When We're Thirty by Casey Dembowski (beautiful books to read .TXT) 📕

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

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

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

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

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

“Why are you retiring?” she asked again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonard was sitting back and drinking his wine, but he was also taking her measure. He nodded. “They’ll be in April—one in LA, one in New York, and the final show will be right here in Boston. I’ll get you and—Will, was it?—on the list.”

“We’d love that. We missed you in New York last month.” Had it only been last month? Everything had gone entirely wrong so quickly. The pact was gone, leaving their relationship fraying at the seams, even if their marriage was still legally binding. She swiped at her eyes, relieved to find them dry. Crying in front of Leonard Nulty was unacceptable.

“Your turn,” he said, repositioning himself on the couch. “I’m dying to hear how this pact played out.”

She wasn’t sure how much she would tell him. It would be easy to hit the highlights reel and move on. But as she started telling their story, it all spilled out. She walked him through Jonathan’s disapproval and their laundromat date, through to Madison and Boston, ending at the phone conversation he had partially overheard.

“I’m worried that maybe I broke him,” she said. “I promised myself when we got married that I’d be so careful with his heart, and I wasn’t careful at all.” She looked up at Leonard, who had been listening intently to the whole story. “What if I broke us?”

“Maybe you did. Maybe you both did. Love and careful rarely go together.” He glanced around the room, but it was only them. The photography crew had long since left, and Leonard hadn’t arrived with an entourage. “Six years ago, things with Veronica and I were the worst they’d ever been. We’d moved to a new part of town after Lollipop Dreams broke through to the mainstream. She’d made some really great friends, had a life and a career—traveling with the band on a smelly tour bus wasn’t appealing anymore. I came home less often, and she flew out to