow, no softball questions today,” Nicole joked, “going straight to the deep end.”

“Sorry,” Lydia said with another laugh, “I just keep obsessing over it. We tried on our outfits for the Grammys the other day, and mine? Okay, yes, I look fucking great in it and Paul looked ready to jump me, but I don’t know, maybe I should show up in a dress I bought off the rack at Macy’s instead. Just to give a big fuck you to the media for calling me an alcoholic tramp for the past eleven months.”

“Oh, girl,” Nicole sighed. She stirred her drink with her straw. “Are you obligated? No, absolutely not. I mean, I think there’s a tacit social contract where we expect everyone to wear clean clothes and bathe frequently enough that they don’t smell funny or carry disease. But will you, as a woman, be crucified for daring to appear in public less than perfectly put together? Yes. Sorry.”

Lydia winced at her word choice. “Yeah, figured. Can’t be taken seriously by men unless they think you’re pretty – but not too pretty, because then you’re obviously just a bimbo.”

“More than that,” Nicole said, “you know the Ancient Greeks believed that a person’s character was actually reflected in their outer appearance? If you were smoking hot, that meant you were a very decent, moral person. If you were ugly, then obviously that meant you were evil. Fuck, we still do that today by assuming that people who look attractive are smarter, more responsible, more competent – pretty privilege is alive and thriving in 2008.”

“Maybe I should just show up to the Grammys in a potato sack then,” Lydia said, frowning. “Call it a political statement.”

“Get called crazy instead of a slut. Be a nice change for you.”

“I mean we both know Paul isn’t winning any Grammys anyway, not with Amy Winehouse on the ballot, so he’s gotta get publicity somehow.”

“I’m glad you said it and not me, but Amy Winehouse is totally winning all the awards this year.” They both laughed.

Lydia had mostly pushed it from her mind by the time their check came, but Nicole stopped her before they both stood up to leave. “I don’t know if this matters at all,” she said, “in the grand scheme of things. But I saw some photographs of you guys in Paris.” Nicole shrugged. “Paul was an attractive guy back in the day, but he’s visibly aging now. You’re so pretty, but you’re not a supermodel. You and Paul… honestly, you just look happy when you’re together. That’s it.”

Lydia pursed her lips together and clasped Nicole’s hands between her own, trying to refrain from saying something sappy and emotional. Once she had a hold on herself again, she promised “If we get gift bags from the Grammys, I’ll give you whatever’s in mine.”

“Bitch you better!” Nicole cried excitedly. “Oh my god, the swanky stuff that must come in those—!”

Paul found her on the couch when he came back home that night, reading a book. Lydia smiled when he walked in the room and raised her arms for a hug, though he surprised her by making a big production out of joining her on the couch, on top of her. She giggled as he kissed her.

Once they’d said hello, he craned his neck to see what book she’d been reading; it had fallen to the carpet. “Not the 9/11 report again,” he teased.

“Yeah,” she said, “because, um… I’ve decided to write a book.”

His eyes snapped back to hers. “Really?”

Lydia nodded, a lump in her throat. “Really. I’ve got my notes and personal experiences from the day, all my articles and research. I’m not sure yet what my exact topic’s going to be but – I have to write about something I care about before I go nuts.”

Paul’s smile had gotten bigger and bigger as she spoke. “So we’ve decided to keep living our best life, then, have we?”

“Do what makes us happy,” she agreed.

“It was the letters, wasn’t it,” he said smugly, winking at her. “Just reading those letters from Christmas inspired you so much that—”

“Yes yes, you’re amazing and I love you and you’re getting laid tonight,” Lydia said with mock annoyance. He cut her off with a deep kiss before she could keep going, but that was just fine with her.

Chapter Text

By the next day the book had been downgraded to a feature article. Then the following week it was going to be a book again. Then she wasn’t going to write anything at all because who was she, thinking she could tackle a massive subject like September 11, until Paul told her what bullshit that was and she was back to writing a book. Daily, Lydia dug through her old notebooks from 2001, marked up the 9/11 Commission Report with highlights and sticky notes galore, pulled books from the library, spoke to some coworkers who had done extensive reporting at the time. Every spare moment she had, either on her lunch break or after work in her pajamas, while Paul jammed in the music room above her, she turned her mind to the question of what she would write. She still didn’t know her precise topic or polemic, nor which format it would take – but it was happening. She was writing something.

Paul had to fly out to Los Angeles a week before the Grammys for rehearsals, since he’d be performing “Quiet Down” and “For You (The Sun Comes Up)” during the ceremony. “Are you sure you can’t come along?” he asked her, as they said their goodbyes at the penthouse elevator. “You could have the hotel room all to yourself during the day. Get some of your work done there?”

“I’m sure,” she said. She wrapped her arms around his middle and squeezed, hiding real trepidation behind a joke. “Please don’t leave the country and end up denied reentry again, okay? That’s so last year.”

“Ah, there goes my plan to drive down to Mexico,” he teased her.

This would be their first separation since November – since the visa debacle – and Lydia did everything in her power to make the days pass as quickly as possible. She’d started reaching out to the journalists who had written her letters, both to thank them and to send out feelers about meeting up for coffee the next time they were in New York, and was thrilled to get some responses back. Her dance card for the next several months quickly filled with lunches and café meetups.

On the Wednesday before the Grammys, she left the Washington Post’s office and headed to a restaurant to meet up with Bob Woodward, one of the Post’s own favorite sons, who was himself just polishing up his fourth book on the Bush administration. She recognized him immediately upon walking in, having seen him multiple times on the news. Her heart hammered in her ears as she approached him, hand extended. “Hi, Mr. Woodward,” she said, chin tilted slightly up. She felt like a million bucks. “Lydia Montrose, so happy to meet you.”

“Lydia, please, call me Bob,” he said, shaking her hand. And just like that she was on a first-name basis with one of the best-known journalists in the country.

They sat down at a two-person table near the window, making small talk about the nasty winter weather outside. Once the waiter came by and took their drink orders, there was an awkward moment when Bob asked how she knew Paul, and Lydia responded “He’s my boyfriend. We’ve been dating a few years now.” But Woodward, to his credit, didn’t even blink as he said “Ah, I see,” and smoothly changed the subject.

The conversation turned quickly to politics, just as Lydia had hoped. With both of them being so attuned to what was happening in the country their discussion was lively and wide-ranging, but Lydia had a specific end goal in mind. She started asking him about his latest book, which bore fruit about fifteen minutes later when he asked and she confessed that she wanted to write one too. He was the first person outside of Paul to know that, and the admission still electrified her. That subject steered the rest of their lunch. Before long, she’d pulled out her phone to note down several of Woodward’s suggestions for books, archival papers, and people in government to speak to.

But it was a lot. The man sitting before her was one of her journalism idols and had accomplished so much in a storied, multi-decade career. He was a rockstar. Who was she to presume to even walk into the same arena? Woodward tried to be helpful, she could see that, but the more insight he gave her the more she thought I can’t do this. There’s just no way. She lacked the experience and the connections, and there was a public perception to fight against too. As soon as she published anything, TMZ would remind everyone that she was just that drunk chick from the night clubs.

Lunch consumed, she and Woodward had stepped out onto the sidewalk outside the restaurant. Lydia struggled to hide her self-doubt as she shoved her phone into her coat pocket. “You know,” Woodward said, in his slow, careful midwestern cadence, “I might not have been as helpful as I think.”

“No!” Lydia was quick to say, “you’ve been so helpful, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to speak with me, or for writing that wonderful letter last Christmas.”

“But I think we’re coming at the same story from different angles,” he said, gesturing between them. “I live in Washington. I have access to all the decision makers and politicians, military generals and intelligence experts and so on. That’s the version of the story that I can tell. But you, just now you talked a lot about the American people. The soldiers who get sent out to Afghanistan and Iraq. And you said you were actually here, in New York, on 9/11, so you had a front row seat to what happened.” He stepped closer to her, raising his voice a bit as a noisy group passed them on the sidewalk. “I’ll let you in on a little something. When Carl and I were writing All the President’s Men, it was actually Robert Redford who suggested to us that we write the book with ourselves at the center of the narrative. Having that framework made the difference, I think you would agree. And I don’t know if Carl and I would’ve come up with that on our own. A journalist doesn’t insert himself into the story. So for you? I think your framework has to be a ground-up view of the War on Terror. Not what’s going on in Washington. The soldiers, the civilians, and their families. That’s what you’re really interested in, I think.”

It was the first week of February in New York City – cold, gray, cloudy, miserable. Everyone who walked past them was bundled up in coats and hats, scarves and gloves, stamping their boots on dirty snow tamped down to a hard thick crust by thousands of feet. And yet in that moment the light came on for her. The winter sun started shining. People smiled at her encouragingly as they walked by. A bell rang somewhere, and even though it was probably just the little tinkling bell hanging in the doorway of a nearby shop, it rang with all the momentous import of a sea change. In that moment, Lydia knew what to write.

An hour later, back in the close confines of her office cubicle, she got a text from Paul. How was lunch with Bob Woodward? xo

Amazing, she texted back. He figured out how I should write my book. I was about to give up again.

A few minutes later, Paul wrote back Someone told me once that ‘There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done’ xo

Lydia blushed. Wow, she must be really smart.

She is! I’m going to marry her someday. xoxo

And he just had to go and text her something like that, because Lydia got very little actual work done for the rest of the day.

At dawn on Friday morning, Lydia took an early flight from JFK out to Los Angeles, landing at a little before noon in rainy California. Paul was tied up in rehearsals and interviews for most of the day so he merely texted her Can’t wait to see you tonight xo when she let him know she’d landed.

She took the hired car to the hotel, slept hard for several hours, played the tourist for part of the afternoon, then got dolled up to meet him at a pre-Grammys dinner. There had apparently been all kinds of dinners and parties and dancing every single day in the week leading up to the actual ceremony on Sunday. Every gathering had its own theme, its own corporate host, and guests casually flitted in and out making appearances in daring outfits designed to grab media attention. Paul had had to attend several of the events out of a kind of business obligation, he’d told her, since the soundtrack album for the Beatles/Cirque du Soleil show Love was nominated for some Grammys, and everyone wanted the chance to reassert their love for the Beatles. Their songs, apparently, were sprinkled liberally through most of the set lists at most of the parties that week.

“Nobody’s going to play ‘All My Loving,’ though, right?” she’d asked him nervously, when he’d called her at lunchtime to check in.

“No, it’s not part of the Cirque show,” he assured her, “and I asked them not to play it at all. Told them I had a bad memory associated with it or something, can’t remember what I said. But we should be all right, love.”

The hired car dropped her off outside the Chateau Marmont, another legendary Los Angeles location Lydia hadn’t set foot in since the Lost Weekend, and never when she was sober. Generations of celebrities had literally partied and died here in shocking numbers, giving it something of a mixed reputation. To look at it from the outside, with its elegant European architecture and the trees that pressed in close on either side of the hill where it perched, you’d never know this was the place where John Belushi had died of a drug overdose, or where Dennis Hopper had thrown a wild orgy, or where Howard Hughes would spy on women sunbathing by the pool.

Now, though, in the twenty-first century, it was slightly more respectable. Or so she’d heard.

Lydia texted Paul to alert him to her arrival. She walked through the familiar lobby, following the signs and the noise, and showed her engraved invitation to an intense doorman easily twice her size. With a silent nod of approval, he unclipped a velvet stanchion rope and gestured for her to step out onto a Spanish-style patio area at the back of the hotel. She was fashionably late and the place was already packed and loud, the music fighting to be heard over the other guests’ chatter.

Her phone buzzed in her hand; she glanced down. Coming to find you x

She fixed and smoothed down her hair as she looked around the party, trying to find Paul herself. Tons of the guests were known to her – she spotted Bruce Springsteen, Kanye West, Aretha Franklin, and Carrie Underwood without even trying – and flickering bright flashes alerted her to photographers snapping photos on one side of the room. She stepped further inside.

And like the biblical parting of the seas the guests seemed to move in synch, clearing a wide-open path across the tiled floor, and there at the other end was Paul making a beeline towards her. Lydia felt herself break into an instant smile when their eyes met. A weight on her shoulders she hadn’t even known was there abruptly lifted. He’d found her. There wouldn’t be a repeat of his birthday party.

The noise level was such that when they crossed the room towards each other, he said something from several feet away and she had to shake her head to show she couldn’t hear him. He pulled her into his arms for a tight hug, and had to put his mouth right next to her ear to be heard: “You made it, love! Christ it’s good to see you.”

Somewhere nearby, cameras flashed like crazy. Lydia decided she didn’t care if they were photographing her or not. “I made it,” she echoed. “And I’m starving, where can a girl get some food in this joint?”

Laughing, he took her hand and led her back to a slightly quieter corner, where he had nabbed a small table. With a few words for the waiter, soon there was a parade of servers coming directly to her and bringing all the appetizers being offered out on the floor: sliders and cheese puffs and street tacos (Californians had yet to find a food they couldn’t put into a taco) and fancy finger foods of all varieties. Lydia happily filled her plate to overflowing and chowed down like she hadn’t eaten in days. Paul sat with one hand around the back of her chair, nodding as she filled him in on her week, especially when she gave him more details on her lunch with Bob Woodward.

“So the book is still on,” he confirmed, once she stopped to sip some wine.

“The book’s on,” she said, grinning. “God, Paul – I think I’m even more excited about it now than I was before. I’m going to write a book.”

He chuckled and squeezed her shoulders. “Do I get to read this book?”

She gave him a look. “Obviously, babe. You’ll be my first reader.”

“Can’t wait, my love.” Their moment was spoiled when he leaned in to kiss her cheek and a half-dozen photographers immediately sprang to capture their private moment – but only a little spoiled.

That set the tone for their weekend, leading up to the Grammys ceremony: wherever they went, the media was never far away. Once she’d eaten, she and Paul circulated the dance floor, getting all kinds of invitations to brunches and lunches on top of the official sponsored parties they’d already planned to attend. Lydia got lots of polite smiles when Paul introduced her around, a bland “Oh, how interesting” when she said she worked for the Washington Post, and then she had a front-row seat to those same people losing their minds over merely being in Paul’s presence. Lydia, who couldn’t fathom being starstruck over anyone, understood even less when celebrities in their own right got hysterical over another celeb.

To his credit, Paul wasn’t an ass about it. Lydia was in awe of his mastery of whatever space he entered, how he acted like a normal (ish) person and treated everyone kindly, instead of like a caricature of the worst kind of international superstar. And all the while, their every facial expression, every hand gesture, was captured by some nosy paparazzo’s camera.

In her head she kept running over the ground rules Paul’s publicist had given her last year, over and over, to stay calm and cool and collected. No making funny faces, no off-color jokes, no getting too drunk or out of control. She’d be beautiful and aloof, quiet and supportive, and no one would have any chance of getting sloppy pictures of her ever again. She had a book to write, and it would only get read if she were perceived as a serious person. Her irresponsible youth had come to an end.

Even so, Lydia couldn’t help but think that it was really, really boring, being arm candy.

Sunday night she had a surprise for Paul: his assistant had helped her work out how to borrow jewelry, and so she’d managed to get permission from an exclusive jeweler to wear a gorgeous set of emerald earrings and a long rope of diamonds and emeralds to dangle down the low neckline of her dress. Once the stylists were done with her and he saw her in everything – the perfectly tailored gown, the messy chignon at the nape of her neck, the sparkling jewelry – he froze for a long moment, just staring.

“Wow,” she teased, blushing. “Have I really made Paul McCartney speechless? Somebody mark it down on the calendar.”

He stepped nearer, heart-stopping in his own suit, and put his arms around her. Swaying a little back and forth, dancing to some silent tune, he murmured, “You going to tell me where the fastener is on this dress, then?”

Lydia threw back her head and laughed. “It doesn’t count if you ask me,” she said, leaning her cheek against his. “I have to volunteer that info.”

“Are you volunteering?” This, said with two fingers run down the length of her bare back, making her shiver in delight.

“Oh, come on. That’s against the rules.” They swayed a few more times before she pulled away slightly. “Hey. I hope you know that getting nominated for five Grammys is fucking amazing, Paul.”

He snorted and looked away. “Would be more amazing if old farts like me actually won them,” he mumbled.

And that’s what she was worried about. “Whatever happens tonight,” she said, cupping the side of his dear face, “we’re going to have a great time, okay? Both of us look crazy hot, you’re going to kick ass during your performance, and if you’re very, very good, I might even tell you how to take this dress off at the end of the night.”

He kissed her, hard. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

The drive to the Staples Center passed in a blur, as did Lydia’s first red carpet with Paul. All she was aware of was the warm weight of Paul’s hand at the small of her back, as they stood and posed and smiled for a huge crowd of photographers, all yelling simultaneously for her to look this way, no this way, over here. Lydia posed as she’d been instructed, turned occasionally to smile at Paul, then back out to get her eyes blasted and blinded by endless flashes. And none of it mattered because as soon as they caught sight of the tattoos on her back, that became their main focal point. She could almost see the headlines now: Elder statesman Sir Paul McCartney dating wild child with tattoos.

It was a relief to walk into the cavernous Staples Center, to find their seats along the aisle in a prime spot close to the stage. Paul promptly started saying hello to everyone he knew in the rows around them, shaking hands and asking after partners and kids. Even when the orchestra struck up a tune and all the cameramen and crane operators kicked into motion, clearly showing that the ceremony had begun, Paul was still happily chatting away with some producer he knew and talking about a mutual acquaintance who’d broken their leg skiing last month and couldn’t be there that night. Paul was distracting himself, Lydia assumed.

Because once the night started and the categories were read out, the exact thing she’d expected for months happened: Paul lost first one, then two, then three of his categories. Every single time, a camera operator would station himself in the aisle right next to Paul, to get a reaction shot when the nominees were read out, and every time Lydia would watch as Paul carefully held the smile on his face and applauded whoever had beaten him. After the second loss, she reached for his hand and squeezed and didn’t let go. He let her.

Somewhere around the midpoint of the evening he slipped away to prepare for his live performance, and within seconds of his departure someone came and took his seat. Lydia, who had momentarily forgotten all about the major award shows’ deathly fear of a venue looking empty, startled at first, but smoothly held out a hand to him. “Hi, I’m Lydia.”

“Adam, nice to meet you,” he said. He looked like a recent college grad – probably in LA trying to make it in the entertainment industry, if she had to guess. “You do these things a lot? This is my first time being a seat filler and it’s been nuts so far. I got to sit next to John Legend earlier, he was so nice!”

“No, this is my first awards show,” Lydia said. “It’s been pretty surreal.” The fact that he thought she was a seat filler too silently thrilled her.

They chatted through the next category and the commercial break that followed, until the emcee announced that Paul was next. “Oh man, I love the Beatles,” Adam gushed, cutting off their conversation to turn towards the front of the auditorium.

The audience came to its feet in a standing ovation when Paul appeared onstage. Gone was Stella’s tux; in its place was his usual concert uniform of a blazer over a t-shirt and blue jeans. He merely stood there, waving to everyone as they poured out their love and admiration, his trusty left-handed guitar draped over one shoulder. Before the applause had fully died down, he looked back at his touring band and they kicked off a raucous version of “Quiet Down,” and the crowds cheered even louder.

Paul had barely finished the first verse of the song when Lydia saw the dreaded camera guy situate himself in the aisle, and turn his all-seeing lens on her. The show was going out live, she knew, with just a few seconds’ delay, so she had mere moments to decide how she was going to react. Paul was onstage, singing her song and crushing it. She wanted to enjoy it in peace.

Lydia lifted her hand and flipped off the camera. And held it there.

The camera guy pulled his head away from the viewer. “Hey,” he snapped, “come on.”

“I don’t want to be filmed,” she declared.

“Look, I’m just trying to do my job—”

“I don’t want to be filmed,” she said, a little louder, on the verge of Making a Scene.

The camera op put a hand to his earpiece. “Copy that, I’m trying,” he said to whoever was on the other end, and he glared up at her again. “I need to get a shot of you—”

“No one’s stopping you.” She propped her elbow on the armrest, middle finger still standing tall.

“It’ll look weird, if we don’t cut to you during—”

“Not my problem, I’m not the producer.”

“Hey.” The person in front of them turned towards the op. “You mind, man? Girl said she don’t want to be on camera.”

“Yeah,” Adam said, jumping in a little late. “We just wanna watch Paul McCartney.”

Seeing that he was now outnumbered, the camera op stood and marched back up the aisle, grumbling all the way. Lydia reached forward and tapped the shoulder of her rescuer. “Thanks for that,” she said.

“Yeah, no prob,” Rihanna said, and she turned back around.

Unfortunately, she’d missed most of “Quiet Down” by then, but she still joined in the applause after the final chord rang out. “Thank you!” Paul called out, raising a hand to acknowledge the cheers. “Well. That was the song that got me banned from America for a little while last year—” Everyone laughed and whooped at that. “Next we’re going to play a song I wrote for someone very dear to me.” A stagehand came forward to swap guitars with Paul, the electric being traded in favor of what Lydia recognized as Paul’s favorite acoustic. Another stagehand plunked a wooden stool in front of the main microphone, and the lights on the rest of the stage dimmed. “You’ll have heard the full version on my last album – Year 10, in stores now—” more laughter “—but I thought I’d let you all hear the way it sounded the first time I played it for the person its written for. Hope you like it as much as she did.”

“What did they want to film you for?” Adam asked, keeping his voice low.

And there went her anonymity. “Because,” Lydia whispered back, watching Paul sit on the stool and begin strumming, “Paul’s singing to me. That’s his seat you’re sitting in.”

She couldn’t hold back her smile as Paul started doing an energetic acoustic version of “For You (The Sun Comes Up),” playing it just the way he had when it was a half-formed tune in her parents’ backyard. It had already lost the category it had been nominated in – Best Pop Vocal was awarded earlier in the night – but Lydia hardly cared. Her heart lodged in her throat and she mouthed along with the words she’d helped him write.

A camera op came back to her section, this time a different one, but he hadn’t even crouched down before Rihanna was hissing, “Yo dude, what did she say before? It’s not happening!” Lydia held up her middle finger until that guy left too. Which meant that when Paul strummed the final chord, Lydia was completely undistracted and could watch giddily as he blew a kiss in her direction, while the entire house clapped and clapped.

A few minutes later, a coordinator came to move Adam to his next seat. “It was nice meeting you,” Lydia said as he got up.

“Yeah,” he said, awkwardly smoothing down his rented tuxedo. “Sorry I thought you were, um, working like me. No offense.”

“None taken,” she said kindly. He walked away and that was the end of her brief career as a seat filler.

When Paul returned, back in his tux, she just smiled at him a moment. “How was it?” he asked.

“You were phenomenal, babe,” she said sincerely. “Had the crowd hanging on your every note.” He chuckled, sounding relieved, and took her hand and kissed it.

He was only in two more categories after that: two of the so-called Big Four, Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Amy Winehouse had so far swept everything she’d been nominated for, and Lydia imagined that that trend would continue – and she was in the Record and Song of the Year categories too. Amy hadn’t been able to get to the ceremony because of a work visa snafu (that was apparently becoming a trend around here) and so each time she won, she’d been piped into the auditorium via satellite feed from London to accept the award.

During a commercial pause, Lydia turned to Paul. “Remind me again what the difference is between the Record and Song categories?”

“Best Record is for the production,” Paul said. He was fidgeting and drumming his long fingers on the top of his leg. “So that’s for the artist and all the producers and engineers. Song of the Year is for the songwriters.”

“Hey.” She waited until he looked at her, and grinned. “I’m having a really good time tonight. In case I forget to mention it later.”

He relaxed a little, returning her grin. He leaned in and murmured, “This is so much more fun with you here, love.”

Record of the Year came up first, and a camera op returned to their side for the fourth time that night to film Paul’s face. Natalie Cole and a frail Tony Bennett approached the podium and read out the names of the five nominated songs. They were in heady company: Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Beyonce, and of course Amy Winehouse, who appeared on screen from London.

Tony Bennett held up the envelope. “And the Grammy goes to…”

Despite her certainty that Paul wouldn’t win, Lydia felt herself get nervous. Her hands shook, even the one currently clasped tightly in Paul’s. Her heart was pounding faster than it ever had before, like it wanted to burst out of her chest. Because sure, Paul probably wouldn’t win – it most likely wasn’t in the cards – but, on the other hand, what if he did…?

Natalie Cole read out: “Amy Winehouse, ‘Rehab’!” And that was that.

She and Paul both applauded wildly, cheering along with everyone around them. As Mark Ronson accept his Grammy in person, and then Amy gave an embarrassed thank you over the satellite feed, Lydia and Paul were nothing but courteous and attentive, since Paul was still on camera throughout. After that, Nelly Furtado, Andy Williams, and Roselyn Sanchez walked onstage to introduce a tribute to Burt Bacharach, who was winning a Lifetime Achievement Award that night.

Sitting through Bacharach’s tribute, and the subsequent commercial pause, felt like the longest year of Lydia’s life. “Do you have any gum?” Paul asked, which Lydia recognized meant he was antsy and craving a cigarette. She fished into her clutch and offered him a piece of wintergreen Orbit, and he gratefully took it.

But then Nelly Furtado finally took the podium again. It was time for Song of the Year.

The camera op repositioned himself in front of Paul. “The nominees for Song of the Year are,” Nelly read aloud, and the emcee took over to read their names and songs: “Umbrella” by a slew of writers for Rihanna; “Like a Star” by Corinne Bailey Rae; “Hey There Delilah” by the guy from the Plain White Ts; “Quiet Down” by Paul McCartney and Monty Hayes; and “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse.

Amy’s obviously going to win, and she’s going to deserve it because “Rehab” is so good, Lydia told herself, trying to calm down, but her heart was racing again.

Was it a disservice to people, when they had such massive success in their youth? Did it give them a false sense of how the world worked, the feeling that everything they did would be perfect and wildly popular forever and always? Did it make you struggle with self-esteem, when you found yourself always trying to be as good as you had been at twenty-two as you closed in on forty, on fifty, on sixty?

“And the Grammy goes to…”

And what if that youthful success had been the cultural juggernaut known as The Beatles? Would anything ever match that feeling of being absolutely on top of the world? Did Paul know that she’d love him no matter what, that none of that—

“It’s ‘Quiet Down’ by Paul McCartney and Monty Hayes!”

A shocked and excited cheer ripped through the audience at light speed; if anyone was disappointed that “Rehab” hadn’t won, no one dared show it. The whole stage lit up, people turned in their seats. Over the sound system Paul’s grungy guitar hook filled the arena, his voice growling Don’t tell me to quiet down…

Paul stood right away, casually buttoning his jacket – but then he turned and held out a hand to her. “Come ‘ead, love,” he said, which she only understood via lip reading.

Lydia was too stunned to realize what was happening, too dumbstruck to do anything but obey. She took his hand. The single real thing in the universe was that warm, callused hand clasped in hers, the back of his head and his dark green suit, as he led her down the aisle to the massive stage with all its glittering lights and decorations. The anxious buzzing in her ears matched the decibel level of the cheers around them, the uproar of fans cheering on Paul and his song.

Her song.

She picked up her full skirts to get up the stage stairs, but it was still a nerve-wracking ordeal in her high heels. Paul patiently held her hand and supported her up. And when they were there at center stage Nelly Furtado stood in front of them, and one of those award show escorts who turn up at every major ceremony, holding the two Grammy statues. Paul took one and gestured for them to hand the other – the one for Monty Hayes – to her. Lydia took it, and later she hoped she said thank you. She couldn’t be sure if she had.

“Well, look at that!” Paul said, his voice echoing all over the Staples Center. He’d stepped away from her to speak into the microphone. Did he have a speech prepared? That would be so him. “First I’d like to acknowledge the other artists in this category…”

The auditorium was so intensely bright up here, where the audience sat so dark. Light shone off hundreds of eyes, all staring up at them, hundreds of faces upturned as they sat in thrall. Lydia looked down at the Grammy in her hands, at the blank space at the front which would soon carry a small plaque reading PAUL MCCARTNEY & MONTY HAYES – SONG OF THE YEAR 2007 – “QUIET DOWN.”

What were they supposed to do with this thing? Paul would want his Grammy on display, in the cabinet at MPL where he put a selection of his most prestigious awards, or in the larger display cabinet at Peasmarsh where all the rest of them were. But this one, which was supposed to go to another person? Where were they supposed to put it?

Where would it go when she was really the one who’d won it?

Lydia looked up at the back of Paul’s head. “My co-writer Monty couldn’t be here tonight,” he was telling the audience, “but he’d want me to say that – that this song is about free speech and speaking truth to power. And, you know, there’s nothing more important to a free and fair democracy than that.” The audience roared out its agreement so vehemently, Lydia watched in a daze as they gave a standing ovation.

Gave Paul a standing ovation. Even though those were her words he was saying.

It had been so spontaneous, the creation of the mysterious Monty Hayes. A necessary alter ego to hide herself, birthed on a New York City sidewalk the day after the worst terrorist attack in American history had inspired her to pour her agony into song. Her only thought that morning had been concealment, protection, to avoid the stigma of her and Paul being paired together in a way that would garner prudish condemnation. Paul, born performer that he was, would be the public face of their partnership; Lydia, as she grew up and figured things out, would have no problem being the silent partner. Sure, maybe someday someone would realize that Hayes was her mother’s maiden name, and yeah, maybe someone would make the connection that Monty = Montrose – hell, maybe someone would learn that she was born in December 1980, what an unusual coincidence – but that hadn’t happened yet, and her anonymity was still intact.

But now she’d just won a Grammy. She, Lydia Montrose, Bitch Girl Wonder of the Tri-State Area, intrepid girl reporter at the Washington Post, had won a Grammy. She’d co-written the Song of the Year – written well more than half of it, if she were being brutally honest, since Paul had just come in with a middle eight and polished off the lyrics in her last verse. And she’d never be able to tell anyone what she’d done. The award would never bear her name, not her real one, would never sit in pride of place on her desk at home or at work. She couldn’t put the win on her resume, or talk about it in a job interview. It wasn’t an anecdote she could drop at parties or something she could share with her family and friends.

Really, it’d be like she hadn’t won anything at all.

Lydia looked up again, and had a feeling of the world slowing down to half-speed. Paul was still talking. It wasn’t the mere fact of winning an award – Paul still cared more about those than she did. She had never understood the fuss over getting handed a hunk of marble or painted wood or gilt metal made to look important and exciting. It took up space, gathered dust; that was why she had tended to give away her awards to fans rather than keep them, back in the day. But the recognition. The acknowledgement from her peers that she’d accomplished something pretty astounding, and that her fellow practitioners appreciated her craft and her skill. That was the important part, for her.

But she wouldn’t even get that for “Quiet Down.” Instead, everyone was looking at Paul, and he was looking back at them. Nobody was looking at her.

The audience applauded again and, with a wave, Paul stepped back from the microphone. His Grammy in one hand, he reached out and took her hand with his other and led her offstage. Lydia felt like she was being dragged forward, and she tripped once on the hem of her gown, though she recovered quickly.

They submerged themselves into the dark and claustrophobic backstage area briefly, then came out of it in the press room, where a far smaller stage was ready for them – for Paul – to field questions from the media on his shocking upset. Lydia stood back and watched as the entertainment reporters asked him, point blank, how it felt to win Song of the Year when everyone had thought “Rehab” would win. Paul was gracious, nothing but gracious, always effortlessly charming and gracious in victory.

Once their five minutes were up, Paul finally (finally) looked in her direction. “Can you believe it, love!” he said, grabbing her hand and squeezing. “Song of the Year!”

“Congratulations,” Lydia said. She told herself that Paul didn’t say it back because there were too many listening ears around them.

Since the Grammys ceremony was basically over, they didn’t return to the Staples Center. A talent coordinator ushered them quickly to their limo, and soon they were shooting across town to the first of three afterparties they now planned to attend. The first one was the important one: the official Grammys engraver would be there, to put the winners’ names on their trophies.

When they got to the engraver’s booth, behind several familiar faces, Paul plunked both golden gramophones onto the counter. “One should say Paul McCartney,” he declared, jubilant. “Let me know if I need to spell it for you. The other…” He turned to Lydia and winked. “Well, Monty’s not here, we could put anyone’s name on it.”

“John Philip Souza,” Lydia said, playing along. “Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.”

“Dr. Livingston, I presume!” Paul cried, and a few sycophants standing nearby laughed.

Someone shoved a martini into her hands and Lydia drank it, hardly tasting it as it went down. Everyone wanted to congratulate Paul on his stunning win, sing the praises of “Quiet Down” – such a hard-rocking song, and with such an important and timely message – and some asked about the mysterious Monty Hayes. Was Monty going to collect his trophy from Paul? Would Paul have to ship it to him? Paul, drunk on scotch and his unexpected win, joked about how Monty would have to get his trophy via US Mail, and then there was a running joke about if it should be sent first class or expedited.

Lydia said nothing. She stood there and looked pretty, the only role expected of her.

After that was the next party, where Paul got his picture taken with his fellow winners and nominees. They bumped into Rihanna, who relayed to Paul how Lydia had kept the cameras from filming her. Lydia finally spoke up to thank her again.

When someone else snagged Paul’s attention, though, Rihanna turned to Lydia. “You shouldn’t be on camera anyway,” she said bluntly. “You ain’t done nothing but fuck somebody who used to be famous.” And with that she walked away.

Lydia stared after her, numb. Then, remembering she had a drink in her hand, she polished off what was left of her champagne and started looking around for more. As she did, Paul slipped behind her, putting his hands on her waist. “Hey there,” he said, with boozy breath. “Have I been very good tonight?”

“Sure, yeah.” She waved to a waiter and swapped her empty glass for a full one.

“So does that mean I get to know how this dress comes off?”

Coming so fast on the heels of what Rihanna had said, Lydia felt her stomach drop to her feet. “I don’t know,” she said dully. “I’ll think about it.”

“You’ll think about it!” He laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and she was grateful when another one of his adoring fans came and started sucking up to him, pulling focus.

At some point they went to a third afterparty, and maybe there was a fourth, but Lydia eventually lost track. Paul grabbed her hand and dragged her behind him and she dutifully trotted in his wake, party to party, person to person, suck up to suck up. Every now and then, in a voice screaming to be set loose, she told herself I won a Grammy too, goddamnit, but the longer the night stretched on, the more impossible it all felt.

I’m the arm candy, she then told herself. I’m just the arm candy.

It was late when they finally got back to their hotel, sometime in the very small hours of the morning. Paul, drunk and happy, strode into their room cradling his Grammy like a baby, while Lydia, drunk and sullen, brought up the rear. Her Grammy, bearing an imaginary man’s name, hung at her side like she resented having to hold it. She dumped it into the open maw of her suitcase as soon as she could; it bounced among her jeans and extra socks.

Paul set his Grammy down on a side table, then spun on his heel to face her again. “There you are, love,” he said. “My love, my lovely love. Christ you look so gorgeous in that dress, you know?”

Lydia sighed. She felt a thousand years old. “I’m exhausted, Paul. I’m going to go wash my face and get my pajamas on.”

“No no, come here, love.” She’d turned to head for the bathroom but he jogged towards her, wrapping his arms around her waist. Trapping her. “I’ve been thinking all night,” he said, kissing the side of her neck, “about getting this dress off you.”

“Oh really, I couldn’t tell,” she deadpanned.

He chuckled and ran a finger along the edge of the fabric. “Think of it, love. Tomorrow morning you can say you shagged a Grammy winner.”

She wrenched herself away from him so suddenly, both of them were taken aback. And though she was pretty drunk, the sobering effect of unfiltered, unchecked rage was immediate. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she hissed.

Paul blinked. “What—”

“You,” she snapped, pointing at him, “you fucking sober up. Then maybe I’ll think about telling you why I’m so fucking angry right now I could – ugh, motherfucker!” With a roar, she grabbed her clutch again and stormed out of the room, the door banging shut behind her.

In the hallway, she jammed on the elevator button but it was going much too slowly for her, so she stomped towards the stairs and started heading down, her heels clacking loudly on the concrete and steel. Her anger propelled her down two stories before it petered out and she stopped, swaying, halfway down a third flight.

She was in a strange city. Vaguely, she knew they were on the West Side of LA in the hotel featured in Pretty Woman, but besides that she had no other details about her location. To leave the hotel now, at three in the morning, wearing painful high heels and a very revealing dress, would be the height of stupidity.

Fuck.

She sank down gracelessly, sitting hard on the metal stair. It was painful, allowing the adrenaline that had coursed through her to slowly seep away, to drain out of her until she could hardly keep her head upright. Lydia tossed her clutch onto the step beside her and bent over her knees, her ears still ringing from the loud music that had blasted at every afterparty. For what felt like a long time, she just sat there, no logical thoughts in her head but to count her breaths: in, out. In, out.

How do you feel, Lydia? Dr. Archer would probably ask her right about now. Catalog for me what you can feel. Or Nicole would give her that no-nonsense look and say Spill it. Right now.

“Rage,” Lydia whispered to her knees. “Fury. Envy. Resentment. …Doubt.” She sniffled. “Hurt. Betrayal.”

God, did she hurt. She felt like her heart had been ripped from her chest, every enumerated breath a stab from a relentless knife. She cradled her head in her hands, feeling hollow and desiccated, even as her phone pinged with a new text from inside her clutch. Lydia ignored it.

Even through the ringing in her ears, the empty stairwell was too still. The hotel surrounding her on all sides was too smothering. Solitude wasn’t the cure she needed, but she couldn’t call anyone back home. New York and Boston were asleep right now, or about to wake up to head to work on a regular Monday morning. What she needed was to spill her guts, to get all this frustration and sadness purged from her system. To have a strong, steady shoulder to cry on.

Deep in the thick of her misery, the only person she wanted to talk to was Paul.

She unzipped her clutch and looked at her texts. The most recent one read I ordered coffees from room service. Come back and talk to me, my love xo

Lydia collected her things and made her way back to their suite. When she quietly let herself into the room with her keycard she found Paul sitting slumped at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, two cooling mugs of coffee on the counter before him. His green tuxedo lay crumpled on the carpet, his white shirt partially unbuttoned, like he’d started and lost steam halfway through. Paul picked his head up and watched her approach with bloodshot eyes.

“Hi,” she said. “Um, so I have a question for you.”

“Yeah?” His voice was hoarse.

Lydia gestured at his trophy, sitting over in the living room. “If somebody co-writes a really great song that everyone likes,” she said, “but nobody notices or acknowledges her, or even gives her an attagirl, job well done – did she really write it?” She wiped away at a few tears. “Um. Asking for a friend.”

“Yes – yes of course, Christ, love, come here,” he burst out, and she went to him and buried her face in his shoulder.

Chapter Text

Her mind was a jumble of past and present, time and place. It all slid loosely through her subconscious, not quite sticking around long enough to leave an impression beyond color-texture-size-shape before it was gone forever, not to be seen again. Music trickled into one ear, sounding muffled as if it were playing on a scratched record in another room, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t identify the song. George was there, his thin spotty face looming before her, and he asked her a question and she didn’t quite catch that either, asked him to repeat it, and he did over and over until she tilted her chin up and found herself looking at a familiar unfamiliar face. Do you know who you are? the policeman said, in a voice so broadly New York it seemed almost satirical. A whiff of stale pastrami wafted past her nose and—

Lydia started awake with a jolt. Inhaling again, she sighed. Eggs, she smelled. Coffee. Breakfast. Los Angeles.

The fucking Grammys.

Last night, after returning to the suite, she’d poured her heart out to Paul in a teary rush, giving him the events of that evening from her perspective. After listening with a patient ear he’d then gently nudged her towards the bathroom, where he started a hot shower for her and she washed the product out of her hair and the makeup from her face. Scrubbed clean, she curled up in bed with him for whatever hours remained of the mild California night. With everything open and honest between them once more, they’d both slept like the dead.

She stumbled out of bed and pulled on her robe, then went to find Paul – already up, as usual. He was busy taking plates and glasses from a newly-arrived room service cart out onto a shaded patio. “There she is,” he said warmly, his voice low. Thankfully he’d figured out years ago that she wasn’t a fan of his unfiltered morning perkiness. “Morning, love. Brekkie’s on.”

“Morning,” she mumbled. Lydia followed him outside and slumped into a seat, diving straight for the coffee he’d ordered for her. Only once she’d started sipping it did she notice what sat at the center of their table: the Grammy awards, both of them, positioned like ornate centerpieces.

I won a Grammy last night. Maybe if she reminded herself enough times it would feel real.

They didn’t talk much. She’d already said her piece and all that raw emotional honesty had exacted its toll in the form of weariness. On his part, Paul didn’t attempt to put on a happy face or give her any inanities that would annoy her. She tangled her feet with his under the table, and halfway through breakfast he reached out and took her hand, and the skin contact grounded her. But they spoke aloud only about their JFK-bound flight later that night. What awaited them back home in New York. The texts Paul had gotten from everyone congratulating him on the win. Lydia glanced at her own phone and saw similar kudos, though with the exception of their inner circle most of her messages were just friends telling her how hot she looked on TV. To them, that had been her major accomplishment of the night.

She tossed her phone to the table and sank lower in her seat, staring up at the canvas awning above them. Idly, her mind wandered to the mysterious six days – the days between her death and rebirth, still after all this time a gaping black hole in her memory. She’d long ago decided that she must have entered into some kind of Faustian bargain during that time, made promises, exacted certain conditions. She’d not only come back with memory of a past life, after all, but a perfect memory of one, moment by moment. If she really set her mind to it she could recreate entire conversations verbatim, entire distinct takes of songs as they’d slowly come together, entire books that he’d read, entire news bulletins, entire TV programs. There were multiple lost episodes of Doctor Who lurking in his subconscious, which was a pretty cool party trick but couldn’t be the sole reason he had those memories in the first place. He must have wanted to be completely himself, no matter what his next life threw at him. Wanted to be something that his friends – that Paul – would recognize right away, no matter what he looked like on the outside.

But surely not the jealousy part. Even he had the self-awareness to know that his chronic struggle with jealousy wasn’t healthy, and he never would have wanted that toxicity to come forward with him into another timeline. Because as Lydia stared at their Grammy awards, that was the feeling that rose to the top: jealousy. Ugly, and twisting in her gut. She’d won recognition from her peers but had had to stand back and let Paul speak for them both, a concession that felt like gravel scraping underneath her skin.

Not that he had said anything she didn’t agree with. But why did she need to be silent in the first place when she had a voice of her own she was willing and able to use?

And that led her to another question: to wonder if she’d actually chosen, on purpose, to come back as a girl when she’d known firsthand how patriarchal American society was. She had been a rich, influential white man, top of the heap in a multitude of ways; there was no way in hell she would’ve ever consented to coming back just to be a supporting character in someone else’s life, even for someone she loved. Absolutely no part of that sounded appealing. But that was what she’d become since not just last night but since they went public early last year, she realized: arm candy. A girl hanging around Paul who looked hot in low-cut dresses, good for her. And though Paul’s team had told her that the best reaction was no reaction anytime something went viral online, that also meant that the void could be filled with endless sexist, demeaning bullshit.

Her heart sank. Unless that was the real trade-off for retaining all her memories – not having to watch her friends die, but to endure a lifetime of misogyny for the privilege.

And if it was, did that mean that being Lydia Montrose wasn’t her big second chance at righting wrongs, but merely a desperate bid for more time? Was she like Anderson’s original little mermaid, trading pain and microaggressions for a few years with her prince charming?

She couldn’t accept that. That couldn’t be all there was.

Lydia became aware of Paul’s eyes on her, their conversation having faded away to nothing and their breakfasts long since eaten. The pad of his thumb ran gently over the back of her hand, and she tightened her grip before turning back to him. Without trying, he was the locus around which she rotated. The one thing in this chaotic world that consistently made sense to her, and always drew her in. He would have seemed like an equitable trade off, she mused, if she were in a certain mindset. But no, this couldn’t be all there was.

“I never foresaw anything like this happening,” she began. “Maybe I should have.”

“How could you have done?” Paul said right away. “You can’t see the future. We didn’t know, neither of us, love. How could we’ve known that ‘Quiet Down’ would be such a big hit when we first wrote it?”

“Yeah.” She heaved in a breath and let it out slowly. “Quiet Down” had probably become a hit because of people feeling sorry about all the visa nonsense, combined with the present political climate, but she didn’t say that part out loud. Well, maybe because of the guitar hook too, which was pretty damn catchy, she allowed. And Paul’s singing on it was fantastic. Definitely just as good as “Rehab,” maybe better. “But I don’t know if I could do last night again. I felt like I was drowning.”

Paul nodded, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. “We should come clean, then. Tell everyone you’re Monty Hayes.”

She was shaking her head before he’d even finished. “We can’t, babe. I was still in college when we wrote ‘You and Me,’ and we’re already skirting the very edges of what the public finds an acceptable age gap. And,” she added, sitting up a little, “more importantly, my parents think we didn’t meet until after that song was written, which means I looked them right in the eye and lied to them. I couldn’t…” She shook her head again.

“Then Monty should retire,” Paul said, his voice growing more confident. “I’ll say that he decided he’s done with songwriting, or whatever. He rides off into the sunset for good. Next album—” He squeezed her hand, and god love him he looked so hopeful. “Next album you write with me under your real name.”

Yet another project with her name on it that wasn’t her end goal. Awesome. She could add it to the pile of YouTube videos she’d made for the Washington Post that she’d never wanted to do in the first place, and all the general articles she’d done as she tried getting her foot in the door of international news and war reporting—

But Paul was looking at her with such excitement, like he’d come up with the best possible solution. McCartney-Montrose, songwriters extraordinaire. “Maybe,” she hedged. “That might work.”

“That way, if we—” He cut himself off with a mirthless laugh, scrubbing a hand over his unshaven face. “Might be counting chickens before they’re hatched,” he grumbled, “but if we keep writing together and we get nominated for more Grammys, you can join me onstage and say your piece too, if we win. Have your own acceptance speech.”

“I’m not going onstage at the Grammys ever again,” Lydia drawled.

Paul blinked at her, looking crestfallen. Fuck. She leaned in at once, clasping his hand with both of hers. “Hey,” she said, “I’ll always want to write with you. I mean it, you don’t ever have to worry about that part of it. When it’s just the two of us in a room together…” She got a little choked up unexpectedly, and blinked several times. “Fuck, when we write together it’s – that’s my happy place.”

“Mine too,” he was quick to say.

“It’s my happy place because in that room, we’re equals,” she went on. “As soon as we step out into the world, I’m the rank amateur working with the seasoned pro. Hardly anyone will take me seriously standing next to you.”

He clicked his tongue in annoyance. “But why isn’t it enough that I know you’re my equal?”

“You mean like how you knew you were my equal?” she challenged. “Did we all forget the Seventies, where you released eighty-three fucking albums and were on tour every other week with your new band to show people that you definitely weren’t the lesser half of Lennon-McCartney?”

Paul rolled his eyes and looked away, nibbling on his thumbnail, and she had her answer.

Silence fell over the table again. Knowing a lot about how his mind worked, Lydia knew he needed something to fix right now. He needed some kind of concrete task to perform to lift the heavy atmosphere that had fallen over both of them, to get them back to happy and content. So she pushed her patio chair back, wincing a little at the scrape of the legs against the concrete, and stepped closer to him. “This seat taken?” she teased, gesturing at his lap.

Paul gave her half a wry smile and sat up so she could fall into his arms. No place like it, being held by him. She inhaled a deep breath full of his fresh laundry scent and slowly let it go, feeling some of her troubles floating away on a sunny California breeze. “When we get back to New York,” she said, after a lazy pause, “I want to talk about setting up a home office for me. I’ll need one for writing.”

She felt it in real time, how his interest was piqued. “What were you thinking, love?”

“Well, our bedroom is an L-shape, so maybe we wall off that short leg at the front? I’d use the second bedroom but the natural light isn’t great there in the back.”

“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. He leaned his cheek against the top of her head. “And you should have my office on the lower floor anyway.”

“But don’t you need—?”

“We turn that part of the bedroom into an office,” he said, loosely sketching out the dimensions with his hand, “and put in a door connecting it to the music room on the other side. That’s mine, and then you’re all the way downstairs where it’s quiet, yeah? You can work on the computer and have your phone calls and things without bothering me, or being bothered by my playing music.”

As he spoke she could picture it clearly. She picked her head off his shoulder and grinned, eager to get started. “Yeah. I like it.”

“Yeah? That’s settled, then.” He carded a hand through her hair and kissed her, a kiss that burrowed deep in her bones and made a home there. “We always come up with the best ideas,” he murmured against her mouth.

“Sure do,” she murmured back. She kissed him again, lingering in it. “What about this idea – when’s the last time you shagged a Grammy winner?”

“Oh, it’s been some time now,” with a kiss to her cheek, and a wandering hand pulling back the neck of her nightgown. “At least… two days.” He pressed his lips to her collarbone and hummed.

Lydia shuddered, feeling the vibration of his voice down to her toes. “Mm. Might have to do something about that, you know.”

“As soon as I possibly can.” But he lifted his head up to gaze at her one last time. “Are you really sure you’re all right, love?”

“Getting there.” Lydia put her hand to his cheek and looked right into his eyes – the eyes that matched the beetle tattoo on her shoulder. Paul might have been her reason, she decided, but he wasn’t going to be her purpose. “You’re getting me there.”

First things first, when they got back to New York: they had to host a huge, blow-out party celebrating the Grammy win.

“The music industry is a clique, you know,” Paul told her, as they shopped for a caterer and a deejay the following week. “A very catty one at that. I need – we need to thank everyone for nominating us instead of Amy Winehouse.”

There was no question of where the party would be held. Paul had hired a contractor and a decorator to create the two new home offices and they were already hard at work, making measurements and comparing fabric swatches, so their condo was ruled out. He rented another place for them to stay in while construction was underway, a Central Park-adjacent penthouse with stunning views, even swankier than theirs. Lydia hated how cold and ultra-modern it was, compared to their home with all its little personal touches, but she figured she could put up with anything for just one month.

Jeff had no such resolve to look on the bright side. She opened his carrier on their first day in their temp digs and he streaked away yowling, only appearing at mealtimes from then on.

The guest list for their party included everyone from their inner circle, though James took his time before finally – reluctantly – saying he’d make an appearance. Paul invited all of the nominees from every category, even ones he hadn’t been in, and they watched as the RSVPs rolled in with plus ones and twos. They rented a gorgeous grand piano and some guitars to put into one of the upper rooms, since Paul confided in her that ultra-competitive singalongs always broke out when you shoved multiple musicians into the same space, and the two of them sat with the hired deejay to collaborate and come up with a perfect playlist.

Lydia got her guests in too. Scott and Travis couldn’t make it, but Nicole and her Mister Right Now could. “Don’t worry, Mark doesn’t get starstruck,” Nicole assured her, “he’s not going to get all weird if we walk in and, like, Kanye or whoever is right there.”

“You must really like this guy, huh?” Lydia teased her.

“He’s a breath of fresh fucking air after Tim,” Nicole said baldly, and they both laughed. “But, um, yeah, you know, Mark’s okay I guess.”

“He treats you right?”

“Yes, Mom,” Nicole returned, snorting.

“And you’re going to call me if that ever changes?”

“Lydia,” her best friend said, suddenly serious, “you’re always my first call, shut up.”

She dressed carefully for the party, opting to avoid anything too revealing like her Grammys dress. Instead, she wore a purple sequined blouse and her acid wash skinny jeans, the same ones that had driven Paul wild in Paris. With her hair artfully tousled, bracelets stacked up both arms, and a white blazer thrown over the top, she was pretty without bowing too much to the male gaze. Perfect.

Paul was in the kitchen chatting with one of the catering staff when she entered, chunky heels thudding on the tile. The caterer left and he turned at her approach, and she saw for the first time what he was wearing: her cartoon Beatles t-shirt, under a dark blazer.

She gaped, pretending annoyance. “I wondered where that shirt had gotten to!” she cried. “Look at you, you’re going to ruin it. It doesn’t even fit you right.”

He looked down, playing along. “It fits fine!”

“No, no look.” She hopped up onto the countertop and poked at Beatle John’s stylized head, positioned over Paul’s heart. “Ugh, my face is getting all stretched out of shape, it’ll be useless after this.”

“Oh dear, let’s take a look.” Paul took her chin in hand and tilted her face this way and that, studying it with great care. She crinkled her nose at him, thrilled as he stepped nearer, in between the spread of her knees. “No, no stretching that I can see.”

Lydia grinned and leaned in with sultry eyes. “Look closer.”

He’d leaned in too, and a pretty good snogging session was seconds away when Lydia heard a voice calling to them from below. “Hey bitch, you better be decent! We’re coming up either way!”

She squealed with excitement and hopped down just as Nicole and Mark came up from the entryway in their party finery. She hugged her friend tightly, then they enthused over each other’s outfits for a few minutes before Lydia finally threw an arm around her shoulders and presented her. “Paul, this is my bestest best BFF in the whole world, Nicole Parker. Nic, this is my Grammys date Paul McCartney.”

“Charmed,” Nicole said, offering her hand. Paul shook it politely, though with a sinking feeling Lydia realized he was sizing her up the same way he had Stu, when they first met. Aw, hell.

“Pleasure,” Paul said, aloof. “How long have you known Lydia, then?”

“Since our freshman year at Columbia,” Nicole said, lifting her chin and folding her arms. “We took an American history lecture together, and she lived in a dorm one floor above mine. Then we were roommates sophomore year.”

“Ah, for all that time,” distinctly unimpressed. Lydia could tell he was refraining from gloating that 1957 was a lot further back than 1999. “And she tells me you’re working on your doctorate? What field do you study?”

“Not music or the music industry,” Nicole returned, without missing a beat. Lydia winced and found herself looking at Mark, but he was just standing there awkwardly like an actor who didn’t know his cue. “I study comparative philosophy with a focus on how different cultures perceive the soul. My dissertation has to do with the philosophical justification for the dehumanization of enslaved people in the US, compared to how various African cultures viewed their oppressors.”

“It’s really good,” Lydia blurted out, when Paul merely raised an eyebrow. “Her dissertation. She’s let me read part of it.”

“Let you,” Nicole said, rolling her eyes, “more like you helped yourself to my laptop and read a few pages before I caught you.”

“I was curious!” Lydia cried, laughing. “I regret nothing!”

There was a door shutting down below in the foyer, more voices and shoes clomping on the tiled floors, and Lydia picked up the sound of Dhani and Olivia speaking to the coat checker stationed at the front door. Just before she turned to go and greet their guests, she saw Nicole crook her finger at Paul and whisper something in his ear.

Lydia could only wonder what that was all about. After Dhani and Olivia arrived the floodgates opened, and the entire penthouse was soon filled with people milling about, sipping cocktails and nibbling on vegetarian appetizers. The deejay had the music cranked so loudly she almost couldn’t hear herself think. She found herself caught up in conversations with all kinds of people, artists and producers and plus-ones who were there just to rub elbows with celebrities. One of the girls who had been nominated for Best Newcomer – Taylor something; Lydia couldn’t remember everyone’s first names let alone last names – had taken over at the piano upstairs and Dave Grohl was singing along as she played. John Mayer fiddled aimlessly with a guitar while a producer gave a hard sell for producing his next album. Nicole and Mark, Lydia saw sometime later, had ended up in conversation with Julian and Mary. Mary, for once, didn’t look like she was merely humoring her dad but like she was actually having a good time. Count that one as a win for the chick from Westchester.

She and Paul came together and separated numerous times throughout the night, as the staff needed to ask about their stock of drinks and food, or guests came up to chat. But multiple guests didn’t know who Lydia was unless Paul stood directly at her side, and those moments of anonymity jarred her. She was walking through the main living room to finally say hello and catch up with Dhani when Justin Timberlake snagged her upper arm. “Hey, you’re with catering, right?” he said, not really asking. “Could I get another one of these cheese puffs? These are great.”

She wasn’t dressed anything like the staff. Not even close. “I’m Paul’s live-in lover,” Lydia said bluntly. “But I’ll let him know about the cheese puffs.” She walked away, rolling her eyes, while she heard the group behind her laughing at Justin’s blunder.

Rich appeared later on, as she touched base with the actual caterer. The guests were going through the booze at an astonishing clip, but they’d anticipated that and weren’t in any danger of running out. “There you are, love,” Rich said, giving her a warm hug. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, you know.”

“It’s great to see you. Sorry, I’ve been running all over the place tonight.”

“No, not at all,” he said, brushing away her apology. “Wanted to see you because – well, I don’t know if this is the time or place, but I have an update on Sean.”

Sean.

Lydia froze, her shoulders lifting slightly in a protective stance. Rich put a hand on her arm, rubbing gently. “It can keep, love,” he said, “we can talk another time—”

“No,” she decided on the spot. “No time like the present. Come on, I know a place.”

Determined, she led him over to where Paul stood with Stella and Dhani in the dining room, and put a hand on his arm. If she were about to get bad news, she wanted to get it with Paul at her side. “Rich has some news about Sean,” she muttered in his ear. “Join us if you like.”

“Oh.” Paul looked between the two of them, blinking in surprise. “Yeah, let’s hear it.”

“I’ll come too, if you don’t mind,” Dhani piped up, looking a bit sheepish. “I’ve… actually been talking to Sean as well.”

“Then I suppose we’re all tagging along,” Stella said flatly.

Lydia felt her face heat, but she merely put her head down and led them all upstairs, to the third level where the penthouse’s bedrooms were all situated. And as they headed up more people joined their caravan – Olivia, Mary and Julian, Barb and Jason. All of their private Beatley circle, everyone who would have Sean’s new contact info too, followed Lydia up and filed into one of the guest bedrooms, crowding in beside the luxurious bed and bedroom furniture. It felt like a tribal council on Survivor, or something just as dramatic. When the door shut behind them all, it was as if the party downstairs wasn’t even happening.

She turned to face the room, letting her eyes flit over their expectant expressions until landing on Ringo. “Right,” Lydia said. She swallowed around a dry mouth. “For those of you who don’t know, Sean changed his number a few months ago and gave it to all of you except me, Paul, Richie, and Barb.” She snorted, trying to lighten the mood a little. “We sent Richie on a fact-finding mission to see what’s happened.”

“I don’t really have much for you, love,” Rich said. He looked, Lydia realized, unbearably sad. “I rang him using Jason’s phone a few weeks ago. He was… angry, when he heard my voice.”

“He yelled at Dad,” Jason blurted out, sounding upset on his father’s behalf. “I could hear it over the phone, he got all worked up.”

Lydia’s heart started sinking, like she’d fallen into quicksand. But she still had to know. “What did he say?”

Rich shook his head, back and forth, and stared at the floor, and it was several moments before he spoke. “He was offended that I was… on your side,” he said. “How could I be friends with someone so…” His voice trailed off.

“Say it, Richard,” Lydia snapped, making a few people startle. Paul put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “I’m a big girl, I can take it.”

Rich sighed. “How could I be friends with someone so awful,” he said, the words unwillingly dragged into the light.

Fuck. Oh fucking shit. She wanted off this ride. She had a bad feeling about it.

“I can only imagine what Yoko must’ve said,” Paul ground out, when Lydia’s words failed her. At her side he was a knight in shining armor, towering with righteous anger, ready to ride to her defense. “Must’ve fed him all kinds of lies to counter the truths Lyd told him last year.”

“I didn’t get much beyond that,” Ringo said dully.

“We didn’t want to push him any further,” Barb chimed in. “He sounded so upset, Sean did.”

“I’ve been speaking to him as well,” Dhani said then, sounding hesitant. “He’s one of my best mates, we talk pretty frequently. I may… well, I’ve a little more information about the situation.”

“Anything you think we need to know,” Paul said, nodding.

Dhani exchanged a look with Olivia, wincing. “It’s not good. Not by a long shot.”

“That’s not important. We’d just like to know,” Paul said, glancing at her. Lydia was still unable to speak. She felt, with a sinking sort of dread, that she knew exactly where this conversation was going to go but, like in a nightmare, she was stuck and unable to escape.

Dhani looked down at his hands, picked at one of his fingernails. And then started telling them all in even, measured tones the contents of his recent talks with Sean. Everything Yoko had told him about her life with John – the screaming matches, the slammed doors, the slaps and kicks and wrenched arms. The emotional manipulation, the verbal abuse and vicious mockery. Racism and sexism woven together into terrible two-pronged insults. Wild sprees where he was withdrawing and violently desperate for another hit of dope. The time he yelled so loudly that Sean’s ear drums ruptured.

Lydia felt herself shrinking, in and in and in. Trying to take up less space, or disappear altogether from prying eyes. Stella glanced at her once or twice, she saw, covering her mouth with her hand in unveiled horror. Of course a daughter of Paul McCartney, the fucking Father of the Year himself, couldn’t fathom that some daddies were just shit.

And Paul’s hand – god. Lydia felt Paul’s hand slide from her shoulder, down her back, away. Until they weren’t touching at all anymore. The knight in shining armor had rode off.

When Dhani finished his terrible accounting, the silence was absolute. Somewhere downstairs the party went on, and the music pumped up through the floors. A man laughed hysterically at a joke none of them could hear. Oh my gawd, Lydia heard him say, you gotta be kidding me.

“Christ,” Rich breathed. “What an absolute mess—”

“I don’t think Sean believed it all at first,” Dhani said reluctantly, “but over time—”

“She’s crossed the line,” Paul spat, trembling with fury. “I can’t believe she’d bloody say all that to her own son about his father, fucking hell—”

“Should we talk about voting her off the board of directors for Apple?” Olivia wondered aloud. “She can’t be the steward of John’s estate if she’s—”

“Oi,” Lydia said, yelling to be heard over the furor. They all looked to her. “Before anyone’s knickers get all in a twist, aren’t you even going to ask if what she said is true?”

Julian closed his eyes and turned away, folding in on himself.

“It’s obviously not,” Paul cried. “I don’t need to—”

“Except it is, though,” Lydia said, and a full body tremor shot through her. She felt like she was naked before them, exposed for all to see. “Everything Yoko told Sean. It’s all true.” She turned to her firstborn son. “Tell ‘em, Jules. Tell ‘em what an abusive piece of shit your old man was.”

Julian looked up at her, his eyes rimmed in red. He said nothing.

“Not exaggerated, not even a little bit,” she went on, her voice getting shrill. “Right, Jules? I did all of that. And a lot more, honestly.” She looked down, tucked her hair behind her ear. “So. You all… do with that what you will. I’m gonna make like Greta Garbo and be alone now.”

She gave a mocking curtsey to the room, spun on her heel, and left before anyone could stop her. Not that any of them tried.

Chapter Text

Lydia, careening back down to the second level of the penthouse she hated, hardly paid attention to where she was going. Bumping into Nicole at the foot of the stairs was an unpleasant shock to the system.

“Hey, I – whoa whoa, Lyd, what’s going on?” Nicole grabbed her by her upper arms, halting her forward progress. “What’s happened?”

She looked wildly about the room, at the party still throbbing around them. Flowing on, somehow, like nothing had changed, like the world hadn’t rocked on its axis. I’m a sadistic wife-beater, Lydia could’ve said. I hurt small children. I’m everything we always said we hated about the patriarchy. And the words just weren’t there. It was like her vocal chords had up and walked away. Because that’s what happened when things got hard – when Stu died, when Brian died, when George got stabbed by that mad attacker. She froze like a deer in the headlines and was mute, immobile, useless, completely useless.

Rather than continue to watch her gape soundlessly, Nicole started steering her towards the kitchen. “Okay, we’re getting you some water now,” she announced, “and then you’re going to get some fresh air, and then you’ll tell me who I need to punch.”

Lydia cringed at the threat of violence, even jokingly meant. Fuck, how many times over the years had the two of them casually talked about attacking people for misdeeds both real and imagined? “No,” she whimpered.

“Then you’ll tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“No,” she rasped. “I can’t. Not right now.”

Nicole’s shoulders jerked in frustration. “Okay. But you need something, right?”

“Water,” Lydia replied. She hoped her thin voice could still be heard over the strains of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” blasting over the speakers. She cleared her throat. “Water. Air.”

“Okay,” Nicole said again. “We can do that.”

Lydia let her friend lead her over to the bar, watched her ask the barkeep for a bottled water. Then, that one item checked off the to-do list, Lydia headed towards the sliding glass doors that led to a shallow balcony at the front of the penthouse, facing the dark expanse of Central Park. It wrapped fully around the side of the building, leaving a blind spot right at the corner where she could sit and no one could see her from anywhere inside.

“And… you want to be alone?” Nicole confirmed.

Lydia nodded.

Her friend clearly wanted to argue that point, but after only a moment’s hesitation she nodded back. “Okay. Mark,” she called over Lydia’s shoulder, “top off my drink, lover, we’re going on guard duty.”

The cold night air hit her in the face when she stepped outside, and her ears started ringing once she slid the glass door shut. Only the bass vibrations of the party music made it out here, where they fought for dominance with the ever-present dull roar of New York City street and sidewalk traffic.

Lydia sat in one of the patio chairs, pushing it back until she couldn’t see into the penthouse at all, from any angle. But rather than collapse into a heap the tension in her body screwed higher, leaving all her limbs like guitar strings that had been tightened too much and were at risk of snapping. She sat, legs spread, feet planted, elbows dug into her knees, head dropped forward until her long hair shrouded her from the world and all she could see was the tiled balcony floor, and her own breath leaving her mouth in faint clouds.

She had a real answer now, didn’t she? This life wasn’t a second chance. It was so she could do penance for all the evil shit she’d done in the past. And fucking hell, she’d done so much evil. Yoko had only told Sean about the things she had direct knowledge of, and Yoko had only been in part of his life. She hadn’t been there in the room the time a teenage John screamed at Mimi until she cried, or when he slammed a girlfriend’s head into—

How could I have ever thought I deserved a second chance? she wondered, despairing. How, with my history?

Hardly had the thought entered her mind when the heavy glass door slid open again. “You can’t go out there,” Nicole cried. “She wants to be alone!”

“That doesn’t include me,” Paul declared, and he rammed the door shut behind him so hard the glass rattled in its frame.

“Fuck off, Macca,” Lydia growled.

“I’m fine where I am, ta.”

She flipped her hair back so she could give him the full effect of her glare. “I’m not in the mood for your next rendition of ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,’” she hissed.

“Good, wasn’t planning on breaking into song.”

“What don’t you get about ‘I wanna be alone right now’?”

He sat beside her. “If you really wanted to be alone, you’d say so.”

“I did!”

“I mean now, love.”

The words dried up in her throat. Yes, I want to be alone, and yes, that does include you. If she said it, she wouldn’t mean it. She always wanted Paul, even now that she felt on the very brink of losing him forever. Lydia scowled at him for good measure, then returned to her contemplation of the floor.

For a long while they just sat there. Distantly, she became aware that he had mirrored her pose, seated on the edge of his own chair and leaning over his knees, but he didn’t say a word and she had zero interest in initiating a conversation.

“She must’ve exaggerated some, surely.”

“None of it,” Lydia said. “Not a thing.”

“And… that’s not all?”

“Not by a long shot.” A perverse impulse overtook her. “You remember Thelma Pickles, at the art college?”

She could practically hear him frown at the non sequitur. “Ah… yeah?”

“We dated awhile, so she’s got her own stories about me. So does May. And Cyn. Auntie Meem. Alma. Maureen Cleave. A girl who snuck into my hotel room on tour in… fuck, where was that, Houston?”

“I sucker punched a photographer once,” Paul blurted out.

Lydia stared up at him. “Congratulations…?”

He sat up a little, tossing back his hair. “I’d just done a rather difficult interview – Desert Island Discs, remember that, on the BBC? They had me on in 1981, ’82. That was during a period when it felt like everyone was pushing me to get emotional over you,” he said, sounding annoyed. “And at last I was, that day. Few notes of ‘Beautiful Boy’ and I got as close as I’ve ever come, you know. Stepped outside the building after, saw a kid with a camera and went after him like – like some bloody ted. Two solid jabs to the face.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “The Marquess of Queensberry must be so proud,” she drawled.

“Threw a bucket of water at a journalist too,” he said thoughtfully, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Couple journalists, if I’m being honest. They like to trespass on my land for some reason. There were a few men pretending to be you who snuck over the property line as well, over the years, pretty sure I clocked at least some of them, for their sins. Worse than the journos, they were – they’d get my hopes up.”

“Oh would you shut up,” she snapped. “Stop fucking trying to make yourself out like some big bad—”

“Screaming matches with Linda,” Paul said, his voice filled with regret. “Christ, the fights we had. I can only hope the kids never heard them.” He paused. “I’ve fought with you. Before, and after. Loathed everything I said, once the fog of war had lifted.”

“We’re not the same, you and I,” Lydia said, turning towards him. “Don’t get it twisted, we’re not fucking equals when it comes to hurting people.”

“Never claimed we were,” Paul said with a shrug. “You forget, I’ve dragged you off plenty of bastards you were about to deck. Some of them deserved it, even. I know what set you off and I know what you were capable of. But that was then. Lydia,” he leaned in, his air of nonchalance finally giving way to earnestness, “I’ve slept beside you for five years, love. You don’t even kick me in your sleep.” She scoffed and turned away again, folding her arms tightly. “You get frustrated, and you complain, and you work out your feelings like everyone else does,” he went on, “but I know you’d never hurt anyone now.”

She wanted to bolt. He was between her and the patio door; she wanted to push him aside and run for the exit. Out the building, down the street, far far away. It was an effort to stay present, in the here and now. “Where’s Julian?” she mumbled.

“He’s fine, my love,” Paul said. “I—”

“Just because I might not kick you in your sleep doesn’t mean I’ve never kicked other people,” she spat. “Exhibit one: Yoko. When she was pregnant, no less.”

“Love,” he said patiently, “it was terrible, what I found out today. But that doesn’t mean I think it happened today.”

A sob pushed past her lips. Lydia clenched her teeth, trying to keep the rest in. “Stop it,” she wailed.

“I know you’re sorry for all of it. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be sitting out here with you.”

“But sorry isn’t enough! Sorry won’t – it doesn’t mean shit if people are still traumatized by what I did to them!”

Paul sighed. “Bloody hell, is this the part where we talk about what you do and don’t deserve? Where being Lydia isn’t a second chance to do things right, but the opportunity for… I don’t know, 24-7 self-punishment?”

Curse him for knowing how her mind worked. “Maybe it is!”

He sagged back in his seat, legs sprawled. Somehow, she finally noticed, he’d moved so that their hips and knees and ankles all touched. Always reaching out for one another. “Love, honestly, that sounds rather dull.”

“Would you be fucking serious for five seconds, I swear to god Macca—”

“I am being serious. If you think I’m going to sign off on, you know, your spending your days like those monks from Monty Python – the ones constantly bashing themselves on the head – to make up for being a violent prick decades ago, and then maybe, if you think you’ve earned it, you come home to me and we shag with the lights off… yeah, that sounds pretty dull, if you ask me.”

Unbidden, she snorted. “Not with the lights off.”

Paul grinned and winked at her. “Only if you’ve earned it, mind.”

The unexpected moment of levity deflated some of her anger. She rolled her bottle of water between her hands, back and forth, forward and back. “Are you sure Julian’s—”

“Still fine, love.”

“Fuck.” She tilted her head back and looked up at the starless sky. “The last time I hit someone was in October of 1998,” she announced. “I was a senior in high school. I’d been flirting with the captain of the football team over the summer and finally, he’d asked me out. Corey Robinson, what a dreamboat.”

Paul shifted beside her, radiating jealousy, but didn’t interrupt.

“I don’t know where he got this idea from,” she went on, “because it definitely didn’t come from me, but Corey got it into his head that he was my first. That was until one of his teammates let slip that I had gone behind the bleachers a few times the year before with a guy from the track team. Corey didn’t like that too much.” Lydia looked down at her hands, turning blue in the February chill. “So during Homecoming Week, at the big pep rally, Corey waits until we have a large crowd around us, and then he breaks up with me and calls me a chicken-head bimbo for all to hear.”

Paul gave her a blank look; Lydia took pity on him. “What does a chicken do when it’s feeding?”

“Its head bobs up and d— oh Jesus,” he groaned, face palming.

“Three people in this story,” she said, “all sexually active. But I was the only one being slut shamed in public and made to feel like I was dirty and shameless. So I punched him. And the second my fist made contact with his nose I—” Lydia swallowed around a sudden lump in her throat. “I saw Bob Wooler’s face flashing in front of me.”

“See? You’re not made of stone.” Paul went to put his arm around her and draw her into his chest, but Lydia stayed strong, remained stiff and upright in her chair. He gave up but left one hand pressed to the middle of her back. “You’ve seen the error of your ways and corrected course. It matters, love!”

“But it’s not enough,” she insisted. “How could it be?”

He bit the inside of his cheek, thoughtful. “Lydia,” Paul said finally, “some might say that – that 1980 was punishment enough for all that.”

“Yeah, right,” she snarled.

“The violence of that night. The… Jesus, when I think of where I was at forty, and everything I’ve done since then – you were robbed,” he said, his voice thickening, “of so many bloody years. Why isn’t that your punishment?”

“Because then I wouldn’t remember!” she said, leaning away from his hand. “If that was it, if the whole thing was done and dusted, eye for an eye, then I would’ve been reborn without my memories and I wouldn’t be forced to relive all my misdeeds again!”

“Would that be better?” Paul asked. “If you hadn’t remembered, and we had never reconnected?”

“It almost didn’t happen in the first place!” she let slip.

He stared at her, lips slightly parted. “I know you didn’t want to see me at first, at the Plaza,” he said slowly, “but—”

“Paul, I remembered you in 1999,” she said. “I didn’t seek out any of you until the ticket to Rich’s show pretty much fell into my lap. A full year later. And I almost turned Travis down. I almost decided that I didn’t want to see any of you.”

It still wouldn’t sink in. “You wouldn’t—”

“I wouldn’t have sought you out, no. Not ever. Not that you would’ve noticed, probably, from behind all your personal aides and bodyguards,” she said bitterly. “I would never have been able to get through to you. I could’ve lived with that.”

Paul stood up abruptly and walked a few steps away, hand over his mouth. “Us finding each other again,” she went on, twisting the knife further, “it was never a given. Never fated, or any bullshit like that. I chose it.”

“You chose it,” he repeated, triumphant, spinning on his heel to look at her. “You chose not to deprive yourself. You do see this as a second chance. You want to be with me, same as I want to be with you.”

“But how could it—!” She gasped as tears choked her again, as the cold sank ever deeper into her bones. “If it’s a second chance, to do things over,” she whispered, “why does it feel like this?”

He sat beside her again; this time, she was limp as he pulled her close. “Who said second chances are always perfect?” he murmured into her hair. “They usually aren’t, you know. They’re messy and complicated, because life’s messy and complicated.”

“Stop it,” she said, even as she pulled on his jacket and pressed her face against him. “Why aren’t you completely turned off by what you just learned about me?”

“When have I ever been?”

She grunted, annoyed. “That’s not an answer.”

“You’ve been important to me from the moment we met, love,” he said, his voice gentle. “At first it was because you were the lad who could get me into a real rock ‘n’ roll band, one that got paid bookings and everything. Then you were important to me because you were the only one, aside from Hazza, who really understood Little Richard and Buddy Holly and all them. And it went from there. As long as we’re talking about choices, the path not taken – best decision I ever made, you know, joining your group.”

She buried her face in her hands and leaned further into him, the warmth of him. “You feel like you need to do all this atoning now,” he went on, running a hand through her hair, “but I think you’ve already been doing it all along, haven’t you? Think of how you adjusted your behavior, back in your school days. Look how remorseful you feel right at this minute.”

“You don’t think I’m a monster? A chauvinist pig?”

Paul snorted. “Not hardly. Would a monster have asked me twice if Julian was okay?”

“He is, right?”

He smiled helplessly at her, like she’d done something adorable. “Yes, love. Julian’s fine.”

She closed her eyes, weary. “I just…”

“I know, love. But just as those things didn’t happen today, you didn’t realize they were wrong today, either, yeah? You’ve known for years already. You’re already on your way.”

Lydia curled up against him, tucking her hands inside his jacket. He pulled at her legs until she was practically half-draped over him, and they sat that way listening to traffic several stories below. Thank god she hadn’t followed through with her first instinct and told him to leave her alone.

“Oh, before I forget again.” He shifted in his chair, then fished out his phone and unlocked it. “The contractor sent me photos earlier today of the progress they’ve made on your office.”

“Yeah?” She took his phone when he offered it, and swiped through about a dozen photos of the room. She saw the back wall, formerly covered with Wings tour posters, now covered with erasable whiteboard calendars so she could schedule interviews and phone calls. The desk adapted with a corkboard, so she could structure her work with index cards and Post-It notes. The new dedicated land line. One of her favorite photos pinned over the brand-new desktop computer, of folk singer Woody Guthrie holding an acoustic guitar that read This machine kills fascists.

“You know,” she said, tilting her chin up, “someday you’re not going to come up with the perfect thing to say in a tough situation, and this winning streak you’re on will come crashing to a halt.”

“Mm, you’re probably right,” Paul agreed. “You’d best stick around, then, so you can be witness to when it happens.”

“So fucking confident,” she muttered, just before she shifted herself fully into his lap and kissed him hard. He kissed back, matching her ardor and need, wrapping his arms tightly around her so they were pressed together and no space existed between them. Holding her like she never had to worry about him letting go.

“Did I say the right thing, love?” he whispered, later, when air became necessary. His dark eyes were luminous in the city lights.

“Yes,” she whispered back. “Flagellating myself for things I did decades ago might be appropriate at first, even expected, but eventually it would become purely performative. And who would decide when amends were made – me? You? Yoko? How do you measure that kind of thing?”

“You can’t.” He pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I just… I didn’t know what to say, when Dhani first told us. I would’ve said anything to make you feel better. To keep you from fucking off somewhere else.”

“Paul,” she said, tears coming to her eyes, “where could I go that I wouldn’t tell you about first?”

“Rather not think about it. But I had to – I had to tell you…”

“Tell me what, Macca?”

He buried his face against her, ensuring that his words were a secret meant for her ears alone. “To tell you,” he said, his voice catching, “that I love every bloody version of you.”

She waited a few moments, until she was sure her voice would be steady. “And having sex with the lights off is boring,” she said, which made him snort.

The party had reached such a fever pitch by the time they all retreated to their odd family meeting, that it ground on seamlessly with little participation from either of them for hours, late into the night. They went back inside eventually, driven indoors by the loss of feeling in their cold fingers, but no one had even noticed they were gone. It wasn’t until nearly three AM that guests started heading for the door and out into the night, the deejay dismantled his equipment, and the caterers started stacking their trays and packing scattered bits of leftover food.

Paul went to touch base one last time with all the staff, while Lydia tiredly ushered out the last few stragglers. Among them were Nicole and Mark. Nicole gave her a tight hug. “You’re okay?”

“I want to tell you about it,” Lydia realized just before the words left her mouth, “but today’s not the day. For now, I’m fine.”

“All right.” Nicole gave her a sad smile. “Thanks for inviting us. We had a great time.”

Once they were on their way, Lydia went to the music room and found Julian there alone, playing a little something on the rented piano. He stopped as soon as he saw her. “I’d better be off as well,” he said, standing up from the bench. “I’m beat.”

She merely watched as he walked towards her and stopped. “Paul and I are so glad you could come.”

“Yeah.” He cocked his head to one side, eyeing her. “He didn’t give you any grief, did he? About… everything.”

“No. I mean, not any more than the grief I was piling on myself.”

“It’s rubbish, you know,” Julian burst out. “He – Yoko shouldn’t have told Sean all that.”

Lydia shrugged, ready to trot out all the arguments Paul had already shot down once, when Julian went on, “It’d be one thing if you didn’t give a shite, if you didn’t care. But I can tell you care. So… it’s just not right,” he looked away, shy, “to step all over someone who’s really trying to be a better person. That’s what I think, at any rate.”

Embarrassed, he made to walk around her and head for the door and his coat, but Lydia moved to intercept him. Before he could say another word she’d wrapped her arms around him, as snugly as she dared.

Julian hugged her back.

Lydia inhaled as tears filled her eyes, as her heart lifted into the back of her mouth. I love you so much, she thought frantically, I’ll never have the words to describe how much I love you, my sweet boy.

She backed away, framing his face with her hands. And because the words got caught, she didn’t say half of what she really wanted to. “Text me when you get to your hotel, so I know you got back safe,” she told him instead.

He snorted, a light puff of air through his nose. “Will do.”

Twenty minutes later, the last of the staff having left and Paul and Lydia finally alone in the penthouse, they went through their evening routines quietly. All the lights shut off, the coffeemaker programmed for the morning, any left-behind items from guests dumped into a pile at the door for Paul’s assistant to worry about the next day. Lydia brushed her teeth and removed her makeup, thinking that it had been centuries since she’d done herself up for the party.

And when she got the requested text from Julian – Safe and sound, good night x – and drifted off to sleep securely held in Paul’s arms, only then did it finally feel like the punctuation at the end of a very long day.

Chapter Text

The relief was sweet, on the day they moved back into the penthouse in early March.

Lydia stood in the doorway of Paul’s office – now hers – and looked around in wonder. Every element she had picked out of a catalogue or sketched on a loose sheet of paper, for the benefit of designers and carpenters and contractors, had now been rendered in real life. All her gleaming whiteboards ready to write on, the brand-new dry-erase markers poured into pencil cups, stacks of untouched Post-Its and index cards, the sleek new desktop computer. More importantly, the décor changes were just enough to minimize the horrible memory of what had happened a few years ago in this very room: her confrontation with Yoko, and the painful conversation with Paul that had followed. Now the room was wholly hers, with everything in its place, just how she wanted it.

“And there’s one more surprise,” Paul said. He made a big show of putting a finger over his lips, then opened a lower desk drawer and lifted up a false bottom. Down in a hidden compartment lay her Grammy award, on its side with the brass plaque etched SONG OF THE YEAR – “QUIET DOWN” face up. “For when you need to remember how brilliant you are.”

Lydia bit back a grin, nudging his shoulder with her own and chuckling a little when he nudged back. Part of her – the part that nagged like Aunt Mimi to sit up straight and keep her elbows off the table – was still convinced that she should reject the new office, because she didn’t deserve it, not any of it, not with all the black marks against her. And maybe Paul saw that in her eyes, because he slid a hand against her lower back and murmured to her, “This is it, love. You’re writing a book.”

“I’m writing a book,” she whispered back.

She next followed Paul upstairs to his new office, slightly smaller than his old one, positioned between their bedroom and the music room. Now two stories higher than before, he had an even better view out the front windows of Central Park across the street, and the filtered sunlight illuminated the old touring posters he’d had brought up and pinned yet again to the back wall. “Way That I Feel” and “You and Me” hung vertically over the light switch. “Wow,” she said, looking around, “this looks great.”

“Aye, it’ll do,” he declared, in a broad, bored accent, throwing an arm around her shoulders. They shared a thrilled smile.

To break in her new workspace Lydia celebrated by getting right to it, filling in her calendar with all the phone interviews and informal coffees she’d been lining up for the past several weeks. She transferred her document files from her laptop to her new computer and started toiling away at them, strategizing and structuring and sketching out the format of her book. It wasn’t time to write yet, only for research and data-gathering, but that was enough to keep her busy for hours.

That first night Paul went to bed long before she did; she had a dim memory of him coming in to put a cup of tea next to her keyboard and dropping a kiss on the side of her head. “Sorry, I’ll be up in a minute,” she said to his retreating back.

“No rush,” Paul said as he went upstairs. Jeff, curled up at the edge of her desk, just gave her a look. He didn’t buy it either.

Lydia didn’t head up until well after midnight, once all of her work thus far had been sorted and organized into its proper place. By then even Jeff had slouched off to his little bed in the living room and called it a day. She ducked into the bathroom and shut the door so the light wouldn’t wake Paul, and once she’d finished her evening ablutions she tiptoed out and slid into bed beside him. Even asleep, he moved closer to her and she curled up in his arms with a deep sigh.

He now knew the worst things about her, the most vile deeds she’d ever done – and he was still here. There would never be a time when that didn’t feel like a miracle.

Lydia took the train to work the next day, eschewing the car service. She never in a million years could’ve believed she’d ever think this, but she’d desperately missed the New York Subway System, its questionable smells and oddball characters, the decaying splendor seeping from its cracked mosaic tiles. Even in its present state, it was positively luxurious compared to the subway she remembered from the Seventies, when the City had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and every ancient train car was liberally dripping in graffiti tags. She strode past a guy using a plastic bucket for a drum, wailing away in complex polyrhythms that got her all fired up for Monday, and put a five-dollar bill in his upturned hat. Hopefully some of her good mood could rub off on other people too.

There wasn’t much on her plate that day, work-wise. She was still tinkering with a video they’d filmed a few weeks earlier, but that was simply a matter of tweaking some of the voice over and adjusting some of the music scoring. Lydia also had lunch scheduled with Maureen Dowd, the legendary opinion columnist at the New York Times and one of her Christmas letter writers, which she was really looking forward to. But at the very last second, Maureen called to postpone.

“I’m so sorry to do this at the eleventh hour,” she said, “but something’s come up over here and I’ll have to push our lunch to next week.”

Lydia’s antenna immediately went up. Maureen’s vague wording implied just one thing: some sort of breaking story that the Times had on their radar. “Oh, no problem at all,” she answered. “The news waits for no one, right?”

“I—look, you’re in the trenches too, so I know I can trust you with this,” Maureen said, suddenly lowering her voice. “Your people are probably onto it already anyway. Something major is about to come out about Governor Spitzer.”

Lydia froze in her desk chair. “Ah. Is Mister Clean not so clean after all?”

“Our idols have feet of clay,” she said mysteriously, and soon after the line went dead.

Lydia was still staring at her phone when Matt walked up, toting a mug of the break room’s barely drinkable coffee. “Uh oh, what’s that face?” he teased, leaning against the dividing wall of her cubicle.

“Is Metro developing any big stories about the governor today?”

“Aside from his usual fights with the legislature?” Matt asked, frowning. “Not that I’m aware of.”

Lydia slid in front of her computer and pulled up the New York Times’s website. The current front page told her absolutely nothing. “A bombshell is coming,” she said, glancing up at Matt, “I’m guessing within hours. I have that straight from Maureen Dowd.” She emphasized her source with a waggle of her eyebrows.

Matt blinked, nonplussed. “Within hours,” he echoed. “Damn. Too late for us to catch up, I’m guessing.”

“Probably.” Lydia refreshed the Times’ website. Still nothing.

“Wow, I wonder what it could be?” Matt took a contemplative sip of his coffee. “Eliot Spitzer’s record in public office is pristine, so far as I know. He comes by that ‘Mister Clean’ nickname honestly.”

“Politicians always have skeletons in their closet,” she said, turning away from the computer. “Well. My lunch plans just got scrapped. Want to grab an overpriced sandwich from the place downstairs and then obsessively refresh the New York Times website every thirty seconds?”

“Oh my god,” Matt said, hand over his heart, “it’s like you know me.”

For a solid half hour, after they returned from the downstairs bodega, she did exactly that. They congregated at Matt’s desk in the open and sunny Metro department, since Lydia was bored of sitting in her dark little cubicle over in Online Content, and they laid out their respective lunches on the two arms of his L-shaped workspace. While they ate, and Lydia shared a few select anecdotes about the Grammys and Paul’s win, she clicked the refresh button on Matt’s computer like clockwork, every minute or so. The webpage stayed frustratingly static.

A little after two PM Matt watched as she clicked the mouse yet again, and yet again nothing visibly changed. Their lunch break had just ended but neither of them moved to go back to work. He sighed. “You’re sure about what she told you.”

“Completely,” Lydia replied. “Something ‘major,’ she said. Emphasis on the word major.”

“I told my editor and he didn’t know anything about it,” Matt admitted, “and now he’s like, digging back through old clippings, wondering what we could’ve missed.”

“Maybe it’s… wait.” Lydia had just clicked refresh again and, unusually, this time the website was taking a bit longer to load. The browser remained blank and white, the cursor spinning as it loaded, and then— “Fuck a pig,” she blurted out, loudly enough that some of Matt’s neighbors turned to see why she was bothering them.

A new front-page article was now prominently featured at the top of the website, accompanied by a photo of their heroic, lantern-jawed governor. The title told her everything she needed to know: Spitzer Is Linked to Prostitution Ring.

Hello. What?

“That’s not real,” Matt said, leaning in to look at the computer screen. “Like… someone hacked the site. There’s no fucking way that’s real.”

Lydia clicked on the link to the full article, cold and numbing disbelief flooding her entire body as she read the lede: Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who gained national prominence relentlessly pursuing Wall Street wrongdoing, has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month…

 “God, what a tired cliché,” Matt mumbled, reading over her shoulder. “The do-gooder politician, brought down by his love of hookers.”

“But he was supposed to be better than that,” Lydia said. “He told us he was better than that.” Once she reached the end of the article, her hand dropped down from the mouse to her lap, limp. A powerful man with everything going for him, she thought. A man who had lied about himself so profoundly, it might wipe out all the good things he’d done over the past ten years. Everything he’d done for the people of New York, now tainted by the fact that he was a law-breaking, first-class skeeze.

And he had three young daughters, she remembered, finding this out about their own dad. Her heart broke a little for those girls.

Matt eyed her and her reaction. “I had no idea you were such a Spitzer fan. I feel like I’ve heard you complain about him constantly, every time you had to film something with him.”

“He was a micromanaging nightmare,” Lydia said absently. She glanced up at the TVs placed around their bullpen and saw, sure enough, the cable networks had glommed onto the news and were showing Spitzer and his wife at a press conference from minutes earlier, both of them looking grim and slightly ill. The lower third graphic on screen helpfully told her that Spitzer, surprisingly, had not resigned.

But he would eventually, she knew. That was the way this always went; the script never varied in all the times it played out. Public figures were caught with their pants down, they apologized to the American people for betraying their trust, and then they resigned to “spend more time with their families.” It had been an open secret for years that Spitzer was gunning for the White House and wanted to be the first Jewish president – with this new reporting, now he’d be lucky to get appointed head of Public Works on Staten Island. His career, as brilliant as it had been, was done.

Well – maybe, Lydia allowed. With these big scandals, the politicians involved either disappeared into deep dark holes never to be seen again, or they waited a few years before staging a perfectly-crafted comeback to get back into the public eye. Americans enjoyed watching people get torn down, especially if it was richly deserved, but god did they love a good comeback story too. Spitzer would probably fall into the latter camp. If her read of his personality was anything close to the truth, Lydia thought he liked being the people’s champion too much to just give it up forever.

Being a Beatle was a bloody trap, she heard her own voice say, smoky with scotch and cigarettes. Someone fuzzy sat nearby nodding his head; the memory shifted like a microscope coming into focus and she saw Elton, looking solemn and serious. Beatle John was an automaton, you know, waving to the same crowds, playing the same awful crap night after night. “Yesterday…” But being a rocker who’s got something real to say, yeah? Being an artist whose work is appreciated and understood…

When she returned to her desk, she saw that Paul had texted her personal phone about something funny he’d spotted that morning. She opened their text thread to respond: Put on the news. Eliot Spitzer. I’m kind of upset about it.

He texted her back sometime later, as she worked her way through an email backlog. Were you ever alone in a room with him?

Lydia rolled her eyes, though maybe she should’ve predicted that would be his first reaction. Multiple times, she wrote back. Never felt unsafe. That’s not the issue here. But when he asked her to be more specific about what was disturbing her, she found that she couldn’t be. Lydia swayed back and forth with the movement of the train as she headed home that night, turning it all over in her head endlessly, wondering why she couldn’t let it go.

It wasn’t until she returned home and went up to the kitchen to find Paul standing over a pizza delivery, proffering her a beer and a sympathetic look, that it struck her right between the eyes.

Sean had only been five years old when she died. He’d then grown up with a father who was more myth than man, a two-dimensional being who had left behind hundreds of hours of music, interviews, and other recordings by which his personality could be dissected and analyzed. That man was complex, opinionated, and flawed, but in an acceptable way, one that wouldn’t lose him any admirers. And Sean had, Lydia felt, adored the pieced-together Dad that existed in his head. Just as the image that Eliot Spitzer had displayed to New Yorkers – that of a shining white knight ready to ride in and fight corruption – was based on a carefully curated set of data, so too was Sean’s idea of his late father skewed somewhat away from the truth.

And that was all gone now. Forget being a truth-telling rockstar, an artist worth admiring – she was now, in Sean’s eyes, totally defined by the worst behaviors she’d ever displayed. Lydia tilted her head up to accept a kiss from Paul in greeting and thought yet again how amazing it was that she still had this. Rich, Julian, the others, still on her side and willing to support her. But none of it made up for the fact that she’d lost Sean. She couldn’t live with that, knowing that he thought of her like some kind of villain. She couldn’t disappear to a deep dark hole and never have any contact with Sean again.

“Something’s on your mind,” Paul said, as they sat at the table with slices of pizza. “I can practically see the gears turning in your head.”

“I want Sean back,” she announced.

“Ah.” Paul’s face underwent several rapid transitions before settling on determined. “Right. Okay, how do we do that?”

Lydia inhaled shakily. There was only one way, in the end. If Sean wouldn’t talk to any of them, that eliminated all of her options save one.

“I need to speak to Yoko.”          

They fought over it for days. Paul would pace around their home, working himself up into a tizzy, reminding her about how badly it had gone the last time she and Yoko had been in the same room together. “We weren’t okay for weeks, love,” he told her, over and over. “D’you think I’m looking forward to having that again?”

“That won’t happen this time,” she swore. “I have a better idea of what I’m up against.”

“We thought that last time too!” he cried. “But you said it yourself, it was like Yoko cut through all your defenses like they weren’t even there.”

“She can’t touch me,” Lydia insisted. “Look – last time our bargaining chip was the truth about our relationship, right? Well, cat’s out of the bag, Sean knows the whole story now. The only thing she has left is leaking stuff to the press, which she can’t do because my estate – my music, my likeness, my everything – is how she makes her living. She damages my reputation, loses fans, she can’t pay her bills.”

“She can still hurt you,” Paul said. “Somehow. She’ll figure it out, I know she will.”

Lydia eyed him suspiciously. “Are you worried about her telling me something you did, say in the early Eighties?”

Paul clamped his jaw shut, eyes blazing. “I’m an open book, love,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “Ask me whatever you want.”

“Not exactly the answer I was hoping for,” she shot back. “If I have to dig for it, that means there’s something to hide.”

They went around in circles, arguing back and forth. She pushed him to come up with an alternative, if he was so against her plan, but he never could and neither could she. Truthfully, the thought of seeing Yoko again made goosebumps rise on her arms and her hands shake, but if that was the price of admission, so be it. Sean was fully on his mom’s side, so his mom was the one Lydia had to talk to if she had any hope of spending time with him again. Whatever needed to happen, whatever she had to do or say to see Sean, Lydia knew she would do it. God help her, but she wanted to be again the version of herself Sean had grown up with, not the heartless monster she’d been turned into.

The only thing Lydia could promise Paul was that she wouldn’t pursue an audience with Yoko right away – not that she was rushing to make it happen. But he was about to leave on an extended US tour in a few short weeks that would stretch on through the summer, and he wanted to be around when she made her pilgrimage to the Dakota. To clean up the aftermath, was the implied reason, though neither of them said that out loud.

So it was going to happen, but not yet. She and Paul continued to argue in little cloudbursts of frustration and anger and despair, in the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom and wherever the mood struck them. Meanwhile in the news, the world was starting to go nuts – not because of Spitzer, though he’d had his moment in the sun and been the butt of plenty of jokes on Saturday Night Live the weekend after his resignation. But suddenly, apropos of seemingly nothing, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had gone under, and Wall Street was freaking out about subprime mortgages, whatever those were. Lydia tried asking one of their financial reporters to explain what was happening and came away with only slightly more information. Something about a housing bubble that had burst? She wished she understood how the stock market worked but it seemed driven by little more than feelings, both good and bad.

One word she did understand: recession. A really, really bad one. She looked on in horror at the news footage of dozens of laid-off employees carrying boxes out of office buildings, escorted by somber security guards. There were whispers in the Post’s newsroom of job cuts coming soon, and Lydia’s contacts over at the New York Times got squirrely when she mentioned still wanting to join their ranks. No one was thinking about switching jobs when their current ones felt more precarious by the day.

To cope with all the uncertainty, the book gained importance in her mind. While Paul spent hours on the phone handling last-minute details for his tour, Lydia had several successful phone interviews with 9/11 survivors of various stripes: FDNY firefighters, the owner of a café less than a block from the WTC, office workers who’d managed to escape the towers before they collapsed, their family members. Nicole’s brother David had been best friends with a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst whose status was still officially listed as “Missing, Presumed Dead” all these years later, and through David Lydia managed to interview his parents. She teared up as they spoke about the message he’d left on their answering machine when he couldn’t reach them, before he left for work that morning. He wanted to know if he’d left his sunglasses at their house the night before, when he’d come over to watch the Giants game. It was the last recording they had of his voice.

The material was poignant, powerful, human, truthful. The more work she put into it, the more assured she was that she had found her topic, had found her entry into the story, and that she had to be the one to write it. A book worth reading was slowly coming into shape before her. But Lydia made a nasty discovery in late March when she attempted to start writing. She had her notes in front of her, an interview transcript with important bits highlighted, a cup of tea at her elbow, and Jeff sitting nearby for emotional support.

And all she could do was watch the cursor blink on a blank screen.

For twenty minutes straight.

No, she thought, clenching her fists over the keyboard. They shook with an anxiety she struggled to push away. No. I don’t have writer’s block. Not now, I don’t have it.

She tried a trick that had always worked for her before, when she had an urgent deadline looming before her: typing nonsense, just to get the feeling and the rhythm in her fingers. I am trying to write a book about September 11, she wrote out, and I know that tonight I want to work on the part that pertains to when the first plane crashed and everyone initially thought it was just an accident…

She typed on and on, but she was going in endless loops, swirling around like water circling a drain. I just want to write that one part, she thought and wrote. The more she focused on her inability to write, the more frantic she felt.

Her heart pounded in her ears painfully, almost drowning out the sound of—

“…this looks interesting,” Fred said absently, carrying a letter into the music room. “Just arrived today. Return address says Coppola?”

John looked up from his guitar and reached out for it, his curiosity getting the better of him. Once he’d torn open the envelope and skimmed over the letter’s contents, his heart squeezed – half hope, half agony. “Coppola, Francis Ford,” he said aloud for the sake of his audience. “Wants me to score the new film he’s working on.”

“That’s fantastic!” Fred cried. “What an amazing offer!”

Sure, John thought. Writing a film score would be brilliant. Paul had done it, after all, for some English social drama no one had seen outside the Commonwealth, and now it was John’s turn. No quaint little heritage film this, though, no – this was for a Coppola film, a follow-up to The Godfather, one of the biggest Hollywood hits of the past few years. Coppola wrote him a bit about the picture he was planning, which he was adapting from an unadaptable Joseph Conrad story. War, madness, civilization, savagery, Marlon Brando set loose in the jungle; John spun castles in the air as he imagined a film that could encompass all that and say something honest about humanity and its cruelty.

And Coppola wanted him – him! – to write the music for it.

At once he shied away from the prospect. He couldn’t write a fucking film score. Him? He hadn’t written anything new in ages; the muse, if you believed in that sort of thing, had fled him years ago. He couldn’t be John Lennon, composer anymore, not when he was so fully, reluctantly resigned now to being John Lennon, househusband. He could already see Yoko shaking her head when he told her about the offer, for she surely wouldn’t think him up to the task either—

                                                                                         “Lydia!”

She screamed and started so badly that her desk chair rolled several feet away, her hands up to protect her from horrors unseen. Paul stood behind her, appearing to have jumped out of the blast radius. “I’ve been calling your name for five minutes,” he said.

“I just had a flashback,” she blurted out, gripping her head. “I don’t – I don’t know what caused it, I wasn’t triggered by anything, holy fuck why did I have a fucking flashback—”

He was there in an instant, arms around her as she babbled and breathed hard, struggling to get her wits about her. Drawn by his murmured assurances, gentle words whispered in her hair and warm hands pressed to her back, she pulled herself tremblingly together. Fear bit into her soul – she didn’t understand why the flashback had happened. They’d always had clear triggers; why not this one? What was changed?

Or, maybe she had to reframe. Maybe she’d been triggered like before, but the threshold was different. Lower, because her mental fortitude had been weakened by all the stress of dealing with public opinion, and the visa bullshit, and the Grammys, and Yoko’s revelations, and Sean being angry with her…

Damnit. Maybe Paul had a point, about her not going back to speak to Yoko right away.

“Come ‘ead,” he said, breaking into her spiraling nerves, “we’re heading out, love. Change of scenery’s called for, I think.”

Before she knew it he’d whisked them both to the nearest subway station, onto and off of a train only a quarter-filled at this late hour on a Thursday, and he found them a table in the corner at a low-traffic bar they’d discovered a few years earlier. It wasn’t trendy or cool, so there were never crowds of young people getting drunk and foolish, and while everyone clearly recognized Paul no one even thought about bothering him. In New York, it just wasn’t the done thing. They could drink in peace as long as they liked without any fear of being hounded for anything.

Lydia had drunk half her beer before she could string more than a few words together. But they didn’t talk about the flashback; Paul distracted her with the latest updates on his tour, performing that summer with Billy Joel in one last concert at the condemned Shea Stadium, how he’d managed to arrange his schedule so that he had a break every three weeks to come back home to be with her. “Assuming, of course, that you’re set on not joining me,” he said. He was still grumpy about that, she could tell.

Heather had joined him, Lydia knew. So had Linda. She wouldn’t miss a single show when Paul was on tour. But Linda and Heather hadn’t had to struggle to stay in their own skins, in their own heads, in their own thoughts. They weren’t constantly being battered and shattered by the past. “Maybe towards the end of the tour, in August,” Lydia promised. “I do want to see you perform, I just…” Don’t want the added stress of touring on top of everything else, she finished silently. “Besides, I’m definitely seeing you with Billy Joel. I wouldn’t miss saying goodbye to Shea.” Paul hummed a little and grinned, placated.

They went back home together, linked hands swinging between them. As they walked the blocks from the train station to their penthouse, she could see Paul gnawing away at his lower lip, working up to something. “You know,” he said at last, “several years ago you said you got flashbacks when you were forced to deal with something you’d been repressing. Was this flashback… you know, did it have…?”

They were on the same page, then. “No.” Thinking it over, she amended “Well, not directly.”

Paul scuffed his shoes along the pavement. “We’ll talk to her,” he vowed. “We will, love. Just not yet.”

“Not yet,” she echoed, so it sounded like she agreed. “I’ll work harder on my meditation in the meantime. That flashback sucked.”

“What…?” Paul cleared his throat. “Why, you know…?”

She moved nearer; he promptly wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “I don’t miss the way I felt back then,” she murmured. “The way that I hated myself.”

His hand tightened briefly on her arm. “That she ever let you think that way,” he growled low, “made you feel like you were shit. Fucking hell, if I—”

“I know, babe.”

He kept quiet as they walked through the lobby of their building and stepped into the elevator. As it took them up, he wrapped both arms around her. “Don’t you ever forget,” he murmured in her ear, “how fucking amazing you are. Or I’ll be very cross with you.”

“I’ll try,” she murmured back.

Chapter Text

Paul left on his tour in mid-April, and though Lydia was firm on the idea of not tagging along it was still hard to see him go. She held him tight, breathing him in, drawing out their goodbye for as long as she dared.

“I miss you already,” she murmured.

“I miss you, love,” he murmured back. “I’ll see you in three weeks.”

He had been gone less than twenty-four hours when Lydia made her first overture to Yoko’s team. She’d done the legwork and located Yoko’s executive assistant’s contact info about a week earlier, and armed with that she inquired about doing an interview for the Washington Post’s online video series. Yoko was mounting a career retrospective that fall, and Lydia framed her request as a chance for Yoko to talk about her work in her own words for the Post’s global audience.

She put her name in her email twice – both at the end of her written message, and in the standard signature that was appended to all her official work correspondence – so there was no mistaking who was reaching out. She received a polite but definite rejection two days later.

In the meantime, Paul sent her a video from sound check in Boston, giving her the ten-cent tour of the venue and having various roadies and caterers and members of his touring band say hello to her. Lydia grinned as she watched, and chuckled in thrilled embarrassment when he revealed that the photo montage that played behind the band during the show now included a picture of her – the one from the night they wrote “For You” together, though the cigarette in her hand was discreetly cropped out. Paul ended his little video gazing directly into his phone’s lens: “I’m singing ‘Emeralds’ tonight, love. I’ll be singing it to you.”

Lydia pressed her phone to her chest after watching the video three more times in a row. She wanted that. She wanted the version of them that existed in his head, where there were no barriers or objections to their relationship and they could just be… happy. In love. Where the past stayed past and she could be Lydia all the time, not juggling two identities and trying to keep them separate.

But the past had to be dealt with, once and for all, because she couldn’t keep going on like this. She might have promised Paul she’d wait, and she might have even truly meant it at the time, but she’d been fucking around doing nothing for too long already. The thought of waiting until August or September, when he’d be ready to back her up, felt unsustainable. Within an hour of getting his video, she reached out again to Yoko’s assistant.

Another rejection. Slower than the first, less definitive, but still a no.

In a Monday morning story meeting, Lydia preempted her editor. “I know it’ll be brought up anyway, whether I like it or not,” she said, feigning boredom, “so I’m wondering if we should do a thing about Yoko Ono’s show at the Met this fall.”

“I mean yeah, that sounds good,” Henry readily agreed. “When can you get in touch and set that up?”

“Oh I don’t have an in there,” Lydia said. “Paul doesn’t socialize with Yoko outside of, like, Apple Corps board meetings, or whatever. I think the last time I saw her was… jeez, years ago.” She shrugged, hoping she wasn’t overselling it. “I probably have about the same chance of reaching her as you.”

Henry shared a look with Mike, her videographer. “Don’t you have an old college roommate who knows a lot of people in the music industry?”

“I can make some calls,” Mike said with a nod.

Through some convoluted connections that Lydia didn’t bother keeping straight, they soon found an in with someone else on Yoko’s team, a PR person, and with that everything changed. Discussions, Lydia learned, had begun. They were suddenly very interested in doing a piece with the Post after all; it simply remained to settle on a date for filming.

It was happening. For real now. And if Lydia had horrible stress-fueled insomnia that night that not even cuddling with Jeff could cure, well, she wasn’t telling anyone about it.

By the time of Paul’s first break, an extended three-day weekend the first week of May, Lydia was shamelessly eager to see him. They’d been texting and calling and sending pics and videos nonstop the way they always did, but of course they were no substitute for the real thing. He stormed back into the penthouse early that Saturday, shedding luggage and clothes as he ran up to the kitchen and, giggling, Lydia let him chase her to the bedroom where her own clothing followed suit, falling at random increments along a direct path from the top of the stairs to the bed. She felt wild, sexy, wanted; not one pinch of anxiety lingered.

They couldn’t keep their hands off each other in the afterglow. She laughingly lay back and let him press kisses up her arms, to her shoulders, while she ran her fingers through his sweat-damp hair and down his back and up again. There was no getting used to it. No matter how often she thought about him when he was away, she always failed to truly remember the vibrant presence of him, the sheer brilliance of his smiles and laughs, the steadying ballast he provided. How madly he made her heart pound. The three weeks he’d been gone felt like a blip already.

Once she could form real words and thoughts again: “How’s the tour going so far?”

“Great,” he replied, his mouth busy at the bend of her neck. “Audiences are wonderful. I think—” He lifted his head and made a face. “Reckon a lot of people are desperate to think about something else, other than the recession, so I’m glad I can distract them for a bit, you know?”

“At least for a little while,” she agreed.

“How’s the book coming?” he said. “Any pages I can read yet?”

“So impatient,” she complained, tempering it with a wry grin. “I still have a metric fuck-ton of interviews to do, you know. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

“No,” he said, returning to his worship of her skin, “that’s a cop out. Talk to me, love. Tell me about… the last person you interviewed. Who was it?”

Her head fell back onto her pillow. “I managed to find a man in Pennsylvania,” she said. “From Shanksville. He was at the post office with his young grandson when Flight 93 fell out of the sky and crashed into the ground a few miles away.”

Paul hummed thoughtfully. “Who else?”

“Spouse of a victim,” she went on. “Just this morning I got confirmation from a woman in California whose husband was on Flight 11, returning from a business trip. She agreed to talk to me next week.”

“And they do talk to you.” He looked up and met her eyes. “These people, when you find them. They tell you about… everything that happened. Even the worst parts?”

“Yeah. People open up to me.” She felt her face grow hot so of course she had to make a joke. “I’m actually kind of good at my job, as shocking as that may sound.”

“Shocking,” he deadpanned. “I am shocked. But wait, you didn’t answer my question, aren’t there any pages I can read?”

Lydia looked away and draped an arm over her face, hiding her eyes. “No. I… Ugh, fuck it. I’ve got writer’s block.”

Paul snorted. “Doesn’t exist.”

“Maybe not for you,” she shot back. “For the rest of us mere mortals, I can assure you, writer’s block is very real.”

“Nope, I don’t buy it.” He sat up suddenly, pulling the coverlet around his waist. “You do actually want to write this book, yeah?”

She rolled her eyes at him. Then again for good measure.

“All right then.” Paul shrugged, like it was obvious. “So write it.”

“But—”

“Doesn’t have to be perfect,” he said. “It just has to be a first draft.”

“Oh is that where I went wrong,” she said flatly.

“In fact.” He bent over and started rummaging around on the floor for his clothes. “I’ve got a tune in my head, let’s write a song right now, you and I. Then, once you’re warmed up, you’re going to work on your book until tea whilst I take a nap, since I didn’t sleep much on the plane. And then I’m going to read your pages.”

She groaned, but nevertheless sat up and started looking around for her own clothes. “Taskmaster. Why do I put up with you?”

He leaned over and gave her a peck on the lips. “Because I’m dynamite in the sack,” he replied with a wink. Despite herself, Lydia burst out laughing.

And somehow, apparently through the sheer strength of Paul’s will powering it into existence, they ended up with a pretty decent song called “Maybe In Time” for the next True Replica album. Once he escorted her to her office and then bundled himself off to their room for forty winks, she got slightly less than two pages written by tea time. She was amazed by it too, when Paul appeared at the door of her office and started shooing her away so he could start reading.

“Ignore all the typos,” she said, wringing her hands. “Sometimes when I get going I don’t—”

“I’ll survive!” Paul cried, flapping his hand at her to send her away.

Lydia exiled herself to the kitchen. She put together a meal like they used to eat as teenagers, with beans on toast and tea in matching cups. Nervously she fussed with the plates and forks and napkins, trying hard not to think about which paragraph Paul must have been reading at that exact moment, until he trudged up the stairs and without a word slid his arms around her. “Oh hi,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here.” He sniffled; she realized he had teared up quite a bit.

She wasn’t surprised by his reaction, though maybe she should have warned him. The two pages she’d written related to an interview she’d done a month before, with a woman who had been on the sixty-third floor of the North Tower. She’d told Lydia how the building had rocked back and forth after impact, so much so that she thought the whole thing would tip over into the East River. Building security at first had told all employees to stay put but she had decided to evacuate instead, and only half of her coworkers had come with her. The elevators being out, they’d had to descend sixty flights of stairs on foot. The group had just barely reached the ground floor when the woman heard a distant roar, a deep rumble that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth: the sound of the massive tower collapsing in on itself, directly overhead. Thus far it was one of the most terrifying interviews Lydia had done, vivid enough to have lived rent-free in her mind every single day since.

“Bloody hell, love,” Paul said, with a self-deprecating laugh.

She gave him a sad smile and wiped gently under his tearing eyes. “Yeah, sorry babe. Not exactly happy reading.”

“No,” he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand, “Lydia. It’s so bloody good.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really!”

Her body sagged with profound relief. “You’re not just saying that because I’m dynamite in the sack, right?” Paul laughed and hugged her again.

By the time Paul returned to his tour late that Monday, though, she still hadn’t worked out the knack to writing more consistently. She’d fill time by tracking down witnesses, conducting interviews, transcribing them and highlighting the passages she knew would have the most impact, so in a way she could still tell herself she was making forward progress. But several days later, once she went back and reread the two pages she’d shown Paul, the passage she’d written landed in a completely different way. Shitty yellow journalism, she derided herself. A subject as heavy as this one demanded a more measured tone; it was real life, not some cheap paperback novel. She trashed the pages.

A routine of sorts developed nevertheless. She would get herself a cup of tea (or several), have Jeff on hand lounging nearby, and put some soft music on, and then hours would pass with her totally focused on her work. The whiteboards in her new office filled with notes, ideas, scheduled interviews; index cards covered with her loopy handwriting blanketed the bulletin board over her computer screen. She went to work, she texted and chatted with Paul while he was on tour, and she labored away at her book – that was all she cared about.

As a result, she figured she had an excuse for not paying attention to much else. That was how her colleagues got the drop on her.

In late May, her day started out completely ordinary. Her editor Henry assigned her a video she didn’t want to make, she started prepping interviews she didn’t want to do, and had discussions with Mike about filming she didn’t want to be part of. Over her lunch break, as she picked through a container of leftovers from the night before, Lydia fantasized about selling her book pitch to a publisher and getting a large enough advance that she could quit the Post and not work in Online Content ever again. She then imagined a man on a flaming pie offering her a job at the New York Times on their international news desk, with an amazing health insurance and benefits package, which she would naturally accept right away. It was a good daydream. She texted Paul about it and got, randomly, a heart, a pie, and the cowboy emoji in response.

What the hell is that, she texted back.

Isn’t he cool? These emojis are great! xo

You are such a dork babe.

Lucky for me dorks are exactly your type xoxo

Lucky me. <3

Matt came to her desk about a half hour after lunch. “Hey, someone left cupcakes in the breakroom,” he said. “Come help me pick one out.”

Lydia gave him a skeptical look. “Wow. That sounded so natural and realistic, Matthew. I guess I need to go to the breakroom.”

“Yes, follow me to the breakroom now,” playing up the stiffness of his speech, and Matt started walking in an obviously robotic way. Snorting, Lydia stood and went with him, figuring they were joining a birthday celebration for someone in another department—

--and discovered most of their office there, around a cake that read Congrats Lydia! on it in chocolate frosting and copious amounts of rainbow Funfetti. She froze in the doorway as they all cheered and whooped and applauded, wide-eyed and absolutely clueless as to what was going on.

Her old editor on the international desk, Tom, stepped forward and shook her limp hand. “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving reporter,” he said gruffly.

“What?” Lydia said. “What happened to me?”

Tom looked at her nonplussed. “Montrose, you just won a Peabody Award. They announced it this morning.”

“Oh.” She glanced around at the circle of people now closing around them, all ready to offer their own congratulations. “Um. I forgot they were announcing those today.”

Matt rolled his eyes. “Well we didn’t.”

“Oh,” she said again.

Everyone went silent around her, in stark contrast to their earlier excitement. Clearly they were expecting a lot more from her, and didn’t know how to deal with this subdued reaction.

“Holy cow,” she cried out, as if the news were just now hitting her on a delay, “I won a Peabody! Oh my god!” That was apparently the right thing to do, because everyone cheered her again and started helping themselves to the cake, reassured that things weren’t about to get weird.

Matt sidled up to her a few minutes later, once they both had slices. “Wow,” he said under his breath, “that sounded so natural and realistic, Montrose.”

“Quiet, you,” she muttered back. He just laughed and headed to his desk.

Lydia remained in the break room, figuring the least she could do was to accept plaudits from her coworkers. She smiled hard, laughed politely at tame workplace jokes, was noncommittal when asked if Paul would attend the award ceremony with her the following month. By the time Tom had returned to her side, her thoughts had circled longingly back to the man in the flaming pie and his imagined job offer.

“Peabodys aren’t like Nobel Prizes, you know,” Tom said to her, once he’d congratulated her again. “They’re for specific pieces or series, not for an entire career or body of work. You don’t even know what you won for, do you?”

Lydia shrugged. Enough people had left the break room by then that she could drop her happy act. “I’m guessing the video with Remy,” she said. “The one that went viral.”

“Check out their website,” Tom suggested, as he backed out the door. “See what it’s for.”

His demeanor was odd enough that as soon as she possibly could, Lydia made a beeline back to her desk and promptly pulled up the Peabody Award committee’s website, to scroll through the list of winners and nominees. She gaped when she saw it:

Lydia Montrose, Washington Post, the website read. “Pat Tillman: Patriot and Prop.”

The words took a long time to sink in, for they didn’t register at first. She hadn’t done any videos on Pat Tillman, the former pro football player who had enlisted after 9/11 and then was killed in Afghanistan in 2004. The government had seized on his image as a patriot, dying at enemy hands for American freedom, and had hidden the fact that he had actually been killed by friendly fire – a fact that hadn’t come out until just last year.

No. She hadn’t made any videos on Tillman. But she had written a feature article, back when she was still working on the war for international news.

When she appeared at the door of Tom’s office, he was seated there like he’d been expecting her. “I was the one who submitted the article for consideration,” he said, before she could stammer out a word. “Maybe out of spite, since I hate that you were removed from my department, but also because it was a damn fine piece of journalism.”

“Oh,” Lydia breathed. She really needed to come up with something else to say, and fast.

Tom nodded, folding his hands over the curve of his gut. “You’re a hell of a writer, Montrose,” he said, clearing his throat. “That’s not news to anyone.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I mean it. Thank you. I really miss covering the war in—”

“I know you do,” he said, frowning, and he turned back to his computer. The emotional honesty and vulnerability, she supposed, had come to an abrupt end.

She texted Paul about the Peabody and then, thinking he might be in the middle of soundcheck and unlikely to get her message for a while, called her mom. Carol picked up immediately and Lydia blurted out her news before she’d barely gotten out a hello.

“Oh sweetheart!” Carol cried. “That’s amazing! I’ll tell your dad when he gets home, he’ll be so proud! We both are, oh my goodness. A Peabody!”

“Why didn’t you say you were up for an award?” Paul asked her a few hours later, once he’d called and given her his own enthusiastic congratulations.

“The Post submitted it without telling me,” she said with a shrug. “I’m just as surprised as you are.”

“But aren’t you even the slightest bit excited, love?” Paul said, sounding a bit bewildered.

She tipped her head back and forth from side to side as she thought a moment. “Well,” she admitted, “okay. Yeah. I mean I’m proud of a lot of the stuff I’ve written, but that article in particular was a big story, and I did really like the way it turned out. I guess the Peabody Committee did too.”

“There you are, then,” Paul said. “Maybe put that bit in your acceptance speech, instead of ‘whatever, I don’t care.’”

Lydia cackled. “Wow, is that your impression of me? Needs work, McCartney. Where’s that brassy New York edge you love?”

“All right, all right, hang on,” and he made a great show of clearing his throat and doing vocal exercises while Lydia laughed hysterically.

As the day progressed and she started getting messages from her dad and brothers, extended family, and friends, she softened her stance somewhat. Contrary to her first reaction, by the time she left work to head home she realized that she was in fact excited about having won an award. The Peabody judges had read her work and deemed it to be among the best in American reportage. It was a prestigious award, highly regarded by journalism and broadcast professionals, and she could now put on her CV that she had one.

And, unlike with the Grammy for Song of the Year, she could actually tell people about this award. She could display it and show it off. It would bear her name. Her real one.

She arrived at home and went straight to her computer, and pulled up an archived copy of her Tillman article. It had been so long since she’d even thought about it that the words sprang fresh again from the screen, spinning a story that was clear and engaging. She’d really written this. Before she’d been shunted off to Online Content and relegated to courting millennial You Tube viewers in exchange for ad dollars, she’d been an actual, talented journalist.

You’re a hell of a writer, Montrose.

Maybe that was the boost she’d needed all along. Paul was on stage that night so she just sent him a string of hearts and starbursts, and once she’d made herself a little dinner, Lydia sat in front of her computer and pulled up the word processor. She took a deep breath and dug back through her notes and interviews, trying to grasp the enormity of the story with new eyes. Having just re-read her Tillman article, something in her head must have shifted in a significant way, because now something new was emerging from her research and witness interviews. Something she hadn’t spotted before, a theme that added an important new dimension to the story she was trying to tell.

Lydia turned excitedly to Jeff, who as usual had settled himself at the edge of her desk. “I think I’ve cracked it, Jeffy Pop,” she said.

He blinked at her slowly, tail swishing.

She laughed, feeling excitement and relief in turns. “Oh my god. I think I cracked it. For real, this time.”

By the end of the week – a week of racing home after work each night, scarfing down just enough food to sustain her, and then logging hour after hour at her computer until the small hours – Lydia had written almost six thousand words. She mentioned her progress to Paul, who immediately wanted to read what she had. He even came up with an elaborate, excessive plan involving an MPL aide who could hand deliver her pages to him in Miami just before he headed onstage for his show there.

“You’ll be back home on Saturday,” she reminded him. “If you wait two more days, then there’ll be an even longer chunk for you to read.”

Paul groaned. “But I’m dying here, love. I can’t wait two bloody days.”

“Yes, you can,” she cried, laughing. “I believe in you!”

Instead, she printed out what she had and handed it to Tom. “I’ve been working on a little something,” she said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. “I’m thinking it’ll probably end up being a book. Would you mind telling me what you think?” He took the proffered pages and said he’d read them if he had time.

Despite her impatience, the day had to go on as her workdays normally did. She got a new assignment from Henry and started doing her usual preliminary research for the story, filming locations, and possible interview subjects, and she and Mike put their heads together to figure out the logistics. But it was all mere background noise. The center of the universe was the other side of the building, where Tom sat in his office with her draft.

About fifteen minutes before she was going to call it a night and race home to get back to her book, the phone at her desk rang. “Montrose,” Tom said brusquely. “I read your pages.”

Her heart jumped into her throat. “And?”

“I don’t know what this is yet,” he said, “and I don’t know if you do either, but keep going. Keep writing. There’s something here.”

Lydia beamed at her cubicle wall. “I know what it is,” she swore. “I figured it out, I know what book I’m writing.”

Tom grunted. “Okay then. Let me know when you have a full manuscript, I might know some people in publishing who’d be interested in taking a look at it.”

By the time she’d thanked him repeatedly, hung up the receiver, and fell blissfully backwards in her desk chair, Lydia was up on the ceiling. Lightning zipped through her; she pressed her hands to her cheeks as if she could somehow hold back the grin that wouldn’t quit. Of course she’d known – she knew what she was capable of – but to get confirmation of that fact from someone she knew and trusted was a whole other level of confidence. She was writing a book. And it was going to be a fantastic one to boot.

Lydia was still smiling like a loon when Henry and Mike walked up to her desk. “You heard?” Mike asked.

She shook her head. “Heard what?”

“We finally got confirmation back from Yoko Ono’s team,” Henry said, nodding in Mike’s direction. “We’re tentatively scheduled now to interview her and get a tour of her exhibit at the end of June.”

“Ah.” Lydia sat upright, her back ramrod straight. “Good to know, thanks. I can start prepping tomorrow." She waited until they’d both left before she allowed her true feelings on the subject to surface on her face.

Well, fuck.

Chapter Text

Almost as soon as he’d set foot in their home, dumping his bags on the floor – mere moments after she’d flung herself at him and they’d had a dramatic welcome-home kiss in the kitchen – Paul stepped back, rubbing his hands together. “Now where are your pages?” he wanted to know.

She rolled her eyes, grinning uncontrollably. He’d spoken of almost nothing else in the past few days, but it was still exhilarating to see how invested he was in her book. “I printed out a copy and put it up in your office,” she said. As he went bounding upstairs, she called up after him “I’ll put the kettle on!”

“Earl Grey, ta love!” he called back. Lydia snorted and went to the stove.

She’d written even more since Tom had read her early draft – she was up to nearly ten thousand words now, since she’d reached a stage where each scene, each line just seemed to come flowing out of her. The research was so familiar to her, her notes so well-organized, that everything was lined up in her head as far as how it should unfold, what to reveal and when. She was still doing interviews on a frequent basis, painful discussions with travelers who had missed their flights and were now wracked with survivor’s guilt, people who’d lost spouses or siblings. One woman Lydia had spoken to had actually been laid off from her job at the Twin Towers that Monday afternoon, and thus wasn’t at the office when the attack happened. In an unbelievable twist of fate, the entire HR department of her company had been killed and the paperwork incinerated, so there was no record of her termination. “So… I just went back to work for them,” the woman said, as Lydia gaped in disbelief. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Wow,” Lydia had said. “I don’t know if that’s dark, or…”

“It’s dark,” the woman agreed. “Yeah, I’m still processing it, years later.”

Lydia had thought she knew everything about what happened that day. She’d been less than a mile away from the largest of the three attacks, after all, making her an eyewitness herself. Her own observations did make their way into her narrative, here and there in bits and pieces, based on the notebook she’d scribbled in as she’d waited to hear news about Paul’s whereabouts. But the more people she interviewed, the more she realized that there had been a hundred stories all happening at once, a thousand, a hundred thousand; everyone in New York and Washington and rural Pennsylvania had seen different parts of the whole, and knew and understood different things about the nature of what they all went through. Some people lost loved ones, on the ground or up in the sky; some people were starting to get sick with illnesses they suspected came from the burn pile at Ground Zero. Some families would never be the same again.

And the more Lydia wrote, the more convinced she was of her angle. The realization she’d made after rereading her Pat Tillman article solidified in her mind, and became more real. The further she went with her work, the more she discovered that this was a manner of telling the story of September 11 that she’d never seen anywhere else, in any reporting or published books. It needed to be told.

Once the tea had brewed and she poured cups for each of them, Lydia carried them up to Paul’s office and left his on the corner of his desk. He grabbed her hand and kissed it as she passed, then dove back into his reading. “Our reservation is at eight,” she reminded him, before leaving him to it.

Paul wasn’t a speed reader, so she settled herself downstairs in the living room to wait. Jeff joined her before long, and she scratched his head as she idly looked for something to watch on TV. Not that it mattered – they were headed out for dinner soon anyway. God, she hoped he liked it. If he didn’t…

He thundered down the stairs a half hour later. “It lives,” she cried at the sight of him, heart rising into her throat. “And what’s the verdict?”

“Bloody hell, love,” he said, throwing his arms in the air, “it’s so fucking good!” Lydia shrieked and threw herself at him, cackling in sheer delight.

They went to dinner at a brand new Asian fusion restaurant that had gotten good reviews in the Village Voice, and Paul peppered her with questions throughout the meal, asking her about what she planned for the rest of the book. Excitedly, she told him everything: the interviews she had lined up, the additional newspaper research she was doing to make sure she kept her timeline accurate and factual. “And when are you going to interview me?” he asked, which brought Lydia crashing to a halt.

“You?” she echoed dumbly.

“Yeah!” He shrugged, his smile slipping a little at her muted reaction. “I was there, wasn’t I? Could see all of the Manhattan skyline from where we were on the tarmac at JFK. And then when I decided to return to the City, to get back to you, the bridges—”

“Well, there we go,” she said quickly, sitting up and leaning towards him so she could lower her voice. “Half your day had to do with me, and we didn’t know each other then,” with a meaningful waggle of her eyebrows.

“I was going to see a friend to make sure they were safe,” he said, waggling his own eyebrows back at her. “No one needs to know their identity. I never even told Heather who it was, you know.”

Lydia put off her answer by taking a long drink. Truth was, it had already occurred to her that Paul was an eyewitness too – but that thought had been followed immediately by the realization that if she included him in her book, even in just one short scene, their relationship would dominate any coverage she received if she managed to get published. Oh look, they’d all say, the little reporter included her famous boyfriend! What a shameless bid at trying to draw attention and sell books.

And then there was the other matter of Paul himself. She knew that he put up barriers around fans and interviewers; it kept his private life private and she had no problem with that. Part of her wondered if those barriers would be in force even if she were the interviewer, though. And if they were, if he posed as that glib, charming character he presented to the public, he would stand in stark contrast to the other interviewees. How could she put him acting like that in her book next to a grieving FDNY firefighter, or an office worker at the Pentagon with PTSD?

“If I interview you,” she said, coming up with a possible solution on the spur of the moment, “you’ll stand out too much right now. I’ll need to interview other celebrities too.”

“I’ll get you some,” he vowed, giving her a big grin. “Love. Your book is going to be so brilliant, I can’t wait for everyone to read it.”

Lydia laughed, feeling half-drunk on his compliments. He’d become much freer with them recently, she’d noticed – part of his penance, perhaps, for how things had gone down at the Grammys and the party they’d held afterwards. Not that she’d ever complain about that. If he wanted to fuss over her, she wouldn’t get in his way.

They splurged on a sinfully rich dessert after their meal, chocolate wasabi New York-style cheesecake, to celebrate her book’s progress. With each bite melting on her tongue Lydia felt on top of the world, with her promising book manuscript, her loving and supportive partner, and the world at her feet.

She tried to find a good moment to tell Paul about her upcoming interview with Yoko. How it would fall just after his birthday, just after the award ceremony for the Peabodys, but before the concert at Shea Stadium. How she’d gone behind his back to set it up and didn’t regret it for a second. How it might destroy her, but she was willing to do almost anything to get Sean back.

The moment never arrived. But, if she were being brutally honest, she hadn’t tried that hard to find it.

Paul had long since returned to his tour by the time Lydia found herself heading north the following Friday. A wrapped gift sat in the front seat of her car. Andrea’s baby shower was the next day in Boston, at some fancy restaurant in a building that was older than the United States, and Lydia was looking forward to seeing everyone. Normalcy – that was what she really needed right now. Between the awards shows and designer clothes, lack of recognition for her talents, struggling with her identity and carving out her own path, Lydia just wanted to kick back, drink some girly hard seltzers, and giggle about silly things. Like regular people did.

She met up with her parents at a colonial-era hotel that night, where they both had rooms for the weekend. Dinner was part of that much-needed dose of normalcy she’d been looking for, as she skated lightly over the subject of the Grammys and instead told them all about networking and getting coffee with various journalists, working on her book, and the upcoming ceremony for the Peabody Awards. “Do the two of you want to be my guests?” she asked, once she’d given them the date at the end of June. “I’m entitled to a few courtesy tickets.”

“Won’t Paul be your date?” her dad said, frowning.

“No, he can’t make it, it’s too last minute,” she replied, feeling the same small pang of disappointment she’d felt when he first told her. “He’s got breaks built into his schedule but that particular Saturday isn’t one, and it’s right in the middle of a run of dates in Minneapolis.”

“Oh, what a shame,” Carol said. “I’m sorry, Ladybug.”

Lydia lifted one shoulder. “It is what it is. I asked my friend Matt to come too, I’d love you to meet him.”

Her parents exchanged a speaking glance. “Well,” Carol said happily, clasping her hands together. “It’s not every day your little girl wins a big award, is it?”

“We’ll be there with bells on, kiddo,” Alan said with a grin.

The following day Lydia discovered that the baby shower was, in fact, not just for the women in the family. The invitation – which she apparently hadn’t looked at closely enough when it arrived in the mail – had been for both her and Paul, because as soon as Lydia showed up to the shower alone, Mrs. Adler made her disappointment palpable. “Oh, Paul couldn’t make it, that’s too bad,” she said, frowning down at the gift as Lydia handed it over.

“Yeah, he’s on tour right now,” she said stiffly, resisting the urge to apologize. Lydia hugged her brother and said all the expected things about how Andrea was glowing in her third trimester, trying hard to ignore what was going on behind her. Mrs. Adler was now complaining to a cousin about how she’d so wished to introduce her to Paul today, who’s practically part of the family, you know.

Ugh. Lydia hated when people were weird about celebrities.

Her world-famous boyfriend, evidently, had been a major selling point for guests attending the shower, since Lydia counted no less than four couples who came up to ask her about herself as a pretense to ask her about Paul and what he was like “in real life.” Fortunately, her mom saw what was happening and joined her after the last couple walked away with a harmless anecdote about Paul that Lydia had made up out of whole cloth. “You okay, Ladybug?” Carol asked.

“Couple more drinks and I will be,” Lydia grumbled.

“Well go stand near Andrea or something,” her mom advised, pushing gently on the back of her shoulder. Scott and Andrea were standing together by the windows, speaking with Andrea’s grandparents. “She’ll set people straight if they’re making you uncomfortable. She’s good at that.”

Later on, Lydia found herself sitting at the table near them during lunch, using her sister-in-law as an unwitting force field to hold people back and keep them from asking yet again We have a copy of Wings at the Speed of Sound on vinyl, I don’t suppose we could get it autographed? It would mean a lot to us. “I’m so sorry about my mom, by the way,” Andrea said, halfway through the meal. “I’ve tried telling her to lay off, but I think everyone she’s ever met now knows that my sister-in-law is dating Paul McCartney.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lydia said, with a tight smile. “We deal with all kinds of stuff like that on a regular basis. You get used to it.”

“But you shouldn’t have to,” Andrea said, rubbing a hand over her rounded stomach. She looked ready to go any day now, though her due date was still about five weeks away. “I’ll keep working on my mom, I promise you. She shouldn’t act like that at family functions.”

Lydia smiled again, mumbling something in thanks. Andrea, as well-intentioned as she obviously was, didn’t get it. She didn’t get that if Mrs. Adler stopped bragging about her connections, it would cause no meaningful changes in Lydia’s life whatsoever. It never did. There was nothing to do but grin and bear it, day in and—

“Oh whoa, hey,” Andrea said.

Scott, sitting on her other side, turned towards her. “You okay? Braxton-Hicks?”

“No, nothing like that, just a lot of kicking.” She grabbed Scott’s hand and placed it on her belly. “Can you feel her?”

Scott ducked his head, though Lydia could still see his utterly enchanted smile. But then she realized what Andrea had just said. “Is… it’s a girl?” Lydia asked, feeling oddly breathless. “You’re having a girl?”

Her brother winced. “Yeah, sorry, I thought you were on that email. We found out a few weeks ago. I wanted it to be a surprise—”

“And I didn’t think there was a point in keeping it a secret,” Andrea said, shrugging. “I don’t really care what gender she is, so long as she’s healthy.”

“Yeah, but honey, some people like to make a big deal about things like that.”

Andrea shrugged again. “Okay…? My uterus, my decision. Lydia, we’re having a girl.”

She must have drunk one too many of those hard seltzers. That must have been the reason why Lydia felt herself tearing up and squirmy, soft emotion blossoming in her chest. “Oh my god,” she said, laughing a little. “That’s so incredible. My boring, lame-ass big brother—”

“Hey!” Scott protested.

“—is going to be a dad.” Lydia pressed a hand to her heart. “I’ll keep it kosher now, since you’re going to be responsible for keeping a human alive.”

“She’s pretty active right now,” Andrea said to her. “Practicing her floor routine for the Olympics, I guess. Do you want to feel your niece kicking?”

Lydia froze. “Can I? Is that okay?”

Without further ado, Andrea took her hand and pressed it to her stomach too, the tight stretch of her shirt and the skin underneath. And within moments Lydia felt it: a tiny foot, pressing back.

“That’s your Auntie Lydia, baby girl,” Andrea said to her stomach, in a soft singsong voice. “You’re going to love her.”

She had no words to describe the feeling that stole over her in that moment. The awe that filled her was totally overwhelming and totally unexpected. A baby. A little girl. Her niece. She hadn’t done this with Julian or Sean, never felt them when they were in this nascent stage, an idea but not yet real, tangible, in her arms. In retrospect that now seemed like a terrible mistake on her part.

“Getting ideas?” Scott said, looking shrewdly at her.

“Oh fuck off,” Lydia grunted, pulling her hand away.

She kept to herself for most of the rest of the shower, mustering up a polite smile when Andrea and Scott opened her gift – a large assortment of quirky onesies that Paul had helped her pick out – and otherwise shutting down any other attempts at conversation. She’d been shaken to her core. She wished Travis were there, so she had someone else to talk to about literally any other subject as a distraction, but he hadn’t been able to get away, and her parents had become thick as thieves with the Adlers, all of them excited about the first grandchild for both families. There was no outlet here, no one she could turn to in an attempt to untangle the mess currently burrowing in her head.

When Paul texted and then called a few hours later, once she’d returned to her hotel and was getting ready for another family dinner, she practically leapt on the phone. “How much time do you have to talk?” she blurted out. Her mind was a jumble, but she at least knew that this conversation couldn’t happen in a stolen moment.

She didn’t know what he heard in her voice, but he instantly responded, “As much time as you need, my love. All right?”

“Oh I’m cool,” she said quickly. “Crazy cool. So awesome. Uh.”

“Do I need to guess what’s on your mind?” he teased her gently, after a few fraught moments of silence. “Can I have a hint?”

She paced her small hotel room, the length and breadth of it, tapping her fingers on the walls, a side table, the cabinet that held the TV. “I just… Today… You know, I don’t know why you’re leaving the decision entirely up to me.”

“What decision is—”

“Because maybe you don’t want to be an old dad, you know?” she said. He went still on the other end of the line; she felt it viscerally. “Maybe… because even if I got pregnant, like, tomorrow, there’s no guarantee you’d even still be around by the time he’s getting his driver’s license. Right? And is that fair to a kid?”

“There’s no guarantee you’d be around either, love,” he said, his voice soft. She could tell he was smiling. “Nothing’s guaranteed. No reason not to have kids, though.”

“Trust me, I know all about that,” she said dryly. “Best laid plans, and so on.”

“Are you trying to tell me something, by the way?”

“No,” with an eye roll. “My IUD is still firmly in place. Nine months from now we’ll have… a new president, McCain or Obama, but no visits from the stork. I’m not knocked up.”

“…yet?”

Her breath caught. “What do you think about that?”

The soft laugh he uttered made her feel warm all the way through. “I think it would be amazing, love. I mean it, it would be…” He laughed again, sounding a bit overwhelmed.

Her heart was pounding so hard she felt like she was going to pass out. God, this conversation was insane. Perfect. But insane. “What if I miscarried?”

“We could try again.”

“What if he got pediatric cancer or needed open heart surgery or an organ transplant?”

“Some do. We’d still love him.”

“What if he—”

“What if she had eyes just like yours?” he countered. “What if she wanted to be a writer just like her mum?”

Lydia collapsed onto the end of her bed, curling around her phone. “Ooh, you play dirty, McCartney.”

“Where is this all coming from? Was the baby shower today?”

“Yeah. They’re, uh. They’re having a girl. I got to feel her kicking.”

“And it got you thinking certain thoughts, I see.”

“Many thoughts. I’ve got my thinky face on.”

“Aw, that’s my favorite face, love, and me not there to see it.”

She sighed, feeling another fine tremor shiver through her. “I’m not saying it’s a definite yes,” she warned him.

“Of course not.” He was still smiling. She could practically feel him beaming at her across the miles between them.

“But… I guess it’s not a definite no anymore either.”

“You’d be an amazing mum, love.”

Lydia wasn’t ready to touch that yet. “So you’re already assuming we’d raise the kid in England, if I’m going by mum instead of mom.”

“I’ve no problem with an American kid,” he joked. “I’ve got one myself already and she’s been pretty great, you know.”

“He could call me madre, maybe. Mamacita. Bad mama jama.”

“What was that last one?” he spluttered.

“It’s a Carl Carlton song, keep up.”

“Brilliant, I’ll check it out,” Paul was quick to say. “Love, I’m serious. We’re not deciding for certain right this minute, I know, but… I really think you’d be an amazing mum.”

She bent even lower, picking at a seam in the hotel bedspread. “…really?”

“Yes. Yes, love. I mean it, absolutely.”

Tears welled in her eyes, and she viciously blinked them back. “What if I fuck it all up again?”

“I’m sorry if this is the first time you’re hearing it, but there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. Everyone just muddles along best they can, my love.”

“Some of us better than others,” she said pointedly.

“We’ll be a team,” he promised. “When you drive her mad she’ll come running to me, and when I muck things up she’ll go running to you. She’ll adore you, same as me.”

Lydia snorted. “Basking in the worship of others? I’m sold.”

“No, not tonight, we’ll discuss it further in person. Christ,” he said abruptly, dissolving into nervous giggles, “I have to be on stage in an hour. How the hell am I going to remember all my lyrics when I’ll be thinking about this conversation?”

Lydia scrunched up her face, feeling so joyous and buoyant she could scarcely contain it all. “One does find a way to carry on when one is in Dallas.”

“Oh, you’re pretty pleased with yourself right now, aren’t you,” he accused her, “knowing you’ve got my head all mixed up.”

“Yes, you’ve caught me. Back in the day it was pulling faces at you to make you laugh mid-song, now it’s discussing parenthood.”

“The more things change!” he chortled.

Someone knocked on the door of her hotel room; Lydia, completely wrapped up in her phone call, jumped almost a foot. “Ladybug, you ready?” her dad asked. “We’re heading to the restaurant in a few minutes.”

“Yeah, gimme a sec,” she called back. “All right, babe, that’s my cue.”

“Lydia,” Paul said, “have I told you yet today that I fucking love you?”

“No, you haven’t, and I’m glad you brought it up first because I consider it a major oversight.”

“I do, madly,” he swore.

“Completely.”

“Truly.”

“And now that we’ve mastered adverbs, who knows what the future holds.”

Paul snickered. “Look out world!”

“Look out world,” she echoed. “Paul?”

“Lydia?”

“I fucking love you too.”

“About bleeding time you said it back, I’ve been waiting ages over here,” he deadpanned. “Oi – we’ll really talk about this next time I’m home, yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Good.” He laughed yet again, sounding half-bewildered, half-ecstatic. “Bloody hell! Christ, I can’t stop smiling, how am I supposed to sing like this?”

When he came back to the City for his birthday weekend, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Paul, who even on a regular day was always reaching for her hand or throwing an arm across her shoulders, now apparently couldn’t bear to be more than a few feet away from her at any given moment. “You really meant what you said on the phone?” he asked her yet again, as they sat on the couch watching a movie that night. “You really think you might want to have kids?”

Tell him.

“It’s a definite maybe,” she said, blushing. “I mean who knows, maybe I’ll take one look at Scott and Andrea’s baby and change my mind again. Don’t put the cart before the horse.”

“If we—” He looked away frowning, tossing his hair, suddenly quiet.

She nudged his foot with hers. “Talk, babe.”

“Well, it’s just that…” He cleared his throat. “After… after 1980, I wanted to try for another son, you know? Name him after you. But Linda and I decided in the end that our family was complete, so. Didn’t happen. But maybe if we have a boy—”

Lydia collapsed back into the couch cushions, groaning. “I already have two sons named after me, I don’t need a third.”

“You’ve got two,” Paul said, giving her the full effect of his best puppy dog eyes, “but I haven’t got any.”

“Oh my god, does that look actually work on people?”

“You tell me,” he said, poking her in the hip. She shied away, laughing.

Tell him. Tell him now. Tell him today.

“You know,” she said instead, throwing her arms around his neck. “It’s a maybe now. But if it ever becomes a yes, we’ll need to be in tiptop shape so we can hit the ground running.”

“Naturally,” Paul said, his own arms encircling her waist. “Loads of training.”

“So much training,” she said, giving him a saucy look before she carded her hands through his hair and kissed him.

And oh, look at that, she’d missed her moment again. The interview with Yoko was now only a week and a half away, and Paul still didn’t know about it.

On the Tuesday morning before the Peabody Awards ceremony, as Lydia was devouring a slice of toast and polishing off her coffee before heading to work, the doorman summoned her down to the lobby to handle a delivery. A courier had apparently arrived with a garment bag draped over one arm, and it was meant to be given directly to her and her alone. Curious, Lydia signed for it and then hung it up in her walk-in closet, looking it over for some kind of explanation.

A note had been stuck in a pocket on the outside of the bag: I’m sorry I can’t be there on Saturday, but you should still look beautiful. Paul xoxo Lydia unzipped the bag and found inside one of Stella’s designs, a pale gold dress that – after Lydia checked the seams and found them altered – appeared to have been tailored to her measurements.

Well, fuck. Lydia bit the inside of her cheek, worrying it between her teeth. The dress was gorgeous, there was no question about that, and Lydia would have happily worn it to literally any other formal event. But that was just it: the Peabody Awards weren’t that kind of event. They were mainly for journalists, writers and editors and producers who worked hard and definitely weren’t paid what they were worth. No one at the ceremony that weekend would be wearing haute couture because they couldn’t afford it; they would all be wearing off-the-rack from places like Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor. Lydia’s dress, in fact, which she’d picked out a few weeks earlier, was a sparkling sapphire blue sheath dress she’d fallen in love with at Nordstrom. Elegant, a bit pricey, but not exactly the kind of thing you’d see on the runway in Paris.

She texted Paul once she reached her office and was seated in her cubicle. This dress is beautiful <3 She thought he might be traveling that day, perhaps even at that very moment on a plane somewhere, so she set her personal phone aside and didn’t expect a response right away. There was still time for her to craft a message that somehow said “thanks, but I won’t be wearing this Saturday” without making him too upset.

Her department was all dialed into the upcoming Yoko interview now. They’d decided to film the seated portion of the interview right in the Met gallery, where they’d do the bulk of the questions about Yoko’s life and career. Then Lydia and Yoko would walk around the exhibit together, getting more context and perspective as they paused beside certain works and filmed Yoko standing next to them.

The familiar process of research and writing, though, wasn’t bringing her the usual feeling of comfort or routine. Lydia felt like she was in a low-level state of panic every time she flipped through albums of her work online. Yoko had always had an incredibly compelling voice as an artist, and time hadn’t dulled Lydia’s opinion about that, but looking at it all now had the nasty tendency to raise up certain unpleasant memories. Arguments. Verbal abuse. Insults disguised as honesty. The curtain in the back of her mind rippled nonstop in a dark wind that meant the past was rushing back towards her, instead of staying in the past like it should.

Maybe I can’t do this. Maybe I was an idiot to think I could.

But no, she couldn’t think like that. Exposure therapy was a thing, right? The more she exposed herself to this painful stuff, rather than avoiding it and burying her head in the sand, the less of a hold it would have on her. And then, finally, she’d be free.

Matt approached her desk after lunch on Thursday, as she sorted through a folder Yoko’s assistant had sent over of the artworks being shown in the exhibit. “Hey,” he said, grinning at her, “so I picked up my suit from the dry cleaner’s last night. You said you could give me the invitation today, so we can just meet in front of the Waldorf Saturday?”

Lydia blinked, needing a moment to recenter herself. “Oh. Yeah, it’s in my purse, hang on.” She dove for her desk drawer, dug it up, and handed over the heavy cardstock invite she’d received in the mail.

“Awesome, thanks,” he said, looking over the details about date and time. “You know I saw that the cast of Mad Men will be there? I’m dying to see if Jon Hamm is actually that handsome in real life.”

“No one is that handsome in real life,” Lydia said absently. She turned back to her computer, continuing to click through the files she’d been sent.

“Come on Montrose, let me have hope. You remember hope, right? The thing with feathers? Or wait, how does that poem go…”

Lydia clicked the right arrow button and when the next image came on screen it was like all the air got sucked out of the room.

She didn’t know what she was looking at, at first. A lot of clear glass. Daylight. A fuzzy rendering of the New York skyline that looked increasingly familiar the more she stared at it. And in the foreground—

Lydia spun in her chair, away from the computer. Matt stopped his rambling about Emily Dickinson at once, stepping towards her. “Lyd? What—”

“Describe for me what’s on my screen right now,” she rasped, gesturing over her shoulder.

Matt knelt down at her side, one hand resting lightly on her knee. He squinted up behind her. “Uh… oh god, I’ve seen that photo before. It’s John Lennon’s glasses with his blood splattered on them.”

What little air she still had felt like it had been punched out of her lungs. She gripped the arm rests of her chair, hanging on for dear life as her body broke out in head-to-toe goosebumps. A ringing, a high-pitched ringing cut through the static, a male voice yelled out Mister Lennon! and a woman screamed in abject horror—

“…breathe, Lydia.” Matt’s voice was steady and low, his hand warm and gentle. “It’s okay, you’re okay, it’s just a photograph, Lydia, you’re fine…”

She looked up towards the ceiling, counting her breaths, blinking back angry-sad-scared tears. “That’s Paul’s best friend,” she whispered, instead of telling Matt what she was actually thinking. “How – like who does shit like that, I mean—”

“I know,” Matt said. “I know, it’s… yeah.”

“Exploitative?”

“At best,” he agreed. “I’m sorry. But you’re okay, I’m here, Lyd.”

I can’t do this. I can’t. I need to tell Paul. She shoved the thought away, furious and fearful.

This was calculated. She’d been sent this photo on purpose. To put her off her stride, freak her out, render her vulnerable and then—

And then Lydia would be cowed into submission and stop fighting to see Sean.

But it couldn’t be that simple. She couldn’t be that weak. She wouldn’t. She had come back with a second chance to do things right, and fuck it, that’s what she was going to do. She was going to do things right, and have a real, meaningful relationship with her sons. Both of them. Nothing and no one were going to get in her way.

Several minutes passed before she felt like she was back in her own body again, like she could get enough air in her lungs again. Her hands trembled as she tucked her hair behind her ears, and she finally let out a breath that didn’t make her feel like she was dying. Matt clicked out of the photo gallery so she didn’t have to see that image anymore. “Paul talks about him a lot,” she told him, thinking he needed a bit more of an explanation. “Almost every day, in fact. He still refers to him in the present tense.”

“They were friends,” Matt said, giving her a sad half-smile. “It must be really hard.”

“And I guess sometimes I forget that…” She gestured at her computer, shrugging.

“This is for your interview with Yoko Ono next week?” he said, frowning at her screen again. “Are you going to be – I mean, there isn’t an ethical conflict there, with you dating Paul?”

“Too late to do anything about it now,” she said sarcastically, throwing up her hands.

“No it isn’t,” Matt insisted, very sensibly. “Lydia. What happens if you see this photograph at her exhibit?”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” she muttered, and she awkwardly jumped to her feet and left him there at her desk.

Sean, she reminded herself, it’s for Sean, it’s for Sean, it’s for me, it’s so I can be set free at last, it has to be done, I have to do it or we’ll never have peace.

Six days and counting.

Chapter Text

Her parents arrived at the penthouse an hour before the ceremony began Saturday night, both of them dressed in their formal best. “Oh, Ladybug, look at you,” her mom said, admiring her dress – the blue one from Nordstrom. The Stella McCartney gown hung in the closet. “We’re so proud of you, sweetheart.”

“The two of you get together, so I can take a picture,” her dad said, gesturing. Lydia threw both her arms around her mom and grinned as her dad snapped several photos with his iPhone. “How did I end up with two such smart and accomplished women in my life,” Alan boasted.

“Just lucky, I guess,” Lydia teased him, giving him a kiss on the cheek.

The three of them arrived outside the Waldorf-Astoria a few minutes before things kicked off, meeting Matt in the lobby. After everyone was introduced and shook hands, Matt stuck his elbow out to her. “This seems like the kind of event where men are expected to do this,” he said, a little sheepish. “And, you know, if Jon Hamm’s bicurious I want to look dashing in front of him.” Laughing, Lydia took his arm and let him escort her into the ballroom.

They signed in at a table near the front, and had their names crossed off the guest list so they could get their place cards. Checking the table numbers written beneath their names, they looked around the room trying to find their seats amidst the crush of people and servers. At the front of the room a large golden seal reading THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA – GEORGE FOSTER PEABODY hung in front of a red curtain. Lydia bit back an excited yelp when she spotted Leslie Stahl near the front of the ballroom, speaking with Bob Woodruff and legendary newscaster Gwen Ifill. The cast and crew of NPR’s radio show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” were there, deep in conversation with Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum from Project Runway, and war correspondent Richard Engel was chuckling at something with the actor who played Roger Sterling from Mad Men.

Lydia had just been at the Grammys a few months earlier. She hadn’t felt half as excited then as she felt now. “Oh my god,” she said to Matt, “it’s like we’ve just arrived at Nerd Prom.”

“The only kind of prom I ever wanted to attend!” he joked.

They and Lydia’s parents all set their jackets and purses at their seats once they found them, and while Alan and Carol wanted to go get drinks from the open bar, Lydia and Matt decided to start circulating and networking. They introduced themselves to the other award winners, and Lydia couldn’t help but feel a thrill the first time she got to say “I’m Lydia Montrose with the Washington Post. I wrote a feature article about Pat Tillman and government propaganda selling the War on Terror.”

“Oh I read that one,” Engel said, turning his piercing eyes on her. “I remember that piece in the Post, yeah, that was a really great article. We should talk some more, I think, if you’re covering the war too.”

She was so flattered she forgot for a moment that she’d been stuck making videos for YouTube the past year. “That would be amazing, absolutely,” Lydia said, reaching for her clutch. “If you’ve got a business card I’ve got my own right here.”

“Yes, let’s exchange those.” He scribbled his email address on the back of his own card, and they made tentative plans to meet up for coffee very soon.

“Is it wrong to think that Richard Engel is a dreamboat?” she asked Matt as they walked away after. Matt himself had exchanged info with one of the producers of Independent Lens.

“No,” Matt stated unequivocally. “Some girls pine after Zac Efron or Orlando Bloom. Others go crazy for men with perfect hair who report from warzones with intelligence and sensitivity.”

“I knew you’d get it,” and they both snorted in amusement.

Somehow she and Matt and her parents had wound up at a table with the producers of The Colbert Report, though Stephen Colbert himself was seated at another table closer to the stage. Throughout the dinner they had everyone in stitches as they talked about Colbert’s satirical run for president in South Carolina the previous year, which they’d covered on the show. Lydia was choking back tears of laughter at one point, and she looked to her right to see her parents enjoying themselves just as much.

She grinned down at her dinner plate. This night couldn’t have gone better if she’d scripted it.

Once the dishes had been bussed away from the tables and the wine glasses topped off, Leslie Stahl ascended to a podium at the left side of the stage to kick things off as emcee for the evening. From that point on Lydia was completely focused on the people and the work which was being recognized, watching the short clips that played before each winner came onstage. It was completely different from the Grammys in that regard – everyone present was a winner, and already knew they’d won, so they merely went up when called and had five minutes or so to talk about their work and thank everyone who’d made it possible. At one point while Leslie was introducing the winners from Turner Classic Movies, there was a weird rumble towards the back of the ballroom, like something was happening back there, but other than a brief backward glance Lydia disregarded it.

The programs they’d picked up when they first checked in showed the order in which the awards would be presented. There were no categories, and as a result no seeming pattern to how they were all called up. Lydia herself was somewhere around the two-thirds mark of the thirty-five honorees, and as each person or group went up, spoke, and left the stage, her heart beat faster and faster. When the staff of The Onion went up to receive their award, her mom leaned in. “You’re up next, Ladybug!” she whispered. She grinned excitedly at her and went to get her digital camera ready.

But just as the folks from The Onion were wrapping up their thank yous, that same rumble from the back of the room started up again, followed by the scraping sound of multiple people sliding their chairs across the floor, like they were making way for someone or something. Lydia turned around again, distracted.

And saw a server, holding one of the ballroom’s chairs high over his head, making a beeline towards them. Behind him, hard on his heels, was Paul, apologizing to guests as he pushed through the packed-in tables.

Lydia’s jaw dropped. Somewhere far away Leslie Stahl read her name into the microphone and started introducing her and her work, but Lydia couldn’t tear herself away from the sight of the server setting down Paul’s chair beside hers. Matt, a little quicker on the uptake, pushed himself to the side, as did all the Colbert Report producers, making room for one more person at their already crowded table.

Lydia glanced towards the stage. A video played, featuring background info on Pat Tillman and an interview with her old editor Tom, discussing her reporting. She glanced back and Paul had fallen into his seat, his leg brushing against hers, and he put an arm around the back of her chair. “I wasn’t supposed to be this late,” he murmured in her ear. “My flight from Minneapolis got delayed due to weather, I only just arrived a bit ago.”

“You’re here,” she mumbled, dazed. “But you said you wouldn’t be.”

His eyes twinkled as he grinned. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world, love.”

A broad smile stretched across her face as it finally sank in. He was really here. He’d left his tour to fly in and be with her on her big night. She put a hand to his cheek. “Oh my god, Paul.”

“I’m so proud of you, you know.”

She giggled, feeling as effervescent as champagne. “I can’t believe you did all this—”

“Accepting the Peabody for her work is Washington Post journalist Lydia Montrose.”

Leslie Stahl’s voice rang out through the ballroom, and the entire room began to applaud. “That’s you, love!” Paul cried over the din, and he stood and clapped. She got up and wove through the tables, seeing Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes applauding her (was this her real life??), and then she’d mounted the stage stairs, and then the chairman of the Peabody Board had handed her the squat, bronze award, which she carried with her to the podium. It was heavier than it looked, just like the Grammy Award, but when she looked at the plaque across the front of it, LYDIA MONTROSE was etched there. It was hers.

Her speech was in her clutch; she fished it out as the applause died down and she said into the mic “Thank you, thank you so much. …This article started out life as just a regular assignment from my then-editor at the Post, Tom Steiner. News had just broken about Corporal Pat Tillman’s death being caused by friendly fire and not enemy shelling, as had long been believed, and I was assigned to cover it as part of our reporting on the War on Terror. I had no expectation of it being anything other than part of our routine coverage. Six hundred words, and then I’d move on.

“As I dug into the story,” Lydia continued, “I found more. A lot more. I wrote the article I’d been asked to do, but when I turned it in I told Tom that there was something much bigger going on here. Tom knows me – knew me,” she quickly corrected herself. “He knew I wouldn’t say something like that unless I meant it, and so he gave me the go ahead to keep on the hunt. To work the phones, do the research, talk to people in the know. The result is the feature article you’ve all read, which the Peabody Board decided to recognize tonight, for which I’m eternally grateful.”

Lydia looked up from her written speech and out at the sea of faces looking back at her. Paul had left their table and was only a few feet away holding up his phone, seemingly recording her at the podium. As she watched, she spotted several people with their own phones, taking photos.

Of him. Not her. They weren’t paying attention to her.

She inhaled, returning to her speech. Annoyance, sharp and fine as a paper cut, sliced through her. “I want to thank Tom Steiner, of course,” she went on, “for allowing me to trust my gut and expand this important story into a feature. My parents Alan and Carol Montrose, for their unwavering support over the years, as I embarked on this crazy career that’s the best job in the world. I also want to thank my cat Jefferson Starship, who always seems to know when I’ve done enough writing for the day and need to move on to more important things, like paying attention to him.” She got a big laugh from that. Paul grinned up at her. “And I want to thank my partner Paul for being my sounding board and my cheering section…”

She looked at the rest of what she’d written about him – about how supportive he was, and how good a cup of tea he made. Lydia swallowed and skipped over it, unwilling to give him any more attention than he was already getting. Tonight was her night, not his. “But this article wouldn’t have been possible at all,” she continued, “without the cooperation of Cpl. Tillman’s family and friends, who all spoke to me about the Pat they remembered. While the rest of us only know the now-famous photo, of Cpl. Tillman in his uniform, they were able to introduce me to the real man behind the shameless propaganda devised and packaged by our own government.”

Lydia lifted her head, filled with inspiration, and went off script. “Uncle Sam isn’t a real person,” she said. “He’s a symbol. A cartoon. But the American soldiers getting sent overseas to the Middle East to fight senseless wars aren’t symbols. They’re real men and women with families, with real hopes and dreams of their own. When they come back with injuries that will affect them for the rest of their lives, that’s real, and when their families get nothing back but a folded flag and a coffin, that’s real too. And the worst part is that every person in our government knows that, and still they make their propaganda to gin up support for their wars under false pretenses. The American people deserve the truth, and it’s our job to make sure they get it, and I’m glad I was able to contribute in some small way to that mission. Thank you.”

The applause thundered in her ears as she grabbed her award and made her way offstage. Several people stuck their hands towards her and she shook them mindlessly, feeling like an automaton programmed to do only one thing. She saw Richard Engel again, and Scott Pelley, and even Stephen Colbert as they shook her hand and said things to her that she couldn’t hear over the noise, but all the excitement she’d felt earlier about being here, surrounded and recognized by her peers, was melting away. What remained was a sinking feeling of dread.

She returned to her seat, wedged in between Paul and her mom, and they all sat attentively through the rest of the awards. It was too dark out in the audience for pictures, though her mom tried to take some without the camera flash, so they just sat and waited until the very last award of the night was given to CNN. Paul was a warm, solid presence behind her, holding her hand, and despite her annoyance she leaned on his arm as she watched and listened to the other winners’ speeches. Then the ballroom lights came up; it was time for more cocktails. Everyone stood up, gathering their things, and started making inroads at the open bar again.

“You aren’t wearing the dress,” Paul said first thing, as they got up from their seats.

“I already had this one,” Lydia said.

“But didn’t you like it? I thought the gold color would be lovely on you.”

“It was, it looks great on me,” she lied, since she never even tried it on, “but it wasn’t appropriate for tonight.”

“Why not?” he pressed. God, why was this important right now? “I picked it out just for you.”

“Paul, such a pleasure to see you tonight, we thought you would be on tour!” her mother said brightly. Lydia could only hope she hadn’t overheard them. “How long are you in town for?”

“Less than twenty-four hours, unfortunately,” he said, turning on the charm at once. “I’m performing a second show in Minneapolis tomorrow night.”

“Oh wonderful! You know I’ve got a cousin who lives in Bloomington, just south of there…”

Lydia used his distraction to grab Matt and head for the open bar, her Peabody cradled in one arm. “Drinks?” she said. “I’d love one.”

“Uh, sure,” Matt said. “Um, then I guess I should go.”

She flagged down the bartender and ordered a gin and tonic for herself and a beer for him, then turned on him. “Go? But I thought we were meeting up with everyone later.”

Matt gave her a confused look, arms spread. “When you went up for your speech, Paul basically told me I was free to go, since he was here now to be your date.”

“No he fucking didn’t.” She accepted her gin and tonic and knocked back half of it in one gulp. “Matt, it’s still my night, okay? We made plans. We’re keeping them.”

Someone wearing a headset came up to her then, and Lydia heard something about a red carpet and standup interviews they wanted to do with all the winners. She nodded and, handing her cocktail off to Matt and asking him to let everyone know where she was, Lydia followed the coordinator to another part of the ballroom off to the side. A slightly wrinkled red backdrop with corporate logos had been hung up, creating a kind of low-rent award show red carpet. It didn’t hold a candle to the Grammys, and the carpet itself had been kicked askew and backdrop was hanging a bit crooked, but Lydia was happy to participate anyway.

The cast of Mad Men moved through the gauntlet just ahead of her – and okay, maybe Jon Hamm was actually that handsome in real life. Lydia moved up next when cued. She posed as Paul’s PR person had taught her last year, back straight, chin slightly tipped down, one hand on her hip and the other proudly showing off her Peabody. There were probably only half the number of photographers here as the cluster that used to follow her in the mornings when she left for work, but these were much more professional. Actual news photographers, rather than blood-sucking paparazzi. For that, they got her very best and brightest smile. Lydia knew her blue dress probably looked amazing against the backdrop, and hopefully her hair was behaving too.

An interviewer with a microphone smiled and beckoned her forward, so Lydia moved towards her. “Lydia Montrose,” the interviewer said, “this is your first nomination and win, what did tonight mean to you?”

And wasn’t it just wonderful being interviewed by someone who’d done their research! “Tonight was a dream,” Lydia said. “None of us here do this work for the hardware or the accolades, but to be recognized by the Peabody Board is a huge honor. To be considered a co-equal part of this amazing group of winners this year, who created such an incredible and important body of work, it’s humbling. I can’t express how grateful I am to be counted among them.” Lydia felt like if she kept talking she would just babble from nervous excitement, so she left it at that.

There were a few more questions about her article, and then she was sent on her way. More poses, more pictures. She decided she was in a safe space and could show off some of her personality, so she lifted her award in one hand and pretended to give the likeness of George Peabody a kiss, which everyone chuckled at. Another news outlet gestured her closer, and she stepped forward for a second interview.

As if on cue Paul appeared beside her, snaking his arm around her waist and pulling her close. For a second she thought he’d just invited himself to join her, until she glanced back and saw the show coordinator moving away. At once the photographers went nuts, taking dozens of shots of them standing together.

Lydia’s smile froze on her face. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“You must be the ‘partner Paul’ that Lydia mentioned in her speech,” the interviewer said, grinning a grin that Lydia had seen on a hundred fanboys’ faces.

“That’s me!” Paul said. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of her, and everything she’s accomplished over the past few years. The Post doesn’t realize what a secret weapon they’ve got on their hands.” He looked down at her and winked.

“What do you think of her work?”

“She wrote a brilliant article,” Paul declared. “The Peabody Award was more than deserved.”

After a few more questions – all directed at Paul – they moved down the carpet together, arm in arm, and the cameras clicked and whirred and flashed. They called out questions to Paul, asking Paul about her and her work and their relationship as if Lydia had suddenly lost her voice between one moment and the next. He told them all how he’d flown in just that night to see her, as a surprise for her, because he was such a good boyfriend. Paul was in fine form, shaking his hair back and making sure to smile in three different directions, stopping to pose every few feet in the way he knew he looked best.

Lydia blinked rapidly, feeling like a black hole was opening up in her chest. What was wrong with her? Wasn’t this what she wanted? A great career, the respect of her peers, a partner who thought she was the best thing since color TV – what more could she ask for? She’d given her speech at the podium, said her piece; she’d been handed an award that didn’t have a fake name inscribed on it. Why was she so… god, what was this feeling burning inside her? It wasn’t jealousy, not like she’d felt at the Grammys. She clung to her Peabody, the corners of its square base digging into her palm.

When they reached the end of the red carpet they were swarmed by all the other guests coming up to shake Paul’s hand and gush about the Beatles and get in some face time. Lydia studied them all with the detachment of a reporter. The men wanted to see Paul, but the female winners all made a point to shake her hand and offer their congratulations. Lydia was courteous through the dark rage that boiled inside her, nodding her head and offering kudos in return.

One producer she recognized from their dinner table stepped towards her. “Do you have a business card?” she asked. “Steve told me earlier that he loved your article and your speech tonight, and he thought you might make an awesome guest on the Colbert Report, if you’re interested. We think you two could have a really great conversation.”

Lydia plastered on a smile that was only a tiny bit fake. “That would be incredible,” she admitted. “Yeah, let me get you my card.”

“Steve would ask you himself,” the producer said, accepting her card when Lydia proffered it, “but he’s also a massive Beatles fan, so I think he’s busy fangirling your boyfriend right now.” This, with a tolerant smile and wave of her hand.

“Oh I’m a member of the Beatles too,” Lydia said, “that’s how Paul and I know each other, actually.” The only response was a laugh, because of course Lydia had made a joke and not a statement of fact.

And that’s when it hit her.

There was no one Lydia could blame for it, exactly. No single person was responsible for how the evening was playing out. But there was no getting around it: she had just won a Peabody Award, one of the most esteemed and prestigious prizes in all American journalism. As a girl she used to picture herself on vast stages of the future, posing with awards in sparkly dresses, and imagine all the other little girls out there who would see her and be encouraged by her accomplishments. Visibility mattered, especially to women. To see successful women in male-dominated fields counted for a lot, and Lydia wanted to be one of those who inspired the next generation.

But that wasn’t the night she was getting. Not even close.

Right now, her Peabody still in hand, she wasn’t Lydia Montrose, award-winning journalist. Instead, much to her frustration, his late and dramatic arrival had demoted her to Paul McCartney’s date.

They all stood outside after it was over, the cool night air bracing and giving her a second wind. She said goodbye to her parents, who had booked a room at the Waldorf so they didn’t have to go all the way back up to Westchester that night. Alan hugged her tightly, saying something sappy about his little girl, and she kissed his cheek and her mom’s. “I’ll call you soon,” Lydia promised, and her parents waved and headed back inside the hotel. She hoped they had failed to pick up on any of the tension between her, Paul, and Matt.

“Right,” Paul said, shaking back his hair and checking his watch, “I’ve got reservations at a cocktail lounge at eleven—”

“Have fun,” Lydia said.

He paused, an uncertain smile wavering on his lips. “No, love – the reservation’s for us—”

“You weren’t going to be here tonight,” she said, her tone still level and calm, “so we made other plans. Matt and I are meeting a bunch of my friends at a karaoke bar in Koreatown.” She turned to him. “You texted them to let them know we’re out of the ceremony, right?”

“Yeah, told them we’re on our way,” Matt said, holding up his phone.

“Great!” She smiled at Paul. “I know you’re probably jetlagged, babe, so you don’t have to stay long if you don’t want.”

Her words were exactly the red cape she knew they’d be. Paul straightened and shook his hair back again, lips pursed. “Karaoke sounds great,” he said, chipper voice not matching his expression. “I’ve got the hire car here, just give them the address and we can be off!”

“I think I’m scared a little,” Matt mumbled under his breath, as they piled into the backseat. He sat with his back to the driver, while Paul and Lydia sat together facing forward. Lydia took pity and patted Matt’s arm; out of the corner of her eye she saw Paul make a face like she’d just made out with him.

“So anyway,” Paul said, his voice tight as the car pulled away from the curb and merged into traffic, “we were talking about why you didn’t wear the dress I picked out for you.”

“Because I already had this one picked out.”

“But the other one was better.”

“Yeah, too much better.” Lydia dug through her clutch, hunting for her lipstick. She touched it up as she continued, “You remember that scene in Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett shows up at Melanie’s birthday party way overdressed? Well, if I’d worn that dress, I would’ve been Scarlett tonight.”

“But I thought the gold color—”

“One of the other winners was wearing a business casual pantsuit,” she said, biting off the word. God, she was done with this topic already. “Her outfit looked like something she’d wear to work. That gown you got me is meant for the Grammys, or a White House gala.”

“I think you look great in this blue dress,” Matt blurted out. “Very flattering.”

Lydia grinned at him. “Aw, thanks Matt. Hey, have you two officially met yet?” She gestured between them. “Matt, this is my boyfriend Paul McCartney. He was in that band and now he’s a solo artist. Paul, this is my work friend Matt Klementowski, he’s on the metro desk at the Post.”

“Hi,” Matt said, waving a little.

“You’re the one who posed as Lydia’s fake date for all those years,” Paul said coldly, giving him a searching look. “She didn’t tell me how good looking you are.”

Matt turned bright red. “Thanks?”

“No,” Lydia growled, rounding on Paul. “You don’t get to play the jealous asshole. Tonight’s my night and everyone’s only job is to be nice to me.”

“And I would be if you’d let me!” Paul said. “I flew in all the way from Minneapolis to surprise you—”

“I know you did, you keep mentioning it,” she said nastily. “It was just the one flight, right?”

“You know, if I’d known you were going to react like this, I never would’ve rearranged my schedule to be here,” Paul said, his voice still deceptively mild. “Maybe I should just cancel that cocktail lounge reservation.”

Lydia threw her hands in the air. “Yeah, maybe you should, because we’re going to Koreatown for karaoke.”

“But love,” he shifted on the seat to face her, imploring, “the reviews for this place were excellent, and they do these cocktails—”

“Goddamnit!” she shrieked, slamming her Peabody on the backseat. The frustration simmering inside her spewed forth. “Just shut the fuck up about the goddamn—!” She screwed her eyes shut and clenched both her fists, struggling to grab onto her composure. It was all slipping away from her so fast, like sand in an hourglass.

Paul huffed, clearly annoyed. “I mean, if you really want to go to karaoke, I suppose we can do that, but—”

“No,” Lydia snapped. She paused and tried again. Calmer. Calmer. “No.” She turned back to Matt, who looked shellshocked. “Matt, I’m sorry. Since you already texted everyone, please give them my apologies. The room I rented is in my name and they have my card on file, so I’ll cover the cost. You guys can stay as late as you want.”

“You… aren’t coming out to karaoke?” Matt asked, hesitant.

“I am not,” Lydia decided. “Not tonight. Some other time.”

Paul gave instructions to the driver, and they dropped Matt off at the next train station they spotted. As soon as he’d shut the car door behind him and headed away on foot, Paul turned to her, looking smug as all get out. “This cocktail lounge is great, love,” he said, “they do this—”

“Take us home, Joe,” Lydia called out to the driver. She sank back into the heated leather seat, eyes closed, feeling weary to her bones.

For a long time there was absolute silence in the car. No one moved or said a thing; the only sound was that of the turn signal, ticking and ticking. She left her eyes closed and lay perfectly still, waiting to see what Paul would do.

The car started moving, merging back into traffic. Lydia gazed out the window, clocking where they were as they passed various intersections and architectural landmarks. After a few blocks, she realized that they were indeed heading for the Upper East Side and the penthouse.

“I’m only here until morning,” Paul said out of the blue, a warning note in his voice. “I’ve still got a show to do in Minneapolis tomorrow night.”

“Good to know,” Lydia said flatly. She kept staring out the window, clutching her Peabody, willing to not look at him again until he left, and good riddance. But it occurred to her suddenly that if they kept this up, and he remained in a snit, that that would be the last time she saw or spoke to him before her interview with Yoko that Wednesday.

Fuck. And she always had to make the first move, didn’t she?

Sighing, Lydia located Paul’s hand resting on the seat between them. She reached over and took it in hers, holding it on her lap. Squeezing his fingers slightly, she released a relieved breath when he squeezed back.

The walk across their building’s lobby was interminable; the ride up in the elevator lasted centuries. Neither one looked at the other, neither one of them spoke a single word. Lydia kept his hand clasped firmly in hers as they headed upstairs, one thumping step at a time, and broke away from him at last to place her Peabody Award on the dresser. She stopped for a moment to admire it in the warm golden lamplight from the bedside table.

“Lydia,” Paul said. His shoulders drooped sadly when she turned to him. “Love, I didn’t mean for—”

“I know,” she murmured. Lydia kicked off her heels and went to him, burying herself in his arms. The feel of his heartbeat, the warmth of his hands on her back grounded her and reminded her of what was really important in her life. Not a hunk of bronze with an old dead guy’s face on it, but this. The two of them.

She tipped her chin up, ready to say something to smooth everything over but he took it as an opening instead, tangling his hands in her hair and kissing her with heat behind it. Her body flared to life, like it always did for him. Encouraged by her whimper, he started tugging at the zipper at the back of her dress, and she arched into him as he pressed kisses to her neck, each one hotter than the one before it. Fingers shaking, she started to return the favor, undoing his tie and shirt. She wanted to just forget everything about this stupid night.

Lydia moaned into a kiss on his exposed collarbone. “Oh fuck, Paul,” she gasped, as her dress slid off her hips to the carpet, “I want you so bad, I want you to fuck me hard like you can’t help yourself—”

“I want you slowly, love,” he said, his large hand sliding down to the curve of her lower back, “take my time, make you fall to pieces in my arms.”

A bucket of cold water. Lydia sucked her teeth, her arousal fizzling out. “Why do I even bother,” she said, in a normal tone, “you always get your way eventually.”

He halted for a split second, then drew away from her, his face a mask. The mask she’d seen before; the mask he wore around other people, never her. “On second thought,” he said, “rain check. I’ve got a rather brutal headache coming on.”

“What a coincidence, me too,” she shot back. She stepped out of her dress and marched to the closet, where she grabbed her thickest, fuzziest dressing gown and cinched it tight around her waist.

Before she could make her escape, he called after her “You know, I had the perfect night planned out for us, and if you’d just worn the dress I—”

“Except I didn’t,” she cried. She threw open the bedroom door so hard it banged against the wall, leaving a slight dent. “I didn’t fucking wear it because I’m not Dot Rhone!” Lydia started stomping down the hall, headed for the stairs.

“And where are you going?” he said, following after her. His voice was almost hard and cold enough to freeze her in her tracks. “It’s nearly midnight, I’m not here much longer.”

“I’m going to get some writing done,” she spat at him. “Maybe I’ll write another article and win another award and you can make that one all about you too!” She spun on her heel and continued downstairs.

Jeff had come into the kitchen whining at all the ruckus, so as she passed through she scooped him up in her arms and brought him down with her. Once she’d settled at her desk, he sat in her lap purring in contentment as she booted up her computer and opened up all her manuscript and notes files. She was loaded with adrenaline, practically thrumming with it; for hours she sat there, submerged in her book, sleep miles away.

Her office had a chaise longue right next to the window, the one that used to be up in their bedroom before they partitioned off Paul’s new office. The next morning she woke up on that chaise, stiff and chilled, Jeff having never left her side. Stretching, yawning, in need of a better night’s sleep, Lydia shuffled up to the kitchen.

The penthouse was empty. Paul had already left for his flight back to Minneapolis. She had no new texts from him on her phone, and when she checked to see if he’d left her a note on the fridge or the kitchen countertop, there was nothing there either. He was just gone.

Chapter Text

Lydia had brunch with her parents late Sunday morning before they made the trip back to Westchester, and though she made the effort to look like everything was okay, her mom saw through her act. After, while her dad went to get the car, Carol put an arm around her shoulders. “Between us girls,” she said lightly, “how was the rest of your evening last night?”

“Fine,” Lydia replied.

“Was it really?”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “No. But I don’t want to talk about it either.”

Carol pressed a kiss to her hairline. “You are a brilliant, thoughtful, insightful journalist, Ladybug,” she murmured. “No one – no one can take that away from you unless you let them.”

When she returned home to the penthouse, Lydia felt ill at ease. Thinking she had to fix this before it spiraled into something even uglier, she called Paul’s assistant pretending she was just making sure he’d arrived safely back in Minneapolis. “Yep, he’s here, all in one piece,” Nathan said sunnily. “I’ll let him know you called but we actually have sound check in about two minutes, so he might not get back to you right away.”

“Yeah, he can call me when he’s done,” she confirmed, hoping she didn’t sound desperate.

“Great, talk soon!” They hung up.

She waited all day, pecking away at her book while she did.

Paul didn’t call her back.

Mid-morning on Monday, Matt came to her cubicle with an offering from the café on Sixth, which he set down on her desk as gingerly as if it were a bomb. “Nonfat mocha latte,” he said. “My treat.”

“Fuck,” she sighed, grimacing up at him. “I’m so sorry about Saturday night.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“We’re not normally like that,” she insisted. “Paul and I, we’re so great, usually. I think we were just overdue for a fight. We get antsy after a while when we don’t argue about something stupid,” she tried to joke.

“Sure. I guess.” Matt gave her a tight-lipped, unconvincing grin. He opened his mouth as if to continue, but paused.

“What?” Lydia pushed him.

“No, it’s nothing.” But before he turned to leave, Matt added, “I just want you to know, if you ever need to crash at my place, you can. Any time, day or night.”

“Well that doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Lydia said dryly. “I’m not like a battered girlfriend or something, we just—”

“Hey.” Matt crouched down next to her desk, lowering his voice. “I told you before about how my parents got divorced when I was a kid, right? I had to listen to them yell at each other for about two years before that, and when my mom got remarried I finally saw what a functional relationship really looks like. Taught me pretty early on that there’s a right and a wrong way to have an argument.”

“What are you saying?” she asked, glaring.

“I’m saying,” he emphasized, “anytime you need a couch to crash on, mine’s open.”

She frowned at him as he walked away. Well – what the fuck did Matt know anyway? How could he make a sweeping judgment like that based on spending less than an hour with her and Paul? He couldn’t! He couldn’t. Lydia dug into her purse for her personal phone and shot off a text to her loving and wonderful and sexy boyfriend: Where do you want to watch fireworks for the Fourth? Up on our rooftop? Quiet night in just us might be nice. We need to talk. With that, feeling like she’d proved something important, she went back to work.

It wasn’t until she was home that night, sitting at her desk working on her book, that she remembered to check her phone. This happened sometimes; she was very strict with herself in not checking her personal cell during work hours unless it was important.

(And if that was all lies, and she’d really been forcing herself to not check it every five minutes, the only person she was lying to was herself, which didn’t count.)

Paul hadn’t texted her back. He’d read her message shortly after she sent it, and she saw the timestamp for when he had, but there was no response. “Leaving me on read,” she snapped at her phone screen, “are you fucking serious right now, oh my god, Paul.” She tossed the phone away and it slid across her desktop, stopping precariously close to the edge. If he was going to be a dick then she didn’t want to talk to him anyway.

Her Yoko interview was in less than forty-eight hours. But she was trying not to think about that either.

After spending Monday night sleeplessly tossing and turning, though, she knew she had to try a different tack. Her therapist was sometimes available for last-minute emergency sessions so Lydia called her office, bleary-eyed and already on her second cup of coffee early on Tuesday morning. Jeff sat in her lap for moral support as she listened and waited for the receptionist to check the schedule.

“You know what, you may have lucked out,” the admin said, much too perkily for this hour of the day. “Dr. Archer’s first session did cancel, so let me just check with her—”

“Thanks, I’ll wait,” Lydia said. She barely waited for the admin to transfer the call to the other line and Dr. Archer to say Hello? before she was spewing it all out, unburdening what she could to her shrink. Work stress, she told Dr. Archer, a big project she’d been working on for months, a deadline coming up very soon. Lydia enumerated all the ways it was manifesting physically in her body and sleep quality. They talked through breathing techniques and ways in which she could recenter herself if she felt out of control. None of it was new information, necessarily – Lydia was already well-versed in mindfulness and meditation and all that good stuff – but just hearing it spoken in a soothing, nonjudgmental voice was a balm in and of itself. It kept the panic at bay a little bit longer.

“Anything else we need to talk about?” Dr. Archer asked, when they were wrapping up.

Lydia downed the last of her coffee. “Nope, I think that’s it,” she replied, already mentally upstairs to pick out what she’d wear to work that day.

“Okay, if you’re sure. Nothing about your relationship you need to cover?”

Lydia paused. “What do you mean?”

“My dear,” Dr. Archer tutted, “we just spent the past thirty minutes talking about job stressors, and yet you managed to mention your boyfriend about two dozen times.”

Ugh, fucking damnit. She set down her coffee mug with a hollow clink on the dining room table. “I just…” Lydia sighed wearily. “Well…”

“We still have a few minutes,” Dr. Archer said gently.

And that, apparently, was all Lydia needed to hear before it all came pouring out of her, the infuriating saga of the fucking Peabody Awards. Dr. Archer hummed every now and then as Lydia vented, the words sometimes tripping over themselves in her rush. “I won a motherfucking Peabody,” she spat, hugging Jeff hard. “It’s a big fucking deal. And yet there he is whining about stupid shit, and all he can do is focus on the fact that I didn’t wear the damn dress he wanted, like I was going out of my way to personally insult him. Because of course on my big night I’d be thinking about ways to annoy him. What the fuck is wrong with him?”

“You felt that he had… what, exactly? What did he do that was so offensive to you?”

“He took over!” Lydia cried. “He seized control of what should’ve been my night! Tried to dictate everything that we did!”

“He seized control,” Archer echoed. “Okay. Is that a familiar pattern with him, or was this the first time he’s done something like that?”

“A pattern!” Lydia said, laughing sarcastically. “Hell, him taking control of everything is his fucking hobby at this point!” She swallowed back Exhibit A, our last two albums. You’d think Abbey Road was recorded by Paul McCartney and the What’s-His-Names, not the Beatles.

“Why do you think he does that? Why does he seize control of situations?”

“Because he always has – so I’ve read,” Lydia added quickly. “He has to be in charge or he just gets bored. I – I’ve read in Beatles books about, like, John complaining that when they worked on one of his songs, Paul seemed less invested than when the group worked on one of Paul’s songs. Paul has to be the center of attention or he mentally checks out.”

“That’s something you read in a book,” Dr. Archer flagged at once, “which may or may not be true. Can you give me an example of something you witnessed yourself? An instance where Paul took control where you felt that he shouldn’t?”

I thought I just did, Lydia mused darkly. She looked down at Jeff, scratching his head while she thought. “And also bear in mind,” Dr. Archer added, “being in control and being the center of attention are two different things, aren’t they? Someone can be in control of a situation and stay behind the scenes, or be the center of attention when someone else is in charge.”

“Oh,” Lydia said. “Right, yeah.”

“Let’s first specify,” when Lydia still couldn’t come up with an answer, “what you think is happening. Is Paul centering himself in situations, or is he taking control?”

“Um…” Lydia racked her brains. “Well. … I think he takes control,” she stated, with a surge of confidence, “because what I wear isn’t making him the center of attention, and no one would’ve known who picked out my outfit, nor would they have asked that at the Peabodys. Only Paul would’ve known.”

“All right,” Dr. Archer said. “And when he was answering questions about your work…?”

“Same thing,” Lydia said even more confidently, “because he didn’t write my article. He had nothing to do with the writing and editing process at all. But he was… making sure nothing but glowing reviews of my work were in print.”

“Okay. So in the end, what purpose does that serve, for him?”

“It makes him look good,” Lydia grumbled. “As if he doesn’t already.”

“Now there you go,” Dr. Archer said, “I think you’ve hit on something. He’s doing all of this when his reputation is already firmly established, and has been for some time. So what do you think is happening here? Does he want to take control, or does he need to?”

And that was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? When the Beatles were on top of the world, they were untouchable. He hadn’t needed to be as exacting as he was. And now? Paul had a whole team, a wardrobe specialist and a spokesperson and a publicist on retainer, people whose entire job was to manage some piece of his life and make sure it was perfect. There was no need for him to get involved in any of that because someone else always had it handled. It wasn’t a distrust thing either – he had no issues trusting their driver to get them to their destination, or his aides to get various tasks done.

“When you say ‘need to’,” Lydia began slowly.

“I’m not implying that his staff aren’t doing their jobs,” Dr. Archer said, speaking Lydia’s thoughts aloud. “I mean ‘need’ in the sense that sometimes people feel they need to grab hold of one aspect of their lives because they feel they can’t in another area. For example, people who deal with eating disorders and fixate on their food intake often do so because some other part of their lives feels beyond their ability to control. Does that ring true to you?”

Lydia opened her mouth and nothing came out. Jeff blinked up at her, tilting his head to one side, but he didn’t have an answer for her either. Was Paul controlling because… he felt vulnerable? Was he actually struggling to cope with something, not just being a dick for selfish reasons? A hundred instances of his often tyrannical nature flipped through her brain like one of those old photo carousels – moments on tour, and in recording sessions, and out at night clubs, and at Mimi’s house, reframed now with this new theory. Sadness swept over her, a wave of grief tinged with compassion. Do you feel lost? Lydia wondered. Are you floundering? Oh, Paul, my love.

She glanced up at the microwave clock. “I may need to think about that one some more.”

“Yes, please do,” Dr. Archer said. “Unfortunately I do need to wrap this up for today, but I will see you for your regular appointment next week. Think about what we’ve talked about, and speak with your partner. When in doubt, communicate.”

Lydia’s emotions yo-yoed up and down for most of the day, as she and Mike finalized the details for tomorrow. Paul might have been dealing with something he felt he couldn’t tell her about – and I’m supposed to be cool with him taking it out on me? a dark little voice asked. Like fuck was she going to let him steamroll her just because he was upset. Then a half-hour later, as she ate her lunch and listened to Matt and some coworkers talk, she was swimming in sympathy. I don’t want any secrets between us, she thought. He has to tell me what’s going on so I can help him carry the burden.

She sent him a text once she returned from her lunch break: It’s only me, Paulie. <3

Tuesday night she tried to follow her usual routine of changing into something comfortable and working on her book, but her attention was completely shot. All she could think about was Paul or Yoko. After about an hour of struggling to write more than three words, she gave up in a huff and stomped up to her bedroom. Changing once again – this time into leggings and an oversized tank top – she hopped on her stationary bike, put on her most intense workout music mix, and started pedaling at a merciless speed. If she couldn’t mentally distract herself, maybe she physically could.

And Paul didn’t text her back.

Wednesday morning dawned hot and clear, the sunlight slipping between the tall skyscrapers of New York like it was trying to be sneaky. Lydia, who’d gotten up about forty-five minutes before her alarm clock went off, was fully dressed and her breakfast eaten with hours to spare. She felt hollowed out, subtle tremors occasionally rippling through her as she moved around the kitchen. Her legs were sore from her ill-advised biking the night before. Her coffee tasted awful. Her clothes felt like they didn’t fit properly. Jeff was annoyed about something and didn’t want to cuddle.

Lydia went over the plan yet again, like she hadn’t had it memorized for ages. She and Mike were meant to meet up at the Met at nine-thirty, in the main gallery of Yoko’s exhibit, where they’d touch base with Yoko’s team and the extra sets of hands they’d hired to help with filming. Yoko herself would arrive at about ten-thirty and they’d have her for interviews and stand ups until about four. But if thinking through their plans was meant to settle her nerves, it absolutely didn’t work. Right when she started staring down her imminent departure, Lydia realized she had to change her clothes because she had stress-sweated through her original outfit.

It was while she was buttoning up a fresh blouse that her cell phone rang; Mike’s name came up on the screen. “Hey Mike,” she answered. “Everything good? I’m leaving my place in about five minutes to head to the Met.”

“Don’t bother,” he said, sounding grumpy. “The whole thing’s been postponed.”

Lydia stopped dead. His words didn’t make sense for a long time. “I’m sorry, I think the call dropped for a second there,” she said. “Did you just say that--”

“Not canceled,” Mike said, like he wasn’t even listening to her, “we’re still doing it, just not today. Someone reached out to Henry and said today didn’t work for them anymore, so we’ll have to reschedule for later next month.”

Relief burst out in hot waves, out from her torso to each of her limbs, shaky and warm and welcome. Not today, she thought, not today, holy fuck not today. “Wow,” she said. “Something came up?”

“I don’t even fucking know,” he complained. “Henry said they told him something about how Yoko’s star chart wasn’t good? Like something in the stars or planets said today wasn’t auspicious, whatever the fuck that means…” Mike continued ranting, but Lydia had already tuned him out.

A star chart. Like the ones Green used to create for them, back when they had lived their lives ruled by astrology and tarot cards and palmistry – as if Saturn’s position in the ninth house or the little forked crease at the base of his index finger had any fucking thing to do with whether John should record that day, or if he should take Sean to the park. It was an inviolable law in their household that they only acted when the stars were aligned, and never at any other time. And yet Lydia doubted strongly, in this year of our lord 2008, that savvy businesswoman Yoko Ono still lived her life governed by woo-woo fortune tellers.

Which meant she was fucking with her again. Just like with the photo of the bloody glasses, this was all a concerted effort to push Lydia off balance. She had been anxiously anticipating this interview for weeks, and in the eleventh hour the rug had been pulled out from under her. All calculated. All timed for maximum effect.

“So what does this mean?” Lydia asked, interrupting Mike’s rant. “Do we go into the office? I don’t know if I have anything else to work on.”

“No, Henry told me we could stay home today,” Mike confirmed. “He’s pitching some new stuff, so he’ll let us know what our next project is tomorrow, probably. But we can have today off.”

She said she’d see him at the office the next day and hung up as soon as she could; she opened up her contacts immediately after and looked up the one she needed. Sean had been in her phone as Beautiful Boy, but since Christmas the contact name had been changed to Her Highness.

Lydia opened up a new text: You’re so bloody predictable. I should’ve guessed you’d pull a stunt like this. She hit send before she could think better of it.

She stood a moment unmoving, leaning against the kitchen countertop. Now that she was no longer headed to the Met, the change over her body was, frankly, incredible. Positively blissful. Her heart rate had settled back down to normal, her hands had stopped trembling, her breath was even and strong. Good lord but she’d missed this. Feeling like an adult human who had her shit together most of the time; how amazing it felt.

This was a sign. The universe had given her this gift and now she had to do the right thing: she had to tell Paul. She’d tell him everything, and then he’d share what was going on with him, and then they’d make up and be closer than ever—

Her phone buzzed with a reply to her earlier text. I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Anger surged in her gut. Lydia began pacing, her work shoes tapping on the kitchen tile until, irritated, she kicked them off. She wasn’t doing the Met interview today, so it was no longer important at the moment. She could turn her focus elsewhere. Lydia deleted Yoko’s text and gained immense satisfaction from seeing it disappear from her messages.

She pulled up Paul’s number next and called it. The phone rang over and over until the standard computerized voice told her to leave a message after the beep; as soon as the tone sounded she blurted out “Hey babe, it’s me. We need to talk. You can keep trying to avoid it but I’m just going to keep asking, so. You might as well give in.” She cleared her throat, suddenly feeling ridiculous. “Okay. Well… talk later, love you, bye.” She hit the button to end her voicemail, her face hot.

That done, the day yawned before her, filled with possibility. Lydia went to go work on her book.

And Paul didn’t call her back.

Chapter Text

Paul’s schedule originally had him home with her for the Fourth of July holiday weekend, but such was the silence on his end that Lydia actually started to doubt he’d come home at all. She didn’t try his assistant again, not wanting any of his employees to know anything was wrong, but meanwhile her blood simmered with rage. Hadn’t he told her last year that he’d “never” ignore her? And so what was all this if not him ignoring her texts and voicemails? She was trying to be the mature adult here, but it was hard when Paul insisted on being so fucking—!

On that Thursday before the Fourth, the day before Paul was meant to come home (possibly, who even knew), his assistant called her instead. “Hiya Lydia,” Nathan said, sounding as friendly and unconcerned as ever. “Just wanted to confirm with you for the photo shoot tomorrow.”

Hello, what?

“Yep,” she said, after a moment of shocked silence. “Consider it confirmed. Sorry, remind me where I have to go again? Am I bringing my own wardrobe, or…?”

“No, they just want you and Paul in your home environment,” Nathan said, “hanging out together in the living room or wherever. They’re bringing a rack of clothes for you both, and hair and makeup will be there for touch ups as needed. The crew will be at the penthouse at about nine to start setting up. Paul might be running late since he’ll be flying in from Denver, but I’m sure you already knew that.”

“Ah, okay, great,” Lydia said, even as she mentally shrieked What the fuck, Paul. “Yeah, I’ll be here. Nine o’clock tomorrow. Can’t wait.”

“Excellent!” Nathan said. Lydia wished she had even a fraction of that pep.

As she sat on the rooftop patio that night, Jeff in her lap and a beer in hand, she wondered what Paul was up to. They’d had multiple fights over the years, from the serious to the stupid, and yet they always made the effort to be open and communicate and get things resolved without allowing them to fester too long. Their conflict resolution skills had reached the level of an art, to be honest. And it helped that the makeup sex was always scorching.

But not since they went public last year, Lydia realized. Now they fought, and one or both of them acted like it was the end of the world. Scratch that – they acted like it was 1969. Like when she hadn’t even been in the same room as Paul for months on end, until well into 1970. She didn’t know what the difference was, but she could figure that out later. Like hell was she going to come back for a second chance just to relive one of the worst years of her past life.

No, she vowed to herself, we’re not going back to 1969. We’re both smarter than that. I won’t let that happen.

Still, even with her new resolve, she was a little pissed off. So she retaliated by not being ready for the photoshoot at nine on the dot – because again, seriously, what the fuck. When the photo crew arrived and came up in the elevator, she had just finished working out and was all gross and sweaty, guzzling a water bottle which she let dribble down her chin. “Sorry, lost track of time,” she said, giving them a careless what can you do? shrug as she welcomed them in the foyer. “I’ll just go shower and then you can do my hair however. Paul should be here soon, I think.”

“No worries, take your time,” the photographer told her. Lydia thought he might’ve said he was with Rolling Stone, and his name was something like Frank or Hank, but oh wait, she didn’t care. “We, uh, thought we’d shoot the two of you in the living room, Sir Paul thought that might be a good spot—”

“Eh, we don’t really spend much time in there,” she lied, “and the light isn’t great. I don’t know what—”

The elevator chimed again. The doors opened and out stepped Paul himself, looking utterly fuckable in dark sunglasses and a white button-down and jeans. Lydia’s tongue stuck to the roof of her abruptly dry mouth. “Sorry I’m late!” he said, grinning at everyone. “Are we all here?”

Lydia swallowed, lust stopping all of her thoughts in their tracks. Why couldn’t she switch that off when she was angry with him? How could she be standing here, furious and turned on all at the same time? In what world was that fair?

The photo crew assured him – fell over themselves to assure him, really – that everyone was present and about to start setting up. Paul nodded and discussed logistics as he tossed back his long hair, canted his hip to one side and toyed with his sunglasses. Lydia almost whimpered out loud. But when he swung his eyes towards her it all vanished, for he wasn’t her Paul right now after all. Famous Paul was the man who’d shown up. “You’re not dressed!” he said, gesturing at her. “Come ‘ead, love, let’s get to it!”

Lydia sighed inwardly. Well, that at least made things a tad easier.

She ducked upstairs and showered, and when she was done she came out in a bathrobe to see that hair and makeup had already established a little station just inside their bedroom. Two directors’ chairs sat side by side in front of their mirror, an array of brushes, pots of color, and hairsprays laid out on their dresser top. Paul, in the chair on the left, was being cheeky and clever with the girl tidying his hair and patting away some of the shine on his face. Lydia took the chair on the right and somehow managed not to jump in surprise when Paul automatically reached out and took her hand. Right. They had to make it look good.

After a lengthy amount of time – funny, wasn’t it, how much effort and product were required to make her hair look effortless – the two stylists said they’d send in wardrobe to help them pick out outfits. For a few brief seconds, Lydia and Paul were alone.

“I don’t want to pose in the living room,” she said, as soon as everyone was out of earshot. “That’s my sacred space. I don’t want just anyone on my couch where I eat ice cream and cry over Beaches.”

“No, I don’t want to be in the living room either,” Paul murmured, not looking at her. He’d pulled out his phone and was pantomiming like he was distracted by it. “Music room would be fine.”

“Sure.”

“They wanted two different locations, though.”

“Rooftops have always treated us well in the past,” Lydia drawled.

At that, of all things, he finally glanced up and met her eyes. Famous Paul had left, if but for a moment. “They really have,” he murmured low, the slightest hint of a warm smile at his lips.

Returning his smile, she interlaced their fingers. No one had said anything to her yet about the main throughline of this article – was it about the Grammy win? Year 10? His current US tour? Last year’s visa issue? And was she here to be the supportive girlfriend, or some other third thing he’d concocted without telling her? She wanted everything today to be painless so they could finally talk after it was all over. “How do you want to play this, by the way?” she asked.

Paul’s face shuttered instantly. He dropped her hand as he stood and shook out his hair again. “Pretend we’re together and we care about each other,” he muttered, before turning and walking into the bathroom.

Oh hell no. There was no way he was out here playing the victim now, not with the way he’d ruined the Peabodys and still hadn’t apologized for it. Lydia was going to murder him, probably. She’d do it with her bare hands and enjoy it.

The wardrobe people came in with armfuls of designer clothes then, interrupting Lydia’s homicidal train of thought. For the next twenty minutes she allowed herself to be buffeted along by their effusive and superficial compliments, their dramatic assertions that “This shade of green will look so epic on you” and “Oh my god, that necklace with that top? I can’t even.” Once she was ready they sent her out, and then Paul was in their crosshairs next.

Lydia entered the music room, their private sanctum, to find it packed with strangers and equipment. They’d blocked the sunlight coming through the windows in favor of artificial lights on stands, which gaffers worked to position just so, and some assistant was adjusting the lid on the piano. “Does that need to be lowered?” Lydia said, a note of warning in her voice. She didn’t like people touching their shit.

“We were thinking we’d shoot Sir Paul at the keys,” Frank/Hank said, stepping towards her; using his hands, Lydia watched him frame various spots like a storyboard. “He’s sitting there playing a new song for you, and you’re lying on the lid listening?”

Scratch that, she was going to murder everyone in this room. Did no one in journalism do adequate research anymore? “I took piano lessons for over ten years,” she said, lifting her chin a little. “If I’m in Paul’s music room at all, it’s because I’m playing piano and he’s on guitar.”

“We’ve had some great jams together,” Paul said, coming up behind her. She felt his hand in the middle of her back. “That funky chord in the middle of ‘For You,’ just before the middle eight? That was hers actually, you know.”

“You help him and Monty Hayes write songs?” Hank the Frank asked her, looking shocked. She wasn’t sure what was more surprising to him, that a woman could write songs or that two men had let her.

“No,” Lydia said quickly, shooting a warning look at Paul. “That was a one-time thing. And my contribution to that song is all off the record, okay? All my comments today are off the record.”

“Yeah, sure, understood,” the photographer said, deflating.

Paul turned away then and started wondering loudly about which guitar he should pose with, and he and Frank N. Hank spent several minutes admiring the wall of instruments Paul had. Then all the stories had to come out – how Paul had played this guitar on “Band on the Run,” and this one over here had shown up on “Taxman,” and here was a new one he’d used on “You and Me,” which the Rolling Stone people ate up like catnip. Meanwhile Lydia took her rightful seat on the piano bench (not on the lid like some brainless groupie, thank you very much) and started noodling away on the keys to pass the time. Another assistant came up with a light meter to get readings inches away from her face, but Lydia continued playing. Serenity now, she told herself, remembering the old episode of Seinfeld.

Once Paul had picked out a guitar – an acoustic that didn’t have any legendary stories attached to it, more was the pity – he moved next to the piano and Lydia glanced up from the keys. She blinked, startled. People moved all around them, stepping over the cables for the lights, smoothing down a flyaway hair on Paul’s head, tugging on a wrinkle in her dress, and Paul just looked… completely and fantastically dejected.

Lydia darted her eyes around at everyone, waiting for someone to comment. No one did. Was it possible they really didn’t see it? Even after they got properly started, and Lydia endured blinding flashbulbs in her face with repeated instructions to “Look up at him, Lydia? Tip your chin – great, like that,” the act Paul put on was so painfully fake it made her internally cringe. He was cracking corny jokes and bantering back and forth with the crew in such a way that she wanted to crawl under the piano until everyone forgot she was there.

If she hadn’t been convinced before, after her session with Dr. Archer, she definitely was now. Something was going on with him and it was making him miserable.

Once they were done in the music room and changed into second outfits – Lydia was shoved into a summery black-and-white polka dot dress that, okay, was something she’d probably wear in real life – everyone trooped up to the roof. When they started talking about shifting around the patio furniture and having them seated on the wicker sofa as Paul cooperatively nodded along, Lydia decided she was over it. “Let’s get on the hammock instead,” she interrupted them. “We love the hammock!”

Lies. Blatant, massive lies. The hammock had been a gift from some record company exec Paul barely tolerated, and they’d basically set it up on the roof and forgotten about it. But the idea of yet again making public some private facet of their lives – the patio sofa where the two of them sat and talked about everything and smoked pot and made out – was intolerable to her. It was bad enough that the music room had been invaded but, well, Paul was still a working musician even if she wasn’t anymore. This, though? Too much.

“That works, yeah,” Paul said, which put paid to the discussion. The crew dutifully shifted the lights and scrims around, to block and redirect the natural sunlight, and she and Paul approached the hammock.

“Take off your shoes,” Lydia said. She couldn’t bear seeing that look on his face anymore.

He side-eyed her. “Pardon?”

“Take off your shoes,” she repeated, and she kicked off the soft brown huaraches wardrobe had given her earlier. “You’re always happier when you’re barefoot. You’re kinda feral like that.”

Paul ducked his head and snorted, but a moment later he too had bent and was removing the expensive shoes and socks he wore. As soon as they were both unshod, they wiggled their toes in the open air and grinned at each other. The space between them already felt lighter.

Frank the Hank said something about being ready, so Paul gingerly sat on the hammock and turned to lay down fully on it; Lydia held it steady while he shifted around. He looked monstrously uncomfortable – she knew he hated not having his feet on solid ground – and the discomfort only grew as Lydia then climbed on with him. There was some initial awkwardness as they positioned themselves, but then he lifted his right arm and Lydia slid underneath it, and something just… clicked. She was tucked up securely beside him, the two of them balanced right in the middle of the hammock. His body was warm and solid; before she could stop herself she rested a hand over his heart. He grabbed it at once, holding it tight.

“Great, that looks perfect,” Photographer Phrank said, but he was a thousand miles away.

Lydia looked up at Paul to find him already looking down at her. She smiled. “All right?”

“Yeah.”

“Once more with feeling.”

He rolled his eyes but his shy grin didn’t fade.

“You know why I didn’t want to be on the sofa,” she whispered.

After a moment peering at her intently, he sighed and nodded. “I wasn’t a fan either.”

“Okay. Same page, then.”

“Same page.”

Lydia shifted a little, her dress sticking to her back. “It’s hot up here, isn’t it.”

“I think that happens sometimes in July.”

She poked him in the side and he snickered. Her heart lurched because that had been a real laugh, finally. “Extra side of sass, Macca?”

“Brought my own, ta.”

Lydia covered her mouth to smother her giggle.

“That’s great, keep looking at each other like that,” they were told. They started hearing the shutter of the camera, taking dozens of pictures in quick succession.

Paul sighed again, his smile taking on a false edge. “Serenity now,” he murmured.

She’d never get over how the two of them did that. Leapt to the same thoughts, time and time again. Surely that meant they weren’t as distant from each other as they pretended. “Are you supposed to yell it?” she quoted the next line from that episode.

“The man on the tape wasn’t specific!”

Lydia snorted so hard her nose hurt. “Was that your best Jerry Stiller? Good lord, babe, come on.” She threw her hand in the air, shaking her fist. “Serenity now! Serenity now!”

Paul flung his other arm out too. “Serenity now!” he yelled out, the goofball.

“Fantastic, love it!” Nosey Hank cried over their giggles. “Sir Paul, you’re a Seinfeld fan?”

“Never heard of it,” Paul deadpanned. Lydia had to hide her smile in his shirt.

The two of them whispered and chuckled together for the rest of the session, Lydia smiling more and more frequently as she felt like whatever defenses Paul had put up were slowly thawing under her attentions. At one point he took her hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. The camera went nuts, getting dozens of shots of Paul with his eyes closed and Lydia grinning, but she just didn’t care.

At about two o’clock, as scheduled, Paul’s assistant Nathan showed up and started very politely reminding the crew they were done now. In short order the crew packed up their equipment, Paul shook hands and took selfies with everyone who wanted one, and in less than an hour they were gone, Nathan included.

Lydia sighed as she collapsed onto the couch in the living room. “They put so much shit in my hair,” she complained. “I’m going to have to take another shower.”

“No one’s stopping you,” Paul replied, pretending to be distracted by his phone once again. Whatever moment they’d had on the hammock was apparently now at an end.

Frowning, Lydia stood and walked over to him; over his weak protest she plucked his phone out of his hand and pushed it across the counter. “Hi, babe,” she said, enunciating her words. “I haven’t seen or talked to you in a few weeks. How’ve you been?”

“Fine,” he said, sounding annoyed. He tossed his hair back and wouldn’t look at her. “You?”

“Peachy. It’s the Fourth of July today. Got any plans?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither!” she said, gasping in delight. “I was thinking I’d order up some food and then watch fireworks from the roof later. You can join me if you—”

“What are you doing?” he asked her, an odd note of urgency in his voice. “Love. What’s happening right now?”

“I’m… trying to talk to you? In English? We can try Pig Latin if I’m not making myself understood.”

“No – oh, fuck it, never mind,” he grumbled, and he made to turn away.

She grabbed his arm and yanked him back, taking his face in her hands and rising up on tiptoe so he couldn’t avoid looking at her anymore. “What is it?” she whispered. “What? Tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Nothing’s—”

“You look so unhappy, babe, I just want to know why.”

“I’m not unhappy,” he said unhappily.

Lydia grunted in frustration. “God, would you just—” She flung herself forward, hugging him in such a way that she tried to pour all of her concern, all of her love into him so he’d know. He had to know she was here if he needed her. Paul returned her embrace with surprising speed, considering how unwilling he was to open up, but she shivered in appreciation as his hands slid up and down her back, holding her close. She hadn’t held him in weeks. She drank him in like he was an oasis in the desert.

“I’m here, Paulie,” she breathed. “I’m here.”

And he continued to say nothing. She waited, more patiently than she thought possible, but he still wouldn’t talk. After a long, fraught pause, Lydia rolled her eyes and slid away from him. “Fine. I was wrong, you aren’t unhappy, my mistake. I’m going to go wash this crap out of my hair and then I’m going to work on my book.” If he put up any kind of protest, she didn’t even hear it.

Serenity now, she thought a few minutes later, as she rinsed gallons of product out of her hair. Serenity fucking now.

Lydia ordered food for dinner but opted to eat at her desk while she worked, and she remained in her office even as the sun set and she started hearing scores of fireworks boom and crackle across the city. Jeff sat purring on the edge of her desk as she flipped through her interview notes, turned up the volume on the classical music she had playing, and continued working.

Only much later, nearly approaching midnight, did Paul appear at her office door. He was in his pajamas, one of her old black Jets t-shirts pulling slightly across his chest as he stood awkwardly squinting in the bright lights. His bedhead was award-worthy. Not merely dressed for bed, then, but looking like he’d actually been asleep for some length of time. “Aren’t you coming up?” he asked, his voice rough and deep.

“Soon,” she said. “I’d planned on spending most of today writing, and I lost a lot of time this morning from a photoshoot I had to do with less than twenty-four hours’ notice.”

That made him look even unhappier. “Oh. Well… don’t stay up too late?”

“I won’t.”

He made to turn and head back up, but then paused. “Are you angry about the Peabodys, love?”

It was all Lydia could do to not laugh in his face. “Um, yeah,” she said, the duh explicit in her tone. She rotated in her chair so she could decrease the volume of her music. “I can’t believe that’s even a question you have to—”

When she turned back, Paul was gone.

Lydia’s heart sank, and she buried her face in her hands. She still hadn’t figured him out. The impatient part of her was getting ready to resort to extreme measures: getting right up in his face, tying him down until he talked, a hunger strike, a sex strike – going full Lysistrata on him would get her some answers, right?

The furor of holiday fireworks had finally begun dying down outside when Lydia was startled by a mug of tea appearing at her elbow. She looked up behind her to see Paul straightening, holding one of his own. “Said you work better with tea,” he mumbled.

She gave him a hopeful smile. “Thanks, babe.”

He took a few shuffling steps back. The moment felt as delicate as spun sugar. “Ah… I’ll just…” He gestured upstairs.

“You don’t have to go up if you don’t want to,” she said quickly.

“I don’t want to distract you when you’re working—”

“Paul,” she said, starting to feel desperate. “You won’t distract me. I promise.”

His eyes were intense as he stared at her. Confused, hesitant. Whatever was going on with him was big and scary, and the more she thought about what it could be, the more her heart cracked. Lean on me, she silently begged him, please just lean on me like you used to. I want you to.

He took one step towards the other side of her desk, rather than out the door. Lydia beamed, and she didn’t return to work until she saw him, with her own eyes, sit down in one of the chairs placed there. “What are you working on?”

“Interviewed some Washington people,” she said, turning back to her keyboard. “I’m incorporating their stories about the plane crash at the Pentagon.”

“I’ve found a celeb for you, you know,” Paul chimed in. “You know Seth MacFarlane?”

She looked up. “The creator of Family Guy?”

“Turns out he had a ticket for Flight 11 and… he slept in that morning. Hungover, he said.”

“Oh Jesus,” she burst out. “That was the first plane. Oh my god, yeah, I’ll want to talk to him. Thanks babe, that sounds great.”

He hummed, looking pleased with himself. Lydia went back to work but she couldn’t stop glancing over at him at first, checking to see that he was still there. Paul had pulled out his phone and was peering at it like it held the secrets of the universe, but she had no idea what he might possibly be working on. Frustrated, but now for a much better reason, she gradually returned her focus to her book.

Then he started printing stuff on her printer. First one page, which he fetched from the tray as soon as it was done and refused to show her. Then a second. And a third. By the time the clock on her computer said it was 1:07 in the morning and she was ready to head up, Paul had four printed pages in all, which he had to keep away from a curious Jeff.

“I’m beat,” Lydia announced, and she sent her screen into sleep mode. “What are you up to over there?”

Paul gave her a lopsided smile, looking so cute she could scream. “Oh, thought I’d look around online,” he said, laying out the pages on her desk. “Maybe… see if I could, you know, find a photo for your book cover?”

He’s trying to take control again, an intrusive little voice whispered, he’s trying to tell you what to do.

Clenching her jaw, shunting aside her doubts, Lydia dutifully looked at the four photos he’d found. Two had large watermarks on them but she could still see the details in them all – workers in business casual coated in ashes, a wall covered with handmade MISSING posters, a firefighter washing debris from his face with bottled water.

But then she saw the fourth. A street-level scene of a crowd of people, all looking up at the same point high in the sky. All of them wore expressions of fear, shock, numbness; a man in glasses near the center of the photo looked horrified, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Oh wow,” she whispered. It was like she didn’t even have to decide, as if the decision had already been made for her. This was the cover of her book. It had found her.

“I liked that one best too,” Paul said eagerly. “Fits with the man-on-the-street theme of your book, yeah? Regular people, on a regular day in September.”

She took the page and folded it, cropping the photo so it looked more like a book. Then, fishing around in her pencil cup, she grabbed a black felt tip pen and started writing across the top.

Paul leaned over and watched her a few moments. “I thought you always sagged off lettering class at art school,” he teased her.

“Not every lesson,” she said with a wink, “just the boring ones.” With a flourish, she finished off the last letter and held it up for them both to see. All the people in the photo were at the bottom looking up. Above them, at the very top, was her name in small capital letters, and beneath that Main Title Here?: America on 9/11.

“Paul that’s my book cover,” she breathed in wonder.

“Title needs work,” he cracked, “but yeah, I think that’s it, love.”

She dropped the page instantly and rounded the desk to throw herself in his lap and wrap her arms around him, hugging him as tightly as she could. “I’m still upset about the Peabodys,” she said softly in his ear. “We’re either going to have a discussion or an argument about it, your choice. I’m still so angry and I hate that. But I also miss you like crazy, and I hate that too.”

“I miss you too,” he whispered, his arms squeezing her. “Love, I—”

Lydia mouthed blurry kisses across his cheek. “I just want you to talk to me,” she said, curling one arm around his neck and letting the other slide down his chest. He sucked in a shaky breath and grabbed that hand, stilling it. “I want you to be honest and open, same way I am with you.”

“I know, love,” he said. She felt him press against her lower back so she moved her hips slightly, closer to his; he jerked in his chair. “Christ—”

“What do you need, baby?” she murmured.

Surging upwards Paul grabbed her and kissed her breathless, kissed her until she forgot everything else. “You,” he said, with a strangled moan. “You, Lydia.”

“You have me,” she gasped. “I’m yours.”

It was half an answer, she realized much later, once coherent thought was possible again. She’d gleaned nothing new, still couldn’t say what was eating at him. But as he slept peacefully beside her that night, she recommitted to getting it out of him.

And then she’d tell him about Yoko.

Chapter Text

It was Sunday before Paul said anything she could work with.

They’d fallen into writing together on Saturday afternoon, and managed to churn out a song that sounded fantastic but had nothing going on underneath the surface. Just like “Day Tripper,” Lydia mused darkly, a song written on command, to fill a quota, not because the muse had inspired them. Paul recorded on his phone the blistering hook for “Wouldn’t You Like to Know,” looking very pleased with himself, but as soon as he started singing the lyrics they’d written Lydia had to leave the room. Thank god it was a fake person’s name on the writing credits.

Sunday morning he had some kind of conference call with the concert tour team in Denver, and he was still on it when she fell out of bed. Lydia started rustling up breakfast and coffee and was standing at the stove making hash browns when he came downstairs, made a beeline for her, and wrapped his arms around her waist from behind. “Morning, starshine,” she said, focusing on her work. “The Earth says hello. Call go okay?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled into her neck. “You smell like you just woke up.”

She snorted. “Does that have a specific smell?”

“Dunno. You do, though. It’s good.”

“Okay fine, I won’t take all the food for myself,” she teased, and she turned to give him a peck on the cheek. “Grab some plates, let’s eat.”

The mood was superficially light at first, as they dug in. Jeff strolled in and Paul tried to entice him over, but her prissy cat stuck his tail straight in the air and didn’t even slow down as he passed by. “He’s been in a snit for a while,” Lydia explained. “He won’t cuddle with me either.”

“Dogs and cats can sense it when your emotions are off,” Paul blurted out.

“I know. I guess Jeff can feel the tension in the air.”

Paul made a face down at his plate and went silent. They were about halfway through their breakfast when he abruptly dropped his fork, looking determined. “I wanted the Peabodys to be perfect for you,” he declared. “And you – you hated everything I did and pushed me away.”

Lydia, caught mid-sip, almost choked on her coffee. “That’s what you think happened that night?” she rasped. “That you were creating a night to remember, and I ruined it?”

“Yeah!”

Oh, the confidence of men. She sometimes missed having that absolutely unshakable belief that everything would turn out well no matter what. “That’s not what happened,” she said dryly.

“Look – I know the Grammys were shite,” he began.

“No,” she grunted, “god Paul, the Grammys weren’t shit, they were acceptable and could’ve been better with a few tweaks.”

“But you were so upset, love,” he persisted. “You think I enjoyed that, having you yelling and crying in my arms?”

“Like I said, a few tweaks! We can’t change the fact that I have to keep my identity secret, but you could’ve been more attentive during the rest of the night. You live and learn.”

“And that’s what I was aiming for, at the Peabodys,” he said, leaning towards her, an odd cross between annoyed and disappointed. “I saw that dress on the rack at Stella’s studio and knew you’d look dead sexy in it, and I looked through weeks of restaurant and bar reviews to find the best place for us to celebrate after—”

“You were controlling and inflexible,” she bit off, setting her coffee cup down a little too forcefully. “You showed up and expected to take over, without accounting for the fact that I’d already made plans—”

“You can see your friends anytime you like,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “I’m on tour and you won’t come on the road with me, so—”

“I have a full-time job! In America! Which means I don’t have many vacation days!”

“A job which you don’t even like,” he countered. “All I hear about is how much you hate working on YouTube videos. You can quit at any time.”

“Quit my job? In this economy?” Lydia rolled her eyes. “You know things are getting worse, right? Like over a hundred banks are projected to collapse in the next eighteen months? Bear Stearns was just the beginning.”

“I can support us!” Paul cried, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I’ve got a few quid, you know. You can write your brilliant book and I can pay all the bills while you—”

“Have you been listening to me at all, over the past year?” Lydia wondered. “I told you, I want to get on the New York Times staff and eventually get sent over to Afghanistan or Iraq to report on the war. I can’t have any gaps in my employment history, not when the male candidates for those jobs already have an advantage over me.”

Paul fell back in his seat, mouth twisted in an angry pout. “I think you’re making everything needlessly complicated, you know. Everything’s not as difficult as you think it is.”

“It is, actually,” she snapped. “Because I’m a chick dating a famous guy. It makes things very complicated, and the fact that you can’t even see that—”

“Then use it! Drop my name, I don’t give a flying shite! Lydia,” he lunged forward again and grabbed her hands between his, squeezing tight, “you’ve been harping on how I look unhappy this weekend, but don’t you think I can see how unhappy you are as well? Leave the job you hate, or use your connection with me to get a better one. Just do something so we can get married and move back to London and have a baby—”

And then it arrived: the moment in the argument where Lydia opened her mouth wide and stuck her entire foot in. “You know, I’m not doing all this just to marry you,” she hissed. “Being Mrs. McCartney isn’t my dream job.”

He withdrew from her so quickly she almost felt the air rush in between them. His face became expressionless. “It would be Lady McCartney, actually,” he said, tossing his hair back. “And you already told me you didn’t want to take my name anyway, so.”

“I don’t.” She was shaking. With rage, with sadness, with a little bit of everything. “Because I’m my own person with my own name. I want something that belongs to me alone, that I earned with my own hard work, not because I happen to be fucking somebody rich and famous.”

“So we’re not getting married then.”

“That – ugh, that has nothing to do with it!” she roared. “Paul, I’m going to marry you whether you like it or not. It has to do with—”

“Then ask me,” he cried out, leaning forward. “We decided we wanted to marry, and you said you’d ask me, but it’s been over a fucking year—”

“Goddamnit—”

“You wanted to know why I looked upset the other day, yeah? That’s it. I’m bloody sick of waiting around for you to just fucking ask.”

Lydia scoffed. He was joking, right? That couldn’t be it. Something so simple, that they’d already discussed and agreed on—

She got her answer when she saw him shut down again, this time completely, the whole awful process of him pulling his heart off his sleeve and locking it up tight where no one could find it, not even her. He stood, chair scraping across the kitchen tile, and took his breakfast dishes to the dishwasher.

“Paul.”

He didn’t turn her way, didn’t acknowledge her at all.

She shouted in frustration. “Why are you playing the victim right now? You still haven’t even apologized for the Peabodys!”

“Why would I?” he said, eyes snapping towards her. “I won’t apologize for loving you and wanting to take care of you.”

“That wasn’t love, that was control! I don’t want that.”

Tossing his hair again, Paul just headed back upstairs without another word. Moments later she heard amp feedback, and he started playing one of his guitars at an extraordinarily loud volume.

Cool. The discussion was over, apparently.

She managed to avoid him for most of the rest of the day. Nicole sent her an invitation around noon and, jumping on it like a lifeline, Lydia ended up spending the afternoon with her and Mark and some of their Columbia crowd. They hung out and were lazy in the Park, soaking up the hot New York sun, eating hot dogs and popcorn and ice cream. Time stood still, and Lydia was grateful for that.

Paul texted her after several hours had invisibly passed: Where are you? She noticed right away that he hadn’t ended with xo like he always did, which stung more than she cared to admit.

At the park with my home slices, brb she wrote back. Did Paul know Internet slang? Eh, he could look it up. She tucked her phone back into her pocket and looked around at her friends, sliding seamlessly back into their conversation.

As the sun began to set, Nicole’s friends Jackie and Pete bent their heads together and were whispering furiously about something, making harsh gestures in all different directions. Lydia had seen Pete take a phone call minutes earlier, which she guessed was the impetus for the whispers. She knew a fight when she saw one. Lydia shared a look with Nicole, who gave her a wide-eyed glance before turning back to the larger group.

Eventually the suspense ended. “Hi everyone, hello,” Jackie announced, rising to her feet. She clasped her hands together, looking like an especially passive-aggressive kindergarten teacher. “So apparently Pete just got a call from work and has to go do some research or whatever for a deposition, which means we can’t do Shakespeare in the Park tonight. We have two tickets up for grabs, since I guess we aren’t using them anymore.” This with a glare at Pete, who sat nearby buried in his phone, oblivious.

“Can’t, we got Broadway tickets,” one friend piped up. Likewise several others offered up their own alibis.

“We’ll take them,” Lydia said suddenly. She stood, brushing the grass off her legs. “We haven’t been there before, I’ve always wanted to go.”

“Lydia, I didn’t know you were seeing anybody,” Jessica’s new boyfriend (…Will? Wayne?) said. “Do we know him?”

“Yeah, it’s your mom.”

The group burst into laughter around her as she strode across the grass and took the tickets from Jackie’s outstretched hand. “Have a good time,” Jackie said, in such a way that made Lydia decide she’d post all about it on Facebook. You know, to really rub her face in it.

Curtain wasn’t until 8pm, so Lydia said goodbye to the others, hugged Mark and Nicole (“I’ll tell you all about it later,” Nicole whispered, “I think Jackie’s going to dump him pretty soon.”) and then walked across the street to the penthouse. As soon as the elevator doors opened to the foyer she could hear Paul still wailing away on his guitar up in the music room. Now, at least, it sounded like he was shaping something into an actual song instead of mindlessly running his fingers up and down the frets and bending the strings.

She clapped loudly, once, at the top of the stairs; Paul, who’d had his back turned, startled and spun towards her. “We’re going to Shakespeare in the Park,” she announced. “Let’s eat something real quick and then get ready.”

He frowned. “I’m in the middle of—”

She walked towards him, putting a hand on his chest. “We used to be so much better at this,” she murmured, looking up at him. “I’m still willing to do the work if you are.”

Paul sighed, and bent forward until his forehead rested against hers. Then, straightening up, apparently finding his resolve, he asked, “Do I need to dress up?”

“No,” she said. “Summer casual. Wear those new jeans you just got, your ass looks amazing in them.” He blinked, shocked, and she reached around and pinched said body part then darted away, snickering.

“Well if we’re making requests, I’ve got one as well,” he said, laughing with her. “That one dress, with the strings…” He gestured around his neck.

“Oh, the halter top? Hm.” She tapped her chin, pretending to think. “That one exposes a lot of skin, and it might get chilly later, you know.”

“Someone will have to bring a jacket you can borrow, then,” Paul teased.

He was in a far better mood by the time they had exited their building and made their way across Fifth Avenue, walking to the outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Lydia was wearing the halter top sundress and Paul had donned a plain white button down and linen blazer paired with – she checked – his new jeans. She reached out to clasp his hand and skipped a little, excited.

They were noticed almost immediately. The usher looked like he’d swallowed his tongue when Paul proffered their tickets. “Cheers!” Paul said, once they’d been ripped and handed back. “Assigned seating, or can we go anywhere?”

“A-anywhere?” the usher replied.

“Fantastic, thanks!” Paul chirped. “Haven’t been here before, really looking forward to it.”

“Y-yeah?” the usher stuttered. Lydia led Paul away before the poor man passed out.

They had a tacit arrangement anytime they went to see plays or movies: Paul always sat on the aisle, not only for a quick getaway if things got too crazy, but so that he only had to sit beside Lydia and no one else. They managed to find great seats near the middle with a clear view of the stage and settled in. And as soon as he was seated the fans came – everyone had spotted him and made their way to him now, and Paul happily posed for selfies, turned down a few autograph requests, and accepted their abject adulation as they told him how much they loved “Every Night” and “My Love” and “Silly Love Songs” and…

He needed this, in a way she never had. If there was such a thing as a born performer he was it; he needed to absorb the attention of his fans like a plant absorbed sunlight. It was, she realized, one of the things she adored about him – that he gave so much of his beautiful music to other people instead of keeping it hidden away inside him. And how much richer were they all for it? She was still angry with him, their issues still unresolved, but how lucky was she that she had him in her life?

The outdoor theater lights lowered and dramatic, baroque music piped in over the speakers, signaling that Hamlet was about to begin. The fans all scurried back to their seats and she felt Paul sigh in contentment, though he turned to her with a sheepish look. She just smiled. “Penny for ‘em?” he murmured.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that—” She leaned in close, to say the words directly in his ear. “I love knowing that everyone loves you, but I’m the one you go home with.”

He clasped her hand and held it on his lap for the entire show.

His flight the next morning, to rejoin his tour in Denver, left late enough that he was still at the penthouse when she was getting ready to go to work. Just before she grabbed her bag and keys to head down, he pulled her towards him and kissed her so she could feel it all the way down to her toes. “Please listen to me,” she whispered, holding him close after. “Please believe me. I still want to marry you but it’s just not the right time yet.”

He bent his head and pressed a kiss to her neck, but said nothing.

“How could I possibly have changed my mind about that?” she went on. “How – when I still remember so clearly all those times that I wanted to kiss you but couldn’t, wanted to hold you or just put a hand on your shoulder, but couldn’t?”

“So you—” He pulled away from her, frowning. “Back in the day, you mean. You felt that way.”

“And now,” Lydia insisted. “When we met again in 2001 you were dating Heather, right? But I took one look at you and thought Damn, he can get it.” Paul burst out laughing, a cute blush spreading across his face. “I mean it! Paul I – not to be overly dramatic, but you can’t doubt my commitment when I literally defied death to be with you!”

“Which I can never possibly top,” he joked, smile lines fanning out from his warm eyes.

“But you’ll try anyway.”

“Every day, if you’ll let me.”

“I’ll allow it,” she said, magnanimous, and pulled him in for another kiss.

“I haven’t forgotten about Yoko, you know,” he said, once they’d gone down to the elevator. Lydia tensed up as he continued, “We’re still going to reach out to her after my tour, yeah? September sometime?”

Here it was. The perfect opening. Now was her time to confess. “Yeah,” she said. “September.”

Paul nodded. “That’ll be a weight off our shoulders. Handling all that. Well, we’ll talk about it later,” he said, dismissive, “I’ll see you at Shea Stadium in a few weeks.”

“Can’t wait.” They said their goodbyes and she headed off to work. As her heels clacked on the pavement between the penthouse and the train station, all she could hear was coward, coward, coward, coward…

When she arrived at her work desk, she booted up her computer and found that photos of them at Shakespeare in the Park were all over the gossip websites: them sitting together reacting to whatever was on stage, her whispering in his ear, him looking at her with a grin. The lighting wasn’t great and the photos were clearly just from people in the audience with iPhones, but something about them made her spine straighten.

They looked happy. Why couldn’t she just have that without people making a federal case out of it?

She reached for her personal phone and pulled up the contact info for Her Highness again. Stop fucking around and just schedule the interview, she wrote. Let’s get it over with. Lydia knew she was probably ceding some tactical advantage by breaking first, but she was so far past caring now. Tossing the phone back into her purse, she shoved the drawer shut and went back to her work.

On Thursday the news arrived: Yoko’s team had rescheduled. The interview would take place the first week of August. For real this time, right? Lydia texted. You better not cancel this one too.

A few hours later she got her response: Yes, I will keep our appointment.

Lydia’s hands shook for the next several days.

One week out from Billy Joel’s big farewell concert at Shea Stadium, Lydia headed there for a tech run through. Since Paul was still in the thick of his tour on the West Coast he’d only been able to squeeze in a rehearsal then, rather than closer to the actual concert date. Normally these rehearsals were closed to the public, but apparently Billy remembered the role Lydia had played the year before in convincing Paul to participate, so she was given a lanyard to join them on the field with little difficulty.

There was a whole complicated setup involved, though. For the concert, Paul would arrive via helicopter, just like they had back in ’65; his entrance would be a total surprise since his name wasn’t on the bill at all. Then, upon landing, the same groundskeeper who had driven the four of them onto the field in the ‘60s would drive Paul in a cart from the helicopter to the stage for his adoring fans.

“How are you feeling about the helicopter?” Lydia asked him over the phone the night before.

“Jesus,” he burst out, and Lydia grinned.

“Think happy thoughts, babe, you’ll survive.”

“Happy thoughts,” he said. “You in a bikini, you starkers—” Lydia cackled in amusement.

And now here she was, on a Saturday afternoon in late July, standing near the mound where generations of Mets pitchers had once stood, looking out at rows and rows of empty seats in the grand old stadium. The building was in clear decline: repairs not made, paint not touched up, rust allowed to run wild. Behind her sat the stage erected just for the occasion, and she could hear grips and electricians scrambling to stabilize towers and coil electrical wires and test amps. But before her was just Shea and forty years of ghosts. Forty years of Mets fans and music fans.

Shea Stadium had been one of her earliest memories from beyond the curtain, before she even understood fully what was going on in her head. He’d understood beforehand what that night meant for them, and so he’d swallowed his usual complaints and worn his uncomfortable contacts so he could actually see what was happening. He’d never experienced anything like it before: the ground vibrating with the girls’ screams, his ears so overloaded he almost had to clamp his hands over them. The night had been hot and the excitement in the air made it even hotter, and standing there, on that tiny stage with his three mates, he’d been completely aware of his own mortality, his power and his fragility. The idolatry rendered him immortal and exposed, Johnny from Woolton and a living god both.

Later, he’d trashed the whole thing. Thrown out the Beatles as nothing but meaningless pop rubbish. And maybe that was where the problems had begun, looking back on it now, but that night he hadn’t thought about that. Lydia could admit it now: Shea Stadium had been fucking magical.

After they’d practiced the logistics of Paul’s arrival and then loosely run through the four songs he’d play with Billy, Paul joined her near the pitchers’ mound. She felt him come up behind her, leaned into him slightly as he put a hand at her back. “ ‘And the valley echoes with screaming’,” she said softly, so only he could hear, “ ‘an ecstasy that borders on a religious experience, but I’m the crippled fool they worship.’”

“You what?”

She turned to him. “That’s what I wrote about that night,” she said. “One of the clearest memories I got as a kid.”

Paul nodded, then gazed out at the empty stands with her. “Seems smaller now, somehow,” he said. “It felt massive before.”

“Bit bigger than the Cavern,” she said dryly. Paul snorted in agreement.

She glanced back at the stage, to where crewmen still milled around, then raised an eyebrow at Paul. “Do you dare me?”

A smile danced at his lips. “I don’t know, do I?”

“Wrong answer.” She leaned in, giving him a wicked look. “Do you dare me?”

They stared into each other’s eyes, understanding passing between them. “Yeah,” Paul decided, with a lopsided smirk. “I dare you, love.”

Lydia turned to the empty stands, to the fans that no longer sat there. Then, in the full voice that had always felt like it blasted straight out the top of her head like a steam whistle, she opened her mouth, sucked in a breath, and belted “Well shake it up BABY now!”

“Shake it up baby!” Paul sang.

“Twist and SHOUT!”

“Twist and shout!”

Together they sang their way through the first verse, their voices bouncing around the decrepit Shea. The empty space where George’s voice should’ve been was a bruise, sore and persistent, the gap where Richie’s drums should’ve backed them up painful. And when she reached the end and stopped to hear the silence ring through the seats again she realized she had tears streaming down her face; Paul himself had eyes that shone a little too much.

“God,” she said, her breath hitching. “That night actually happened. That was us.”

“Yeah.” He pulled her in for a tight hug. “That was you and me and the lads.”

Lydia laughed into his shoulder, hanging on for dear life as they rocked back and forth. “Just us Scouse bastards.”

“Can’t believe we even got past the gate.”

“Oh I paid them off, you still owe me a tenner for your share,” and he just snorted again.

She carried that moment with her in her heart, and remembered it one week later as she sat in a private box and watched Paul’s helicopter descend to the field. The place erupted once they saw who had arrived and Lydia teared up again, watching Paul wave at everyone and take it all in. He joined Billy Joel on stage and they did some pre-planned banter, then launched into songs that Paul could’ve played in his sleep. The audience had probably heard those songs hundreds of times but no one was bored. They loved every minute of it.

And to think, Lydia realized. Demolition was planned to start in October, once the Mets wrapped up their season, and would take several months to accomplish. By this time next year, in 2009, all of this would be gone as if it had never been here at all.

Chapter Text

Dhani reached out to her near the end of July, while she was on lunch break: You free? Can I ring? Once she texted him an affirmative, they were on the phone moments later. “Hey,” he said, once they’d checked in and caught up a bit, “so you remember how I was involved in a Beatles version of Rock Band?”

“Yeah – oh man, are you calling because the demo’s ready?” Lydia asked.

“I am!”

She squealed with excitement. “Awesome! Oh my god tell me everything, where is the company office based, when can we try it out, how amazing does my Rickenbacker look?”

Laughing, Dhani gave her the juicy details, promising that they could all demo the game in New York as soon as possible. The game developers were really eager for Paul and Ringo especially to see it in action and give feedback on every aspect of gameplay. “I’m going back and forth with Uncle Richie now,” Dhani said, “trying to find a day that works, and wanted to bring you and Paul in as well.”

She hesitated as something occurred to her. “I probably shouldn’t go, though.”

“Why not? I’d love for you to be there.”

“But – well.” She worried her lip between her teeth a moment, and looked around her office to make sure no one was around to hear her. “Paul’s told me numerous times that I still have a lot of John’s mannerisms, and I can’t help but worry that if I’m standing there, holding a plastic Rickenbacker, playing ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ or whatever, the similarities won’t escape any of the developers either. We’re big sticklers about protecting that particular secret.”

“Understandable,” Dhani said slowly. “No, I think you’re right.” Lydia’s heart sank. But then he went on, “I’ll make some calls. See what I can figure out. You should be able to test it too.”

“Thanks, Dhan,” she said. “I mean it, that would be amazing, thank you.”

“In return you’re going to help me sell the game to Paul and Rich,” Dhani teased. “Counting on you, now.” They both laughed.

About ten minutes later, just as she was about to clean up her food and get back to work, her personal phone buzzed a second time; thinking it might be Dhani again, she reached for it. But the screen read Scotty instead, and when she opened the text chain with her brother all she saw was BABYS COMINGg1!

Lydia gasped. Andrea’s due date had been last Saturday, and it had come and gone without any movement on that front. They’d had a big family phone call the next day where Scott got to show off his medical knowledge to his in-laws and reassure them all that yes, this was totally normal, first-time moms often delivered late, the pregnancy was still low-risk, there was nothing wrong with their baby or Andrea. Andrea herself had then grabbed the phone from him and announced “I scheduled an induction for next week. If she’s not out by then, we’re forcing her out.”

And that was apparently no longer necessary, for here they were – five days after the due date – and Lydia’s niece had finally decided to make an appearance.

She texted Paul right away, forgetting for a moment if he was free just then; that question was answered when he called her minutes later. “She’s in labor right now, then?” he asked, sounding a bit breathless.

“I guess so, yeah. I didn’t ask for details because I assume they’re busy at the moment.”

“We’ll have to send them something,” Paul decided. “Flowers! Do you know Andrea’s favorites?”

“Uh, I think she said something once about liking… chrysanthemums?” Lydia said, taking a wild stab in the dark. “Should probably send her like a nice bathrobe or something too, and some good slippers. Maybe a blanket?”

“Did they say what name they’d picked out? Maybe we can get something monogrammed?”

She shook her head, silently loving his enthusiasm. “No, it’s a surprise, Andrea said they’d tell us after. Are you going to be able to get back here to visit them with me, or…?”

“I’ll see what I can do, yeah.”

“There’s no pressure, obviously, I know you’ve still got tour dates in Albuquerque and Vegas and stuff.”

“No, love, I’m going to be there.” His determination was a bit unexpected, and when she called him out on it he said, “Well. I…”

“I’m listening,” she murmured, leaning back in her desk chair.

“Mostly I just want to see you hold her, you know,” Paul admitted, sounding sheepish. “Your niece. I want to see that.”

Lydia huffed a laugh, nervously picking at a loose thread on her trousers. “They’re called photos, babe.”

“Doesn’t beat the real thing,” he replied. When her boss Henry walked past her desk, returning from his own lunch break, she quickly confirmed with Paul that he’d send Scott and Andrea a gift basket at the hospital from both of them, then hung up.

For the rest of the day she watched the clock on the wall tick with all the urgency of a line at the DMV. Lydia didn’t want to bother them for updates, so instead she texted back and forth with her parents, who were preparing to head to Boston the next morning to see their first grandchild. Hopefully everything was going well. She’d made the mistake of reading an article the other day about how maternal mortality rates were starting to rise in the US, which had not been a good idea to read, but even normal labor took time – hours, sometimes a day or more. There was nothing to worry about just yet.

That night, Lydia was sitting in her home office working on her book when her phone buzzed again. And there on her screen was the most perfect, scrunched up little pink face she’d ever seen in her entire life, nestled above an A+ swaddling job, accompanying her brother’s text: Victoria Adler Montrose, 7 lbs 10 oz. Andrea’s doing great. We’re over the moon.

Tearing up, Lydia immediately forwarded the photo to Paul, then went back to stare further at the picture of her brand-new niece. She decided then that she’d go up to Boston to see them in August – the weekend after her interview with Yoko. It would be like a reward for herself, a treat for enduring all these weeks of anxiety and terror and psychological warfare. Victoria didn’t know anything about that and would only know her as her aunt. Lydia could deal with that.

Hours later, as she was prepping for bed, Paul replied to her text: She’s beautiful! I bet we’d make beautiful babies too xoxo

Competitive bastard :-* she texted back, leaving it at that.

Lydia had been anticipating her interview with Yoko for months now – years, it sometimes felt like. Time had stretched and strained, pulled to its absolute limits, until it had ceased to feel like it moved forward at all. So of course on the day when it finally happened everything abruptly sped up. One moment, she and Mike were discussing the plan for the interview when it was two weeks out. The very next, it was Wednesday morning and she was standing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the wing given over to Yoko’s show that fall, while Mike and the day crew they’d hired set up their filming equipment.

Most of the exhibit was already in place, though one corner was still shrouded in tarps and plastic sheeting; a sign warned the curious about not trespassing in that area. There was one large display of a Waterford crystal bowl full of water that Lydia recognized from the exhibit they’d done in Syracuse, and a flatscreen TV nearby played a clip from one of their conceptual films on a loop. Just as Matt had warned her, the photograph of her bloody glasses had been duplicated at a large scale, dominating the wall on which it was displayed; Lydia wavered between wanting to be sick and wanting to scream at the tops of her lungs at the sight. Her eyes had been drawn to it almost immediately, to the point that she barely paid attention to Mike as he handed her a lavalier microphone and asked her to check her sound levels. “One, two, three, four,” she said, feeling like her lips and tongue weren’t fully under her control. Mike gave her the thumbs up.

And still she couldn’t stop staring at it. Seasons of Glass, it was called. What the fuck was that supposed to mean anyway—

“I’m sorry. I think I’m a bit late, you know.”

Her speaking voice was never loud, Lydia realized, but it was always commanding. Instantly cutting through everything else going on, halting the chatter of their crew. Lydia turned stiffly in place and there she was, all dressed in minimalist white, with a white fedora and round black sunglasses down at the end of her nose.

Lydia stepped forward, painfully aware of their audience: Mike, the Post’s crew, the handful of Met employees and members of Yoko’s personal team. “Good morning, Ms. Ono,” Lydia said flatly, hand extended. “Thank you so much for meeting with us today.” Yoko’s hand was cold, or maybe Lydia’s was just hot from nerves.

“I saw you were looking at that photo,” Yoko said, nodding at Seasons of Glass, rather than returning her greeting. “What do you think?”

I think I want to be sick. Lydia turned and studied it again. “I think it’s powerful,” she declared. Her voice felt like it was coming from somewhere else outside of her. “I’m reminded of Jackie Kennedy’s pink dress, splashed with JFK’s blood… How she apparently said that she didn’t want to change her clothes, she wanted the American people to see what they did to her husband.”

Yoko hummed, standing beside her. “Yes, I’ve been told a lot of people see my photo as an anti-gun statement,” she agreed.

“Was it not meant that way?” Or are you just an attention seeker?

“It can be a lot of things. I won’t tell anyone how they should see my work, because it’s all subjective, you know. You can take whatever you want from it.”

Maybe it was anti-gun, but Lydia was just then remembering in vivid detail what hollow-point bullets felt like when they hit their mark. So that was fun.

Clearing her throat, desperate to escape, she turned and nodded at Mike, who then took over getting Yoko mic’d up and seated where they wanted her. Yoko was calm, mostly quiet, offering a fleeting smile when Mike made a joke. Lydia sat across from her and the crew turned on their set lights and adjusted them. A few more hours, she told herself as filming began. A few more hours and all this will be over. I can survive anything for a few hours if it means I can have Sean back.

“Yoko Ono,” she said, smiling brightly. “We’re here at the world-famous Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where you’re launching a career retrospective that will be open to the public starting in September. When you were approached about this showing, what was your first reaction?”

“Well,” Yoko said, tilting her head back, “I wasn’t sure at first if I should be insulted or not, you know? A career retrospective, it sounds like you’re at the very end of things, looking back. And I’ve always been about looking forward with my art. And on top of that, nobody wants to, I guess, look at themselves in the mirror and admit that they might’ve gotten old.” She rocked in her chair slightly, laughing a little. She had the act down cold; Lydia would give her that.

It went on from there. In front of their small but rapt audience Lydia slowly and painstakingly took Yoko through the questions she’d prepared weeks ago, and had reviewed so many times they were practically burned in her memory. Normally she would have given herself the space to ask questions off the cuff, for an answer to inspire an ask that she hadn’t planned in advance, but Lydia had zero desire to stay in this gallery any longer than she had to. This wasn’t the important part, anyway. The important past was when their mics had been removed and they could speak privately. Lydia gritted her teeth as she asked about Yoko’s relationship and joint career with John, the art on display and the stories behind them.

Finally – holy god, finally – she reached her last index card. “Great, that’s awesome,” she said, after Yoko had given an answer to the last question. “Now let’s sit a moment and get some room tone—”

Mike stepped forward quickly, and bent to whisper in her ear, “We need to ask about the bloody glasses photo again, I liked your discussion but we weren’t filming.”

Lydia swallowed. “Okay yeah, fine,” she mumbled. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. When Mike had retreated off-camera again, she said, “One of the most striking photos on display here is your photograph of your late husband John Lennon’s glasses. Tell me about that one.”

“Yes,” Yoko said, folding her hands demurely on her lap. “That was taken… just about a year after John was murdered, you know.”

No, fuck, Lydia pleaded, as she started seeing sparks at the edges of her vision. Blood rushed in her ears, making her painfully aware of the inward and outward sound of her own shaky breaths. Not now, not now, please god fuck not now…

The surgeon’s hands had been dry and chapped, from being washed so often and from the winter weather. That was always a problem, in New York winters, your hands getting red and hard and dry when it was cold out. If he wasn’t careful playing guitar with his hands like that sometimes it made them bleed.

“The hospital had given me his personal items afterwards,” Yoko said, staring at Lydia, “in a plain brown paper bag. I remember thinking how sort of small and ordinary this bag was, compared to the items it contained…”

They’d cut off his coat. His new coat, just took a massive pair of scissors to it and went to town. He would’ve mustered up the indignation to complain about this shabby treatment, but then the nurse held up the pieces and he saw the round fraying holes—Okay we’ve got four GSWs but only one’s through-and-through, exit wound is just below the left scapula, hit the lung by the sound of it—

 “…I didn’t want anyone to forget,” Yoko finished. “Sean and I, we had to live with what had happened for the rest of our lives. We’d never forget. I didn’t want anyone else to forget what happened either.”

Lydia counted quickly to three before saying “Great, that’s a wrap for me, you guys get some room tone I’m just gonna—” and she bolted from her seat before anyone could stop her, headed for a side corridor where she could get away from the lights, from the stares, from that quiet gaze leveled at her over round black sunglasses. Oh dear me, she thought, sarcastic and furious and freaked out, were we in danger of forgetting? Were we? Were we, Yoko? Were we really?

But this was a test. All of it, a test. She hadn’t failed yet, even though she was getting close. Just a few more hours for the rest of her life. Suck it up, Montrose, you’re in the home stretch.

Lydia had managed to find a water fountain and was drinking greedily from it when Mike caught up to her about five minutes later. “You okay?” he said. “I know those lights can get kinda hot sometimes.”

At least he’d provided her with an excuse. Generous of him. “Yeah, sorry, got lightheaded,” Lydia said with a wave of her hand. “I didn’t ruin the shot or the audio, did I?”

“No, we’re set. Ready to go with the walk and talk when you’re good.”

She followed him back to the gallery once she’d smoothed down her hair and her blouse again, and handed him her index cards before getting back on camera. At his direction, she stood next to Yoko, waited for the two cameras to white balance, and then they launched into the second part of their shoot. By rote Lydia gestured to the works on the wall, or the standalone pieces that sat on pedestals and platforms in the middle of the gallery; she stood and looked and nodded thoughtfully as Yoko explained this or that. She was on autopilot and she didn’t even care if it was noticeable. Henry could fire her for being unprofessional for all that it mattered to Lydia.

They’d finished the shoot and all the equipment was packed away by the time Lydia felt safe enough to take charge again. “I’ll see you at the office tomorrow,” she told Mike, when he asked if she wanted to walk to the train station together. “I haven’t been to the Met in a while, I wanted to look around.”

He shrugged. “See you tomorrow. Good job today.”

“Thanks, you too,” but Lydia had already mentally moved onto the next thing.

Yoko and her team stood in a tight cluster off to one side, speaking in low voices as Yoko delicately sipped from a bottled water. Lydia walked up to them, aware of every single click of her heels and how it echoed in the vast gallery. “Thanks so much again for today,” she said when Yoko turned, using a fake voice and smile. “I wondered if I might speak with you further about the video and when we plan to release it on the Washington Post’s YouTube channel?”

Yoko nodded and, handing her water bottle back to an assistant, followed Lydia to the far end of the gallery, near where the plastic sheeting covered the incomplete art piece. For a long moment they pretended to stare at the work that hung beside it: the TV screen that played an excerpt of Yoko’s film Rape on repeat. It fits, Lydia thought darkly.

“You know why I’m here,” Lydia began in a low voice.

“I don’t, actually,” Yoko replied just as quietly.

“You broke our agreement. You told Sean about me.”

“Only because you told him about me first. All I did was I told him the truth, you know. All the times you hit the two of us. There were a lot.”

Lydia clenched her fists at her sides. One, she counted her breaths, two. “He won’t speak to me anymore,” she tried. “He’s my son too, I want to—”

“Sean is an adult. I can’t tell him what to do, he can think for himself.”

“But he’s on your side by default,” Lydia said. “I only had five years with him, how can I compete with—”

“Oh, I see,” Yoko said, folding her arms. They were still facing the TV together, not looking at each other. “It’s a competition between us. I missed that part.”

“You know it’s not. I want the chance to explain myself to him, to answer—”

“He did have some questions after I told him, yes,” Yoko admitted. “He wanted to know why I’d stayed with you, married to you, if you were such a…” She moved her hand, like she was seeking just the right word.

“But I want to talk to him too,” Lydia said. There was a note of pleading in her voice she hated but couldn’t hide. “I can give him answers, whatever he needs.”

Yoko turned away from the TV screen, which now showed the stalked girl looking behind her in fear. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you sound desperate,” she said.

“Oh come on,” Lydia complained. “I’m not desperate. We’re having a conversation. I want him to know—”

“I suppose I could help you with that,” Yoko said, lifting one shoulder, like she had to think about it. “I don’t know, I’m very busy. So is Sean. We often have very full calendars.”

“How funny, me too,” Lydia deadpanned. “I just want to make sure he understands that I love him and I don’t want—”

“But if I do that for you – and that’s a big if,” Yoko added, “what will you do for me in return? Like I said, we’re very busy. We’ll be going far out of our way to meet you where you are.”

She looked down at the floor, at her feet, at her knees that were shaking like they couldn’t hold her weight for much longer. Courage, Lennon. Lydia met her steady gaze with a tremulous one of her own. “He’s my son,” she whispered. “I think you know I’d do just about anything.”

Yoko looked away, a little smile on her face. “I see. Anything.”

“Yes. Anything. I’ll do anything to—”

“Then break up with Paul.”

Lydia was so surprised she snorted before she could stop herself. “Be serious right now.”

“I am serious.” Yoko paused, then reached out and rubbed out a smudge on the TV screen with the sleeve of her jacket. She studied it a moment, then wiped at it again. “You’re willing to do anything to see Sean, you said. All right then. Break up with Paul.”

It still didn’t sound real. Lydia burst into hectic, high-pitched giggles, rocking back on her heels as her amusement threatened to topple her over. “Oh my god,” she said, her voice thin and reedy, “that’s the funniest fucking thing I’ve heard all day. You sound like you’re in some badly-written Hallmark movie.”

Yoko raised her eyebrows. “That’s my offer. Paul for Sean.”

“You never could figure out our relationship,” Lydia marveled, barreling past that last comment. “It fascinated you right from the start, and right from the start you tried to destroy it.” She stepped closer, giving Yoko a cocky grin. “I bet it eats you alive that I came back for him instead of you.”

“Frankly,” Yoko said, looking at her over those ridiculous sunglasses, “I don’t spend much time thinking about the two of you. I have a life to life. A multimillion-dollar estate to manage, you know. It takes up a lot of my days.”

“So why bother with all this?” Lydia hissed, gesturing between the two of them. “Just – fucking put an end to it. You’ll never have to see or speak to me again forever. For this one thing I ask, and that’s to contact Sean again.”

“Then break up with Paul,” Yoko repeated. “Do that, and I will personally make sure that you see Sean, speak to him, and fix your relationship so it’s stronger than ever. With my blessing. I won’t stand in your way at all. And we’ll never see each other again.”

Holy fuck. She sounded like she might be serious, actually.

Lydia paused. In a panic she ran through other possibilities, other trades she might offer in exchange. Something she could do with the Post interview, on social media, something to widely promote the Met show so Yoko could get money and attention. The longer she thought the broader Yoko’s smile got. “What’s to stop me from claiming I broke up with him and not really doing it?” Lydia challenged her. “Maybe we stay together and just don’t tell you about it. Don’t go in public together.”

“And you would be happy with that? Living half a life, like you were the past four years?”

“You’re old,” Lydia said bluntly. “I’m not. All I have to do is wait for you to kick the bucket and I’m home free.”

Yoko shrugged again. “Paul isn’t much younger than me. I might outlive him, you know. The way I outlived you.”

Lydia was in danger of drawing blood. Her fists were now clenched so tight, her nails were gouging sharp half-moons into her palms. “I’m not going to break up with Paul,” she declared. “I’ll do anything else—”

“No, that’s not what you said before,” Yoko pointed out, shaking her head. “You said you’d do ‘anything,’ not ‘anything else’.”

“I said ‘just about anything,’ if you’re going to get bloody technical—” Lydia bit down hard on her lip, swallowing the rest of the sentence. Leaning hard into her New York accent, “You made an initial offer, but I’m not accepting it. I’ll come up with a counteroffer.”

“I don’t want a counteroffer. I have everything I need.”

“But he’s my son,” Lydia said, her voice breaking a little.

“I think you’ll find that he’s five years older than you now,” Yoko said, laughing. “The chronology doesn’t work anymore, you being his parent.”

No. It all was slipping away from her. She hadn’t actually had a concrete plan, Lydia now realized, nothing thought out beyond please, I’ll do almost anything. She looked down at her hand, shaking out her fists and looking with dismay at the angry red crescents on her palms. Get your shit together, lady, Lydia thought furiously, come on, she can’t hold out forever, keep going—

One of the assistants then stepped forward, smiling and apologizing for the interruption. Lydia spun back to the TV screen and stared hard at it as Yoko accepted her phone from the other woman and looked at a text she had just received. She murmured something inaudible and the assistant replied Right away and left them again.

When Lydia turned back, trying to find her second wind and keep going, Yoko was grinning. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“About…?”

“About you breaking up with Paul,” Yoko said. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Okay.” Lydia eyed her, because it couldn’t be that easy. “Then… what do you want from me instead of—”

“I’m sorry, I misspoke,” Yoko said, brushing the words away with her hand. “I still want you to leave him, but I don’t think I have to ask you to do that.” She nodded in the direction of the assistant who’d just left them. “Do you know who texted me? That was Paul. Telling me we need to talk about something that’s upsetting you.”

Lydia stared after the assistant, who had left the room and was no longer visible. “Well he… Paul knows about Sean changing his phone number,” she said slowly. “I’ve told him everything. We decided we wanted to talk to you about it, in September sometime. He’s setting up a meeting.”

“He wants to meet with me next week,” Yoko said. “By himself. He’s willing to reschedule one of his shows in San Francisco to do it, if necessary.”

A cold shiver ran down her spine. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

“I’m lying,” Yoko echoed, grinning again. “And when you set up this interview today – did he know about it?”

“Paul—”

“Because you just said the plan was for you both to meet me. And yet…” Yoko made a show of looking around, trying to locate him in the gallery. “Does he know you’re here right now?”

Lydia took a step away. Her knees shook even harder, like she was at imminent risk of collapsing.

“You’re going behind his back to see me – he’s going behind your back to see me.” Yoko chuckled and shook her head. “No, I don’t think I need to ask you to break up with him at all.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lydia hissed at her. “You—”

“Here we go again, the same argument as last time. I don’t know, right? I don’t know anything about you, how could I possibly?” Yoko looked around the gallery, pride in her eyes as she gazed at all of the exhibits. “I saw you at the Grammys earlier this year. When Paul won for Best Song.”

“Song of the Year,” Lydia ground out. “And we both won it.”

“You’re correct, my apologies,” Yoko said, not sounding apologetic. “I saw you both on stage, accepting the award. It was incredible, really – as soon as they said his name and handed him his little golden prize, it was like nothing else mattered to Paul, you know? He was the very best boy. He didn’t even see it, how upset you were, but I did. You standing there behind him, in his shadow. You were so unhappy and he didn’t even know, did he?”

“That night didn’t go the way we’d planned,” Lydia admitted. She put her hands on her hips and lifted her chin a little, hoping the power pose would make her feel stronger. “We’ve talked about it. We hashed everything out and we’re as crazy about each other as ever. So whatever you think you saw on TV at the Grammys—”

“And at the Peabodys,” Yoko gently corrected. “I saw that too.”

Lydia blinked. “That – that wasn’t aired on TV—”

“The video was online, on the Peabodys’ website. That blue dress was very flattering on you, I thought.”

She shivered, feeling sick again. She had to get out of here. “Well,” she said, putting a hand to her forehead. Sweat was starting to bead at her hairline, under her bangs. “Whatever. I don’t know what you think you saw, but Paul and I are doing great. In fact,” she said, and a rational inner voice told her to shut up but she ignored it, “we’ve talked about getting married and having kids. So… yeah, we’re better than ever. Don’t hold your breath waiting for us to break up.”

Yoko smiled and looked away. “I won’t. I have a lot on my plate, remember? But when you break up with Paul, I’ll send you Sean’s new phone number.”

“When,” Lydia scoffed. “I’m not breaking up with him.”

“And I believe that,” Yoko said. “I really do. But him, on the other hand…” She tilted her head to one side. “I just never got the sense that his heart was really in it, you know? I mean, after you died…”

“He was wrecked!” she hissed, defensive. “He told me!”

“And yet mere months after you were murdered,” Yoko said, “he called you ‘Martin Luther Lennon,’ and complained that the way your fans were mourning you was irritating and undeserved.”

“No he didn’t.” Her voice broke; Lydia cleared her throat but she could hear the tears in it. “He’d never. God, if you’re going to make shit up at least make it sound believable.”

“You don’t have to take my word for it, it’s in print. Maybe he didn’t use those precise words, sure, but you can read it yourself. The byline is… Hunter Davies, I think? I’m sure you can look it up on the Internet.”

She would. She’d go home and look it up, and she’d discover right away that –

But Martin Luther Lennon? What the entire fuck was that??

“Where’s your phone?” Lydia blurted out, hit by a sudden brainstorm. “I want to see that text from Paul. I want you to prove to me that he just texted you about meeting, I want to see it.”

“Very well.” Yoko turned and gestured to another assistant, who stepped forward. Yoko took the phone offered and the gallery was dead silent a moment, as she unlocked the screen and pulled up her texts. “There.” She turned around the screen and Lydia saw the text bubbles through her tears. I can do next Thursday? 13.00 or after? in the top bubble, followed by the reply: Yes, Thursday at 1pm works for me. At the top, underneath a profile picture that was the MPL jester logo, she saw the contact name “Paul M.”

Lydia didn’t even know Paul and Yoko texted in the first place.

“I don’t lie to you,” Yoko murmured, as the assistant walked off with her phone. “You already know that. I don’t need to when you’ve always managed to lie so spectacularly to yourself.”

A tear finally broke free and trickled down Lydia’s cheek. “You do nothing but lie to me.”

Yoko huffed a laugh. “If you say so. Still, I’ll uphold my end of the deal. When you and Paul break up… well. You know how to reach me.”

Lydia went home in a storm cloud, a fog that was dark and kept everyone else at bay. Someone on the train even gave her an odd look and moved further away, and that was saying something – New Yorkers never gave a shit about weirdos in the wild. But Lydia was so out of it, so zoned out, that she missed her stop and had to go back two stations until she could alight at 86^th Street. The penthouse – their home, where they’d lived together for the past year – was only a few blocks away.

Her keys clattered to the kitchen countertop, making her flinch at the loud noise. Moving in a trance she started going through the cupboards, the fridge, thinking she should eat dinner, only to change her mind. Too early. Not hungry. Instead she grabbed a beer.

The TV sat before her in the living room, silent. She stared at the room dully reflected on its blank surface, the light outside, the faint outline of herself as she sat on the couch. Jeff padded into the room, meowing a little, and though for the past few weeks he’d been avoiding her he came directly to her now. “Baby boy,” Lydia said hoarsely. “Jeffy Pop. You like me again, huh?” He leapt straight into her lap and made himself comfortable.

She turned her face away as it crumpled with misery. Lydia knew Yoko was lying. All that bullshit today, all of it was lies, it had to be. Paul had never said that about her – and in 1981? When he’d told her he’d been devastated by it, to the extent that he’d gone a little crazy for a year or so – no, he’d missed her then, he hadn’t been venting to journalists saying John was – that John was—

Lydia lost track of time, as the sun set outside; when her phone rang it was a shock. Dirk McQuickly calling. She watched it ring a moment, unthinking, until she finally answered. “Hello, my love,” Paul said, with a smile in his voice. “Night off tonight, so I thought I’d see what you were up to.”

“Hi, babe. Uh… you know. Hanging out.”

“Not working on your book?”

Fuck. “I had a long day at work today, I’m fried.”

“We could watch a movie?” There were noises on his end, like he was moving around. “D’you remember that bit in When Harry Met Sally, they’re each at home watching the same film? Might find something good on the telly.”

She literally had no better ideas – all she could think about was that text chain between him and Yoko – so she agreed and they each turned on their TVs and started hunting around the channels. A few minutes later they discovered that TCM was airing Lawrence of Arabia and settled in to watch it.

“Do you remember us seeing this together in… Christ, must’ve been when, ’60? ’61?”

“1962,” she said automatically. “Yeah, this was one of the last films we saw before Beatlemania went into high gear. Last film we were able to see in theaters without getting attacked by horny mobs of birds, I think.”

“Was it really? Huh.” Paul went quiet a while. She could hear the audio from the movie over the phone line, not quite lined up with the sound coming from her own TV. “Our anniversary’s coming up, you know,” he said. “The real one, the secret one.”

That, of all things, inspired a fresh wave of tears. He remembered their anniversary but had apparently neglected to mention a few other things. “I don’t even know what the traditional gift is for six years,” she admitted.

“Iron, apparently,” Paul said with a laugh. “Limits us a bit, doesn’t it.”

Lydia smothered a sigh. “You don’t have to get me anything.”

“Are you all right, love?” he asked, hesitant, after a brief pause. “You don’t sound it.”

“I had a long day at—”

“No, I know, you said that, but are you all right?”

Am I all right? she wondered. I don’t know, maybe you should tell me about your text chain with Yoko. What else do you two talk about? “It’s silly,” she said, forcing herself to laugh. “Don’t worry, it’s literally just… it’s hormones. I got to thinking about you today, and I miss you a whole fucking lot, and then Aunt Flo showed up and cranked it up to eleven, and… yeah, no, I’m just having a weird day without you.”

“Describes most days for me,” he teased. “Missing you a whole fucking lot. Wishing you were with me, or I was with you.”

“Then you better get back here so we can go up to Boston and meet Victoria.”

“Yes, ta love, that’s why I called tonight, my flight’s coming in late Friday and we can go up Saturday morning, yeah?” They discussed logistics, who would drive (Paul won that one), while Lawrence of Arabia continued to play mostly unheeded on each of their TVs. When it got late and she could hear Paul unsuccessfully smothering a yawn, she decided it was time to hang up.

“Hey,” she said. “You know I love you, right?”

“I love you too,” he said back, his voice warm. “I can’t wait to see you holding little Victoria.”

The rest of her night was quiet, with Jeff following her everywhere she went: into the kitchen to make her lunch for work the next day, upstairs to her room to get ready for bed. And once she was in bed – alone, the other side cold and empty – sleep vanished. She tossed and turned for over an hour, as wide awake as when she first shut off the lights.

I’m sure you can look it up on the Internet.

She bolted up and raced all the way down to her home office, to where her computer sat in sleep mode. It was the work of a moment to bring up Google and type in Paul McCartney + Hunter Davies + Martin Luther Lennon.

Dozens of results popped up immediately. Lydia glanced at one or two of the website previews and saw tantalizing phrases like No one ever goes on about the times John hurt ME and He could be a maneuvering swine, which no one ever realized, but she didn’t click on any.

She couldn’t. She didn’t need to.

Chapter Text

Her mind swung in only two directions over the next few days: towards her niece, and towards Paul’s 1981 interview. Lydia steeled herself to read the full context of the Martin Luther Lennon comment and found that it was somehow both better and worse than what she’d feared. That he’d thought those things about her just after she’d died – not died, but been murdered – and that he’d been idiot enough to entrust said thoughts to a journalist without making it clear he was speaking off the record. He’d obviously been dealing with a lot in 1981, and knowing him most of what he truly thought and felt had probably been buried in the black hole that was his subconscious, leaving him a confused mess. Paul also apparently hadn’t spoken to Hunter Davies since then out of a sense of betrayal, which Lydia supported, but still.

“I found out something not great about Paul,” she confessed to Nicole, when her friend noticed her sour mood and badgered her until she gave in. “It happened over twenty years ago, but—”

“Well there you go,” Nicole said with a nod. “It was twenty years ago. He’s theoretically learned from his mistakes and moved on.”

And that was it, wasn’t it? It was like Paul had said: Just because she’d learned something new about him this week didn’t mean it had happened this week. If Paul could embrace her, knowing the full extent of her abusive bullshit from years ago, the very least she could do was take his unguarded comments in stride and know that he didn’t think that way anymore.

Or – she assumed he didn’t think that way anymore. He was nothing if not consistent in many ways.

Paul flew into New York late Friday and they left the City at the crack of dawn Saturday morning, which naturally was his idea. “It’s almost four hours to Boston, love,” he’d said; “besides, you can sleep in the car if you’d like.” Lydia did just that, curling up in the passenger seat and nodding off as Paul merged onto the interstate.

She woke up somewhere in Connecticut, groaning in annoyance at being conscious again. “There she is! Morning, love!” Paul said cheerfully, glancing over at her. “Your phone went a bit ago, not sure if it was a text or call,” so she fumbled around for it and saw a text from Carol, asking for their ETA. Lydia responded and then dumped her phone back into the center console’s cupholder.

“Scott let me know yesterday they got our presents, by the way,” she told him, stretching out the kinks in her arms and legs. “Andrea hasn’t taken the bathrobe off since.”

“Oh good,” Paul said absently, checking his blind spot as he merged into the other lane to get around a truck. “You excited to see your niece?”

“Yeah.”

He glanced at her. “We’ve still got two hours yet, if you’re not done sleeping.”

“No, I just…” She looked out the window, toying with the cuffs of her sweatshirt. “Remember I told you that I don’t remember everything about being John at any given moment?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Yeah. So… yesterday I remembered the name Victoria means something pretty significant to me.” She turned towards him, bracing herself. “I never told you about – about her, did I?”

He frowned at her and shook his head.

“My sister Victoria.” Lydia swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I don’t have any memory of this of course, since I was a toddler at the time – but during the war, I guess, Julia had an affair with a soldier… and nine months later Victoria was born.”

“I know, love,” he said quietly.

Lydia stared at him. “So I did tell you about her?”

“No.” He shrugged and gave her a wry half-wince. “Nothing stays secret about a Beatle for long, love.”

“Oh god.” She let her head fall back against the seat. “Figures. So what was it, some rabid fan dug up dirt on the scandalous Julia Stanley? Knocked on the front door of some unsuspecting woman and invaded her life—”

“Better,” Paul said. “She came forward and identified herself. About ten or twelve years ago, I think it was. Yeah, she got to choose the timing herself and everything.”

Lydia froze, staring at him. She felt hot and cold all over, paralyzed by disbelief. The memory she’d gotten the day before had been filled with such pain, such longing, an unconquerable sense of needing to put his family back together and collect all the remaining remnants of Julia in one place. He’d tried so hard to find Victoria, been devastated when he couldn’t.

And now she’d been found.

Limited by his need to focus on the road, Paul shot a smile at her in several short bursts, chuckling a little when she remained speechless. “Yeah! She knew she was your sister!”

“No way. The adoption was closed, wasn’t it?” She sat up, her heart pounding. “I mean, I hired a private investigator – fuck, I hired two! – and they told me they couldn’t track her down—”

“She saw Julia’s name on her birth certificate,” Paul explained. “She knew she was your half-sister for a long time, before the band broke up, even. But she didn’t want to say anything until both of her adoptive parents had passed, out of respect for them.”

Lydia gaped. “Oh my god. But what’s her – I mean does she still go by Victoria?”

“Her name,” Paul said, “is Ingrid.”

“Ingrid,” she breathed. She looked away, her eyes filling, her shoulders rising up towards her ears. “Ingrid. Oh my god. My sister Ingrid.”

“She knew you looked for her as well,” Paul added. “Mentioned it, you hiring someone back in ’64.”

“Paul,” she wailed. “Oh my god.”

He chuckled again, gazing at her fondly. “She’s all right, love,” he assured her. “It’s a happy story with a happy ending.”

“My sister Ingrid,” Lydia said again, trying out the words. “Ingrid. Holy fuck, Paul, her name’s Ingrid. Oh my god, I’m freaking out – where’s my phone?” She went online and started typing furiously, as Paul confirmed that her new surname was Pedersen. Lydia pulled up a photograph of her accompanying an article and good lord, this woman even looked like Julia. “She had a good life,” Lydia announced, skimming through the article. “Her adoptive parents were amazing. She was happy. Oh thank god.”

“You’re incredible, you know that?” Paul burst out.

Lydia shot him a teary grin. “Any specific reason? Or just in general?”

“No, love, you—” He shifted slightly in his seat, leaving one hand resting on the steering wheel; with the other he clasped Lydia’s tightly, letting them rest on the console. “You’ve never met this woman in your life and yet there’s no hesitation, you know? You just – you go for it. Caring about people.”

“What else should I do?” she said, frowning. “They’re my people.”

He grinned at her, crinkling his nose. “I know, love,” he murmured.

They arrived in the Boston area shortly after eleven, pulling up outside Scott and Andrea’s faux-Tudor house in Brookline and parking at the end of a long driveway packed with cars. Lydia bounded out of their rental, so eager to see her family that Paul was still in the drive locking up the car when Carol opened the front door at her knock. “You made it, Ladybug!” her mom said, sweeping her up into a giant hug.

The house was full of people and activity, Montroses and Adlers alike, but the noise was slightly muted, everyone happy to be there but trying not to startle or wake up little Victoria. A lavish brunch spread had been set up in the kitchen and Lydia found Travis piling a plate high with food when she stuck her head in.

Paul and Lydia entered the living room together. Scott and Andrea sat in the place of honor on the couch, Andrea wearing her new robe, both of them looking tired and overwhelmed but thrilled and happy all at once. Victoria, fast asleep, lay in Scott’s arms. Lydia tried to ignore how the feeling in the room shifted as soon as everyone saw Paul, making him the new center of attention, and instead focused on crossing to her brother and her niece. She hugged Scott and Andrea, wishing them heartfelt congratulations, then bent lower. “Hello there, baby girl,” Lydia said softly, brushing the tip of her finger over Victoria’s tiny hand.

“We were just talking about what her nickname should be before you showed up,” Scott said, keeping his voice quiet. “I think we like Vicky instead of Tori.”

“Vicky’s my vote,” Andrea agreed.

“Hi, Vicky,” Paul said, leaning over Lydia’s shoulder to see her. “She’s just beautiful.”

“Thanks,” Scott said, looking flustered. “Did you guys get something to eat?”

“Did you?” Lydia countered, looking around and not seeing a plate nearby. “I can take her while you get some food.”

Scott raised his eyebrows – and hesitated. Lydia frowned after a moment, not understanding what was going on.

“Yeah, let Lydia hold her,” Andrea said, nudging him with her elbow. “You should go eat, honey.”

“Are you sure? You remember what I showed you the other…” Scott gave her a meaningful look.

“And I told you that doesn’t matter,” Andrea said, rolling her eyes. “She’s your sister now, no matter who she used to be.”

Lydia stood upright, so abruptly that Paul had to step back to avoid a collision. “Been doing a little online research, have we?” She could feel her face burning with fury and shame, panic that a relative might have overheard her.

“Love,” Paul said, putting a hand on her back.

“You don’t have the best track record with kids,” Scott said, lifting his chin a little and – god – holding Vicky a little closer. “I have to look out for—”

“That’s enough,” Paul said over whatever hurt, angry nonsense was about to come spewing out of Lydia. “Let’s get something to eat, I’m famished and I’ll bet you are too.”

“I’m sorry,” Scott said, as they turned to leave.

“No you’re not,” Paul said, too brightly, “but we can discuss it later.” With that, he somehow managed to get both of them out of the room without the family noticing anything was awry.

They returned to a virtually empty kitchen; only Travis sat at the counter, working his way through a pile of food. Numb, enraged, Lydia allowed Paul to push a plate into her hands, to then go platter by platter and ask her “The potatoes look good, you want some? Yeah, here you go. And this strawberry salad—” as he added various foods to their plates.

“What’s your damage?” Travis asked, frowning at Lydia as they sat at the breakfast bar with him.

“Scott wouldn’t let her hold the baby,” Paul said, yet again cutting off the cutting remark Lydia almost spat out. “He thinks she should be judged by the person she was thirty years ago instead of who she is now.”

Travis’s mouth twisted into an uncomfortable shape. “I mean… I can kinda see his point.”

“Oh can you?” Lydia snapped. “Please then, enlighten—”

“But there’s no point actually, you know,” Paul said quickly, covering Lydia’s hand with his own. “Lydia is still the same person she was before she told you. And if Scott would’ve trusted her before last year… you know, what’s really changed? Nothing!”

“I guess,” Travis mumbled.

“Is that how you’d rather see me?” Lydia said, leaning across the countertop towards him. “As him? Ask me again about Elvis and Jimi Hendrix—”

“That’s enough, love,” Paul warned, and Lydia sat back just as her dad wandered into the kitchen and cried “Ladybug! I thought I heard you back here.” He came over to give her a hug; Lydia returned it while flipping Travis off.

If Scott thought her unfit to hold her niece, then so be it. She stayed in the kitchen, Paul at her side, as various relatives and family friends wandered in and out, some to get food or drinks, some to pretend they needed something as a pretense to chat with Paul. As always, he was happy to oblige. Travis left them as soon as he finished his food and her father eventually went back to the living room to coo over his first grandchild, but Paul remained, and made no sign of wanting to be anywhere else. He kept one hand on Lydia’s knee, anchoring her in place as she sat and pouted. It felt like a show of support instead of a leash, so at least there was that.

But yet again, she was at a big family function unable to participate. Just like at Scott’s wedding, everyone was having fun in another room while she and Paul isolated themselves.

When Mr. Adler finally left them alone, after spending an interminable half hour talking Paul’s ear off, she turned to him. “We should just go check into our hotel room now. I’m not dealing with this bullshit anymore.”

He gazed at her a moment, then tucked her hair behind her ear. “We can stay a bit longer, there’s no rush. I got us late check-in.”

“But—”

“It’s all right, love. We’re entitled to be here as long as we like.”

A pained sigh escaped her lips. Lydia tipped towards him until he’d wrapped his arms around her and held her close. “I’m not him,” she insisted in a harsh whisper, hanging onto his shirt. “Why can’t they see that?”

“You’re not only him,” Paul said. “You’re so much more than that, my love. Every version of you.”

“Thirty-one flavors,” she said with a snort, smiling up at him. “Just like Baskin-Robbins, that’s me.” He chuckled and bent to kiss her tenderly, his mouth warm against her own. It went a long way towards making her feel better.

“Sorry to interrupt.”

Lydia broke away from him to see Andrea in the kitchen doorway, carrying Victoria, who was now awake and looking all around. “I just fed her and she needs to be burped,” Andrea said. “Don’t suppose you have any experience with that.”

“Sure,” Lydia said hopefully. “Here, come sit down, you’re still healing.”

They both stood up from their bar stools and pulled a chair out from the kitchen table for Andrea to sink onto, which she did gratefully. Then Lydia draped the burp cloth over her shoulder, carefully took her niece, and sat down. The baby’s warm little lima-bean body nestled perfectly on Lydia’s shoulder, dredging up all kinds of sentimental thoughts about Jules and Sean from the depths of her memory. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Paul grinning with his entire body, having finally gotten his wish. “Hi Vicky,” Lydia whispered. “My goodness, look at you.” Vicky shakily swung her head towards the sound of her voice, staring at her with big dark blue eyes. “Yeah, hi, I’m your auntie, sweet girl.”

“It’s like she sees everything,” Andrea said with a tired sigh, leaning her head against her hand. Her eyes never left her daughter. “She’s so alert when she’s awake.”

“Julian was like that too,” Lydia said absently. “Just wanted to take it all in.” Vicky wobbled and she held her hand behind her neck and head, making sure they were supported.

Paul pulled out his phone and snapped several pictures of them, while Lydia mightily resisted the temptation to pull a face at him. Andrea glanced between the two of them. “I’m sorry about Scott earlier,” she said. “I’ve been trying to talk him off the ledge for a few weeks now but you know how he gets.”

“It’s fine,” Lydia said.

“No it’s not, love,” Paul said. “He had no right. I mean really,” he snapped a few more photos, “out of all of you, I’m the only one who knew you from before, and if I can understand how this works then why can’t your brothers?”

“I’ll use that, thanks,” Andrea deadpanned. “Scott hates not being the smart one.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.”

At that, Vicky burped loudly enough to startle herself. Lydia giggled and brushed a kiss to the side of her downy head, which Paul captured with his camera too. “Ooh, I bet that feels a lot better, huh. Get it all out, girl.”

“I’ll work on Scott,” Andrea said, reaching out and rubbing Vicky’s back. “I don’t know what inspired him to get on the Internet the other night and trawl through Beatles fan message boards, but he was reading this shit to me and getting himself all worked up for no good reason. He was probably just freaking out about the baby coming soon.”

“Thanks, Andrea,” Lydia said lowly. “I’m just me, same person I always was.”

“I know. He’ll remember that eventually.”

Later that night, after they’d left the house and checked into their hotel room, Lydia turned to Paul as he hung a shirt and blazer in the closet. After everything she’d endured that day and how wonderful he’d been throughout it all, she was feeling especially vulnerable and close to him. “Hey,” she said. “I wanted to tell you something. Two somethings, actually.”

He looked back at her. “All ears, love.”

“Speaking of finding stuff on the Internet,” she began dryly, “I, uh. Earlier this week I found something you said about me, back in the Eighties. Um. Martin Luther Lennon?”

Paul’s face closed off at once, and he tossed his hair and lifted his chin in his classic defensive stance. They were like gunslingers in a western film, standing tensely at opposite ends of the room; she almost expected one of them to wiggle their fingers next to a gun in a hip holster. “Ah,” Paul said. “And?”

This was the point where John would have exploded into attack mode, she knew, but she remained still. “And… I wanted to find out more,” Lydia said. “That’s all.”

“I thought I was talking to a friend,” he blurted, voice tight, “I didn’t know Hunter would print—”

“I know.”

“I was out of my mind half the time then,” Paul went on, his words speeding up, “and everywhere you looked someone was holding up a photo and burning a candle and clutching a copy of Imagine, it was all over the bloody place—”

“I know.”

“They were mourning someone I didn’t recognize!” Paul cried, waving his hands. It was almost like her lack of response was pushing him higher and higher. “Who was that man? Not the one I knew! And bloody Yoko was fucking encouraging it, giving people the green light to worship this, this god among men, this selfless martyr, and—”

She crossed the hotel room and wrapped her arms around him but he remained stiff, out of reach. “I know, babe.”

“I just, I couldn’t stand it anymore.” He looked away, blinking fast. “Why bother memorializing someone if you do it wrong? What’s the fucking point?”

“I know, my love.”

His spine sagged; she could feel it in real time as his defensiveness thawed. He framed her face with his hands, cradling it like it was something precious. “You’re angry.”

“I’m… really not, actually,” she realized. She never had been. Surprise and annoyance did not anger make. “Just trying to understand where your head was back then.”

He looked off into the distance, biting the inside of his cheek. “You could be a real prick, you know,” Paul murmured after a long pause, “and a manipulative bastard, and a whinging brat, and a selfish pig. And in the blink of an eye you could also be… endlessly kind. You didn’t complain about signing autographs, or posing for pictures with fans, and if they were so nervous they could hardly get two words out, you’d be so patient and good with them.” He bent and brushed his lips against hers. “I – I’d watch you interact with fans sometimes and I’d get – so jealous, that they could just have some beautiful little piece of you like that.”

She brushed their lips together a second time. “Nothing to be jealous about,” she whispered. “All for you now.” She kissed him again, more firmly, giving them both permission to sink into each other. “So what I’m hearing is that you liked that I was kind of a prick.”

Paul chuckled and pressed their foreheads together. “You had your moments.”

“Gee, thanks,” she laughed.

“But mostly…” He passed the pad of his thumb over her lower lip. “I remember once, you’d gotten a bar of chocolate. You offered me some and I said yeah, expecting you’d just give me one or two squares, you know? But you gave me half. And then an hour later you shoplifted a pack of cigarettes, and you shared those with me too.” He shook his head, gazing at her like she’d hung the moon. “I was – when I saw how people mourned you, the things they said, I was terrified that I wouldn’t remember those bits. I wouldn’t remember you as you really were, which was so much better than anything those fans could imagine.”

“That’s the way to your heart, hm?” she teased him. “Equitable division of stolen goods. Noted.” She laughed as he rolled his eyes, grinning shyly.

“Among other things. Now what was the second thing you had to tell me, or can we skip ahead to something else?” this with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows.

“Patience, you horny bastard. Dhani hasn’t reached out to you yet, has he? About a Beatles video game?”

Paul blinked, looking startled. “Wait, how do you know about that?”

“He told me about it over a year ago. He said he’s going to try to arrange things so that I can play a demo version of it with you and Richie.”

“So you’ll get to play your Rickenbacker again?” Paul said, a smile crawling across his face.

“And maybe sing a few songs,” she said with a shrug. “I won’t even ask for payment first, either.”

He laughed and kissed her again, humming with joy. “Christ, I’d had my doubts about the whole thing, but now I can’t wait to try it out.”

“Me too,” she replied. “I don’t know if he’s pinned down a date with you yet, but I think I might be able to take a day off work if need be. Maybe… Thursday afternoon?”

Come clean, Paul, she pleaded mentally. Tell me you already have plans with Yoko on that day.

“I don’t have my diary in front of me, I dunno,” Paul said, bending to kiss the side of her neck. “Thursday might be all right but I’d have to check.”

Tears threatened, but she held them back. “Or maybe we should wait to try it out,” she suggested. She shivered at the sensation of him sliding his hand under her shirt, brushing his long fingers along the shallow dips of her ribs. “Like until September, after we’ve seen Yoko. Which, speaking of, we should talk about when we—”

Paul lifted his head and gave her a searing kiss, one that stole her breath away. “You really want to talk about Yoko right now?” he mumbled against her mouth, just as he undid the button on her jeans.

Lydia grinned, keeping her grief at bay. “You’re right. Now where were we?”

They were going back and forth for a few days with Dhani, trying to coordinate all their schedules to test drive Rock Band. Paul was still on tour, Rich was about to be, and Lydia and Dhani worked for a living, so it was more complicated than Dhani had perhaps first anticipated. Rich eventually reached out to her one evening as she toiled away at her book to ask her if all the fuss was even worth it. “I don’t know a thing about video games,” he complained.

“The point of Rock Band is that it doesn’t feel like a classic video game, though,” she stressed. “You’re not tapping on a controller button when you play drums, you’ll actually use sticks to strike a drum pad. You use drum pads all the time, right?”

“Sure,” he said slowly.

“And Dhani helped a lot with the design,” Lydia said. “He wanted it to be a stepping stone for people to actually learn how to play guitar and drums, so they worked really hard on making it feel as close to realistic as possible.” When he still hesitated, Lydia said, “I’ll be there too, Richie. Playing with you and Paul, going through the old set lists. I know George won’t be with us, but… you know? It’ll be a little like old times.”

“All right,” Rich said. “All right! I’ll do it for you, love. I’ll admit, that’s the main selling point for me, getting to play with you again, even if it’s not for real.”

“Me too,” she said happily. “Richie… making music with the three of you—”

“I know, love,” he said, chuckling down the phone line. “Christ. I know. Nothing else like it.”

She hung up the phone later smirking with glee at Jeff, who as usual had parked himself at the end of her desk. “Little does he know,” she said in a singsong voice to her bored cat, who merely sat and accepted her head scratches. “Little do Paul and Richie knooooooow what I’ve been planning for theeeeeeem.”

For earlier that very evening she had sent an email to Julian, knowing that he was going to be in town at the end of August recording a new album. While you’re here, she’d written, I want to go guitar shopping with you. I need an acoustic but I’m out of touch with the current styles and types. What do you say?

Chapter Text

She watched the analog clock that hung on the wall near her cubicle, as the second hand glided smoothly around the clock face and crossed twelve again. The minute hand ticked ever-so-slightly forward, the hour less so.

One o’clock on Thursday afternoon.

Lydia sat back and stared, her heart in her throat. Somewhere, right at this moment, Paul and Yoko were talking about her and her desire to see Sean. Were they on the phone? On Skype? Had Paul actually flown back from his tour dates in California to see Yoko in person here in New York? Was Yoko telling him the same thing she’d told Lydia, about their relationship being doomed? Did Paul feel any guilt about what he was doing?

She unlocked her personal phone and sorted through her photos. Yesterday she’d walked past a newsstand and seen several copies of the latest issue of Rolling Stone; Paul was the subject of the feature article, “The Renaissance of Paul McCartney.” The photo on the cover was of him from one of his recent shows, starkly lit by colored lights, sweat licking at the edges of his hair, his head thrown back as he wailed into the microphone. Lydia found the pic she’d taken of the magazine rack and put it into a text: Saw this stone-cold hottie at the newsstand this morning. I might leave you for him.

Paul responded two full hours later: I’ll fight him for you! xoxo

She waited for him to explain why he’d taken so long to reply. But the next time he messaged her, about five minutes later, it was to ask if she’d ever heard of a new band called Fleet Foxes and what she thought of their debut album. She never got her explanation.

On her way home from work that night, on a random impulse, Lydia ducked into a Borders. Without slowing down a step, she made a beeline for the magazine section, snatched a copy of Rolling Stone, and bought it before she could pause and ask herself what she was doing. Paul got press all the time, and his team collected every scrap of it. There was nothing at all special or unique about this particular article, this particular cover. She herself had been on the very first Rolling Stone cover, so she couldn’t even say it was jealousy she was feeling either. It was just… she didn’t know what.

The magazine sat on the dining room table for days after. Paul, singing his heart out, framed as a towering figure atop the world. There had been no lie in her text: Lydia thought it was a stunning photo of him. She’d glance at it as she ate breakfast in the mornings, and as she walked past in the evenings, headed upstairs to throw on something comfortable before going down to work in her office. Sometimes, when she was feeling silly or lonely, she’d kiss her fingers and brush them over his face as she headed up to bed.

In all that time, though, she never opened the magazine to actually read the article, or to see if any of the photos Frank/Hank had taken of them together had made the cut. Something stopped her every time she thought about it. The idea of the article – in which some hip rock journalist probably gushed over a false version of the man she loved – made her feel ill, almost.

Lydia didn’t want to read anything about Paul and find herself wishing that that version was real instead.

He came home for his planned mid-August break, during which Lydia tried to tamp down all her doubts and fears. She distracted them both with a whole new batch of photos of Vicky, as well as a new song that she wanted to finish with him and a new chapter of her book. Paul said nothing about Yoko; neither did she. Lydia kissed him lingeringly at the elevator door to their penthouse just before he left.

“I wish we could be together on our anniversary,” he said, pressing his lips to her hair as he held her. The big day was that coming Thursday. “But keep an eye on the mail, there might be a pressie for you.”

“Oh?” She grinned up at him. “I’ll only sign for it if you somehow managed to find something made of iron.”

“Did you?” he asked, eyebrow raised.

“The doubt in your tone right now, holy shit dude.”

She hadn’t, technically, found something made of iron. What she’d done was hunt through numerous Goodwill stores until she found an old Monopoly board game, picked out the iron playing token (which was made of some kind of zinc alloy, actually), and had it attached to a silver chain bracelet by a jeweler. Lydia overnighted it to him out on the West Coast with a card that read Baby let’s play house (for at least six more years) <3 next to a doodle of Elvis. When Paul received it he sent her a photo of the bracelet already on his wrist.

And then she’d gotten his gift: a necklace with a flat iron pendant stamped with an intricate Gaelic knot. His card just had a long string of xoxoxo, the romantic sap. Lydia giggled like a sap herself until Jeff began to meow, complaining that she wasn’t paying him enough attention.

The next day, while Paul played dates somewhere in California and they sent each other their usual goofy texts, Julian arrived in New York. He’d responded in the affirmative to her earlier email about helping her buy a guitar, though he was still a bit confused about her exact plans when he picked her up in a taxi early on Saturday morning. “So… what are we looking for, exactly?”

Lydia gave Julian a huge grin and rocked a little in her seat. She hadn’t seen him in months, and he looked really good. “An acoustic guitar,” she said. “You’re going to help me pick one out.”

“Well,” he replied, dipping his chin modestly, “I’m sure Paul knows a lot more about them than I do.”

“Maybe, but then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

Before he could ask anything further, the taxi driver pulled up to the curb on West 14th; Lydia swiped her card and paid the fare. Julian led her out of the backseat and they landed on the sidewalk, gazing up at the red signage and all the posters of musical instruments in the storefront windows. “I’ve never been to the Guitar Center before,” she said dryly. “Not exactly how I bought my first one last time.”

“Mail order, wasn’t it?” Julian said, opening the door for her to enter ahead of him. “That’s what Aunt Mimi told me.”

“Yep! A cheap piece of junk out of the back of a magazine, but it was love at first sight.”

They walked into a nearly empty showroom. The store had just opened fifteen minutes earlier so it wasn’t bustling yet, which had been Lydia’s intention all along. A young man at the register flipping through a wholesale catalogue glanced up briefly at them and said, “Good morning and welcome to the Guit—” He did a double take. Of course someone working at a music store would recognize Julian Lennon.

Julian smiled, unfazed. “Will you point us to the acoustic guitars, please?”

The salesman, remembering himself, shoved the catalogue away and came out from behind the counter. “Yes, absolutely,” he said in a rush, “right this way, uh, Mr. Lennon.”

“Mr. Lennon is my dad. Please, call me Julian.”

Lydia elbowed him in the side as soon as the salesman’s back was turned, her abs burning from holding in her laughter. Julian just shot her a sly grin, looking very pleased with himself.

Guitars hadn’t changed much since her heyday, she realized happily, as soon as they’d reached the desired section of the store. Row after row of beautiful acoustics hung from racks on the walls. There were cheaper models with small, simple black dots to mark the frets, others with elaborate inlaid mother of pearl shapes; some were quilted maple, some had tortoiseshell pickguards, some had sunbursts or solid-color bodies in shades of blue and green. The salesman fluttered around them a bit, going into a clearly familiar spiel about what they had on the floor and what was back in the stock room, but Julian just told him they were all right and would ask if they had any questions. Still, it was an effort to get him to leave them alone.

Lydia, meanwhile, started browsing the racks, running her fingers around the curved bottom of some, or tracing the intricate patterns of the rosette on another. Her sense memory was always strongest with smells, and that distinct scent of guitars – the wood of the bodies and the metal of the strings – filled her mind’s eye with dozens of mental images. Paul’s thrilled smile when he’d first strummed the chord that transformed “I Saw Her Standing There.” The way they’d both struggled to keep from dampening the E string while stretching their fingers to play a C-major chord, while George – who’d already mastered that one – impatiently waited for them to catch up. And earlier: Julia, clapping excitedly when he painstakingly worked his way through his first song on the banjo. Most of the very best things in her old life had come from playing guitars.

“But why an acoustic?” Julian murmured to her, as soon as the salesman had finally left them to it. “And what are you going to use it for?”

“Because I already have an electric,” she replied just as quietly. “George left me one of his when he died.” Spotting one she liked – one with a warm red stain which faded to a darker shade around the edges – she lifted it from its rack and turned to him. “You remember how the first time we met, I said I remembered how to play guitar but didn’t have the calluses built up to actually do it?”

“Sure, yeah.”

She held out her hand and, hesitating, Julian brushed his fingers against hers. His eyes widened at once; Lydia grinned. “Yep,” she confirmed. “I’ve been practicing. Every time Paul’s away, I’ve been pulling out George’s guitar.”

“Christ,” Julian breathed. Something odd flashed across his face, something she couldn’t quite identify before it was covered with excitement. “Does this mean…?”

“My hope,” she said slowly, feeling her own excitement grow, “is that I can get us all in the same location at Christmas, and we all have a big jam together. I’ll need you and Dhani and everyone to be in on it to help me with planning, but I want it to be a surprise for Paul and Richie.”

Julian grinned broadly, rising up slightly on his toes. “Brilliant,” he said fervently. “Yes, I’m in, absolutely. God, we’ll need to come up with some lead sheets to pass round so we all remember how to play the same songs—”

Lydia laughed. “And a rehearsal space of some kind, where we can have total privacy,” she added. “I don’t want to worry about a stranger spotting me. Maybe in England instead of here?”

“Of course. And we’ll need cables and mics, music stands, chairs—”

“And Sean.” She swallowed back the sadness that threatened. “If you can – you’re the only one he’ll really listen to right now, but if you can convince him that I’d love for him to join us…?”

Julian nodded, giving her a sad look. “I’ll talk to him. Tomorrow, if I can. We’re having lunch.”

Just that – that simple comment, the reminder that Sean wasn’t physically far away from her at all – broke down her fragile defenses like they were nothing. Lydia hastily set down the guitar she’d grabbed in order to dig in her purse for tissues, while Julian flustered and apologized. “I love hearing that the two of you hang out,” she said thickly, speaking through her grief. She swiped at her eyes and blew her nose. “I love that. Jules, I love that so fucking much. Ugh, stop making me cry with all this sentimental shit, jeez.” He chuckled, and their awkward moment thankfully passed.

Lydia got her shit together enough to actually set herself to her task. For the next hour or so, she and Julian browsed the selection of guitars on display, with Lydia occasionally pulling one down from the wall to strum it a bit and test out its sound. She really hadn’t been one for obsessing over equipment specs – not like Paul, and definitely not like George – but she was picking up an old skill in a new body, which meant there were all kinds of things she had to account for. She needed a smaller guitar to accommodate her shorter arms and smaller hands, for one. She also wanted a guitar that looked like one she’d owned before, since this whole thing was an exercise in nostalgia to begin with. Familiarity, she hoped, would smooth the way with this surprise for Paul and Rich.

She also found herself watching Julian very closely, as he followed behind her and tested out a few guitars for himself. There was one he seemed particularly drawn to, though anytime she asked him a question he’d give her his full attention. Lydia made note of it.

At long last, after working her way around about three quarters of the room, she found herself standing before a locked glass cabinet that held the older, more costly instruments. She spied right away a vintage model that she couldn’t tear her eyes from. When Julian joined her, she muttered “That looks like the guitar I played on Rubber Soul.”

He craned his neck to read the tag above it. “It’s a Gibson,” he said. “That would explain it. Shall we call that kid back?”

She nodded, and Julian walked off as Lydia continued to stare. With her eyes she traced the familiar lines and curves of that guitar, remembered all of the chord changes of “Wait.” Already, at that early date in ‘65, he’d felt the walls closing in on him: the pressures of fame and the demand for more singles more albums more movies more-more-more from the record company, the painful boredom of his domestic life, the tortured longing for a man he loved better than any other soul on earth—

But he remembered the sweetness of that time too. Paul, always Paul, leaning towards him as they sang into a shared microphone, sighing into his mouth later when they were alone in the dark. The friendly fans who just wanted to say hi, nothing more. Being able to hand Aunt Mimi the keys to her new home in Dorset. One golden afternoon when he’d spotted a brightly colored robin in the back garden, picked Julian up and pointed it out high above them in a tree, and his little boy had placed his small hand on his shoulder and pointed at the robin and he’d felt his heart grow bigger.

This was it. This was the guitar she wanted.

Julian and the starstruck saleskid returned, fumbling with the world’s noisiest set of keys, and unlocked the cabinet for them as he rattled off a list of features for the Gibson. Lydia just reached in and grabbed it, single-minded in her pursuit. The strings were out of tune and Lydia sucked at tuning, but she tested out a few fingerings and found the spacing of the frets and thickness of the neck were comfortable for her hands. It felt right. “Yeah, I think that’s what they call a parlor guitar,” the saleskid said helpfully. She imagined he was being extra helpful because the Gibson was not cheap, and the sales commission would be significant. “Good size for women, parlor guitars.”

“We’ll also need a string tuner,” Julian said. “And a strap.”

“Sure, those are right over here.”

He brought out the case for the Gibson to secure the instrument first, then led them across the store to the area where the accessories lived. With his help she picked out an electric tuner and a strap, one with a jacquard floral pattern, bright and busy and colorful the way she liked. Then, right as they were all about to trek down to the register with her purchases, Lydia paused. “Oh,” she said, like she was just thinking of it, “we also wanted to grab that Fender Dreadnought, the mahogany one, if you don’t mind.”

Julian blinked, while the kid practically ran back for the Fender. “You liked that one as well?” he asked, his tone neutral.

“You did,” Lydia said. “So I’m getting it for you.”

He put up a hand in protest. “No, I was just mucking about with it—”

“Jules.” She stepped closer to him, adjusting her grip on the Gibson. “I know what happened after I died,” she whispered, gazing up at him. “I know that – that Yoko only let you choose one of my guitars to have, and Sean got all the others.” Julian stared hard at the floor, not meeting her eyes, while she continued, “This is literally the least I can do. Please let me buy you the Fender.”

He cleared his throat roughly, looked off to the side. “Well,” he managed at last, just before the saleskid rejoined them with the Dreadnought in its black case, “who am I to turn down a free gift, anyway?”

They took their goods back to the penthouse, where she broke out the electric tuner and Julian helped her get her new Gibson in tune. Time, it turned out, had not helped her learn the trick. “Christ,” he said, after she’d managed to fix only one string, “I thought the stories were exaggerated. You really have no clue.”

“Oi!” she cried. “I can return that Fender, I still have the receipt!” Julian threw back his head and gave a big belly laugh at that.

By the time he left for the night, having promised to help her look into booking space and equipment for her big Christmas surprise, and after spending hours noodling around on their guitars on various songs they both remembered, Lydia felt full. Full of everything good and happy in the world in a way she hadn’t in a long time, like she’d just needed a bit of a top up. Paul picked up on her mood right away, when he called her after a show in San Diego. “Here’s me thinking you’re missing me as much as I’m missing you,” he jokingly grumbled.

“I saw Julian today,” she said through a smile. “He’s in town. It was…”

Paul’s voice softened. “Yeah?”

“Babe, I—” The words got all tangled up, the way they always did when it came to him.

“Tell me?”

“He’s so amazing,” she said tearfully. “God, sometimes I just want to stare at him all day. I wish…”

“I know, love.”

She sniffled and stared up at the ceiling, blinking hard. “I was such a fucking idiot before—”

“No, don’t talk like that,” Paul said at once. “Doesn’t do you any good. Look forward, yeah? We’re going to sit down with Yoko once my tour’s over, and we’ll figure out how you can see Sean again, and then you’ll have both of them. Let’s talk about that, when we should reach out to Yoko. I can have my people ask hers about setting up a meeting for the end of September.”

“You don’t have her direct number?” Lydia asked innocently.

“Not really,” he said. And what the fuck did that mean? “We aren’t old friends chatting on the phone, you know, unless it’s some Apple business or other. Better if we reach out as usual, I think, through the army of assistants. That’s what I pay mine for,” Paul joked, “contacting people I don’t want to be bothered with.”

“Okay, yeah, then let’s get that over with,” she said. Already she could feel all her positivity melting away. “Set up a meeting. September.”

“I will, love. And I’ll be there with you through the entire thing, you know. I won’t leave you alone with her, not for a moment.”

Too late for that, she thought darkly.

It was hard to stay upset for long, though. The following Monday was the start of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, which played on the bullpen televisions at work for most of the day, while Lydia worked on editing and writing voiceover for her video on Yoko’s exhibit. Then each night when she went home, she’d have it on in the living room, playing loudly while she made food in the kitchen.

Thursday night was the final day. Paul happened to text her, looking for a distraction on one of his nights off after she’d finished her dinner, and she called him back. “Do you have your TV on?”

“No, why? Something good on?”

“Yeah, actually,” she said. “It’s the last day of the Democratic National Convention. Hillary conceded yesterday and tonight… Tonight, Barack Obama is going to make his first speech as the Democratic candidate for president.”

“Thrilling!” A few moments later she heard noise on his end; Paul had put on his TV too. “You know, I’ve got a connection there. We could get tickets to the Inaugural Ball in January, if you like.”

“I don’t want to think about parties right now,” she said, cutting her hand through the air. “I mean – yeah, maybe, that sounds like fun, I know I enjoyed going to Carter’s Inaugural. But Paul…” She shook her head. “This is history happening right now, you know?”

“It is,” he agreed. “We still haven’t any non-white PMs over in jolly old.”

“It’s history and it’s the future,” she went on, only half hearing him. “You know, my dad used to joke that you could always tell when a movie was set in the future because the president was Black, right? An asteroid is about to hit earth and Morgan Freeman’s the president – must be the future. And now we might have one for real.”

Just then the man of the hour himself strode confidently onto the main stage, waving to the wildly cheering crowds in Denver. He reached the podium and smiled brilliantly at everyone, and waited patiently until the excitement died down. “To Chairman Dean and my great friend Dick Durbin,” Obama began, “and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation, with profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.”

The convention center erupted again; Lydia felt a patriotic thrill run through her. “I love this,” she admitted, “but I’m still a little sad.”

“About what?”

“That Hillary Clinton didn’t get the nom. Growing up during the Reagan years, my mom made sure I knew what a misogynistic prick he was, how he was against the ERA and all that. But our country is even more sexist than it is racist, so at least this is still a step forward. I’m going to vote so hard for Obama in November, you don’t even know. That’s one thing I regret from before, that I only had a green card and couldn’t actually vote in elections.”

“Would you have done?” Paul said, sounding surprised. “Become a US citizen?”

She paused. “I actually don’t know,” she said slowly. “If I had, Mimi might’ve disowned me. Maybe not, then.”

Paul laughed, and for a few moments they just watched Obama’s speech. America, he said, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this. “I read he wants to end the war in Iraq right away, you know,” Paul said suddenly. “Maybe he’ll end it before you get over there.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” she said with a snort. “Iraq, as pointless as it is, isn’t the only active combat the US is involved in. ‘The war is not meant to be won,’” she quoted ominously, “‘it is meant to be continuous.’”

“All right, Big Brother, take it easy.”

They chatted lightly through Obama’s speech, which rocked the crowds at the convention center with sporadic bursts of applause. “He’s a really good speaker,” she said, “I’m getting all fired up. Proud to be American, et cetera.”

“Christ, if I never have to hear again the way Bush says nucular instead of nuclear.”

“Right? Hey, question for you: When we move to London, can I keep my American citizenship? Like would it be annoyingly expensive or no?”

“So we’re still moving to London, are we?”

Lydia froze, frowning. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“No, forget I said anything,” Paul said quickly. “I wasn’t—”

“Paul. We’re moving to London, it’s already settled. Why are you acting like it isn’t?”

“I don’t know,” he huffed, “I’m tired and… Shit.” He cleared his throat. “Look. You already know how impatient I am about this whole thing.”

“I do. So I’ll tell you again, just hang the fuck on, okay?”

“Yes, bloody hell, I know,” he snapped, now sounding annoyed, “so forget I said anything. But to answer your question, why would you want to keep your American citizenship anyway? Wouldn’t you want UK citizenship after we’re married?”

“You’ve got yourself a girl who wants to be both, a New Yorker who'll never not be a New Yorker. But now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder if that means twice the taxes. Ugh, probably.”

He went quiet awhile, the sound of Obama’s voice echoing dimly over the line. America, he said, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices. Lydia sighed after a moment, petting Jeff as he lay at her side. “Stop it,” she said gently.

“You what?”

“Stop worrying, I can practically hear you from here. Paul,” she said, gentling her voice further, “my wanting to keep my US citizenship has no bearing on the two of us. It’s not me making sure I have an exit strategy. As far as I’m concerned, my exit strategy is probably, I don’t know, us getting so angry that we literally murder each other one day.”

He snickered. “I’m sure you’re right, you know.”

“Which part?”

“About us murdering each other.”

“Well naturally.”

Silence again, but slightly more comfortable than before. On the TV screen, Obama looked bold and strong, clear-eyed, fearless. He looked like the future of her country. “Maybe I’m scared you have an exit strategy,” Lydia blurted out. “Maybe some fine morning you’ll wake up and realize I’m too much work.”

“Love—”

“I’m just saying, it’s a possibility.”

“It isn’t, though,” Paul insisted. Now it was his turn to sound patient and kind. “I’m the one who’s trying to marry you as fast as I can, you know.”

“While thinking that if you don’t, I’ll somehow slip through your fingers,” she pointed out. “We’re really insecure, aren’t we? Both of us intelligent, talented, well-balanced people, but for the fact that we can’t accept that the person we love most might actually love us back too.”

He hummed, now sounding happy. “Reckon that means we’re meant for each other, yeah?”

“Bet it means we’re stuck with each other.”

America, Obama declared on TV, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. “But I want that,” Paul said softly. “To be stuck with you.”

“Yeah,” she drawled, grinning. “I guess it sounds okay.”

“More than?”

“Oh, way more than, babe.”

Thank you! Obama cried to his ecstatic audience. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America! As the delegates roared in approval, and red, white, and blue balloons cascaded down from the ceiling, Lydia deadpanned, “I bet Obama is a Beatle John fan.”

“You never!” Paul cried. “I’m the one who wrote ‘Michelle’ and that’s literally his wife’s name!”

“Aw, crap. I admit, I forgot about that.”

They both burst into gales of laughter.