“No,” I say. “I won’t come back again.”

“What if I write you a new song?” he pleads. “Something better.” He almost smiles. “Or louder.”

“Okay.” Willa holds up a finger. “Let’s pause there for a moment before we go on.” You could hear a pin drop in the barn, it’s so quiet. There’s just the sound of our breathing. “Why does Eden say she can’t come back? She clearly loves him. This is killing her. So why is this goodbye?”

I see everyone turning that question over in their minds. And I know the answer, but I can’t figure out how to put it into words.

It’s quiet for a long time.

“Nobody?” Willa asks, and she looks around the barn. She sighs, clearly disappointed. “Eden’s changed too much,” she tells us. “She’s outgrown Orion. And that’s sad. It’s a tragedy, maybe, if she really loves him. But she’s become someone different than she was before her death. Before the chaos of all that. And there’s no going back.”

But that’s not right.

I know Eden inside and out now. She lives somewhere inside me. And that’s not it at all.

Eden won’t come back to see Orion because he deserves the chance to change, too. She wants that for him. She knows that he can’t spend the rest of his life waiting for a ghost. He needs to hurt. And grow. Learn. He needs a chance to become. Because he’s the one still living. And she won’t take that chance away from him.

It seems so strange that Willa could misunderstand her own play like that.

I don’t say anything, though. Because it doesn’t matter whether Willa knows it or not. I know it. She may have created Eden, but I’m the one breathing life into her. It’s my heart that pumps her blood.

So I turn to Cole and deliver the last line of the play.

“No more songs for me, Orion. Write a song for yourself. Something that you’ll always be able to hear inside your own heart. And I’ll be a part of that tune, I promise. Because that’s what it means to more than love someone.”

There’s a moment of eerie silence before the barn erupts in applause, because we’ve finally done it. We’ve worked our way through all of Midnight Music.

“Good work, my lovelies!” Willa Culver is clapping the loudest of all. “Extraordinary work!” But I keep thinking about how strange it is that she could write a play and get the ending so wrong.