Say You Will Part 1: Destiny Rules

To Steal Your Heart Away

Santa Monica, California
Saturday, November 30, 2002
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It had been five years, but she remembered it as if it were yesterday.

Stevie had taken to her bed on Thanksgiving evening as soon as her guests had gone upstairs to bed or left. She had hired caterers to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving meal for her family - Barbara and Jess, Christopher and Lori and Jessi - and flown them all out to California despite Barbara's protest over the money she was spending on a Nicks family Thanksgiving. Waddy had shown up later that evening for dessert after a family gathering of his own at home, Sharon as well, and everyone had had a blast, listening to old Frank Sinatra songs on The Capitol Years, a greatest hits compilation Jess had brought with him and Stevie had insisted on having a copy of, they'd had wine and danced and reminisced about Thanksgivings past, and somewhere around midnight, when Waddy and Sharon left and everyone else went to bed in the guest rooms, Stevie had taken Sulamith up to her room and locked herself in for the night - She had a lot of crying to catch up on.

Five years ago. Sometimes she felt like it had been fifty years since that final night she and Lindsey had shared, holed up in a hotel room in Andover, Michigan making love and sobbing because she was basically breaking up with him so he could make it work with Kristen and their unborn child. Sometimes it felt like it had been five minutes. She had been trying ever since she'd left the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening, crying all curled up in a ball in the backseat of her own car as Karen drove her home, to remember that things were not as awful as they seemed. After all, she had gotten Lindsey back. "Everyone Finds Out", a song on the new album, might have been written many years ago when she was worried about everyone in and around Fleetwood Mac finding out about her relationship with Mick, but there was definitely a lot of Lindsey and their situation in the lyric, "I do have him most of the time." They saw each other almost every day, managed to sneak in everything from a few stolen kisses to an entire evening of sweet, passionate lovemaking whenever they could, and he had been so gentle and kind to her ever since they'd "gotten back together", so to speak - the argument they'd had over Chris Lord Alge being the only real argument they'd had in months. She knew he loved her - she could feel it in the way he touched her, the way he kissed her, the tone of his voice when he called her sweet girl...

So why had she spent every moment alone all weekend crying?

One of the counselors at her rehab facility, years before when she'd been addicted to klonopin, had mentioned the concept of "trigger dates" - dates of traumas and other negative things that made people want to abuse substances. At the time, she had immediately thought October 5, 1982...the day Robin died. Little had she known that some years later, in a hotel room in Michigan as a blizzard fell outside the windows, she would find herself naked in the arms of Lindsey Buckingham again, sobbing openly as they made love because he'd gotten another woman pregnant and they were saying goodbye. Stevie had suffered many losses in her life - people, dogs, opportunities, love affairs - but she had come to think upon November 30, 1997 as the worst day of her life.

She could still see Lindsey coming towards her on stage that night as she cried while singing "Silver Springs", finally crying himself as his hand sank into her hair and his head dropped into her chest, guitar between them as they forgot the crowd and only had eyes for each other. She could still see the slightly bewildered look on his face as she had undressed before him later on at the hotel, inviting him into her bed one last time. Those memories had been haunting her ever since Kristen had appeared at the Say You Will house on Wednesday to take Lindsey and the kids home. She and the kids had been having a great time dancing to "Peacekeeper", and even as she'd spun the kids around in the air until she was dizzy she had still registered the look of unabashed love and joy on Lindsey's face as he watched her interact with his children...and then Kristen had appeared and her legs had turned to spaghetti, her heart into a tight ball.