And They Should Be Together

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***Get ready, folks! MAJOR CONFRONTATION and EMOTIONAL ENDING ahead!***

Madison, Wisconsin
Sunday, May 9, 2004 (2:00 am)
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Lindsey took a long look at himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator as he rode up to the floor where his wife had been waiting hours for him to arrive.  He looked like hell and he didn't care. His eyes were bloodshot from crying and from the lack of sleep that a two weeks with a newborn baby, a flight and a three-hour concert had provided, his hair was disheveled, he needed a shave, and he still wore the shirt he'd sweated through at the concert. He looked in his pocket at his cell phone...six missed calls, all from Kristen. It had been eleven o'clock when he'd stood in the dressing room and told her he'd be in a car in half an hour. That had not happened, and despite his anger, he knew it was not cool that he'd made her worry. He just couldn't take her calls.

He used his wrists to rub at his dry, tired eyes, all of the things that Stevie had told him just a few hours ago still swimming in his mind. She had talked to him for about twenty minutes straight, which was nothing new for Stevie, he thought, but this time it was different. This time she was not trying to spare his feelings or keep from sounding like a jealous mistress...this time she had told him everything.

"The worst part of it was that she made it sound like it was all YOUR idea, Lindsey, like you're condescending to me up there and you're too much a of gentleman to tell me to stop," Stevie said. A Snapple iced tea from Karen balanced between her knees, she sat clutching the tissue he had reached for and given to her when the tears had come on, and his hand had fallen upon and stay on top of her knee.

"She told ME that it wasn't dignified and that I should knock it off," Lindsey told her. "She's said that a few times, actually."

"I kept waiting for her to confront me about us, you know...what's really happening," Stevie said. "That conversation never came. I finally realized that she doesn't have a clue what we've been up to; she's just pissed off that I continue to be in your life at all."

"I can't put my finger on it, but I know that somehow Stella was not an accident." Lindsey held a finger up to Stevie's lips when she opened her mouth to protest. "No, it's true. I love my children, Stevie...and Stella is a beautiful baby girl and I wouldn't dare go back in time and change that - or Will or LeeLee, for that matter - but somehow I just know she did it on purpose, like as if I wasn't listening to reason and she had to find some way of putting distance between us, like she had to invent a reason for me to be at home, not out touring with you and Mick and John and earning a living - which she WANTS me to do - and having a good time being who I really am."

"She throws the fact that she is a mother in my face every single time we talk," Stevie said. "She invents reasons to bring it up!" She looked at him seriously them and asked, "Linds, does she know about...?" She didn't have to complete the sentence; he understood that she meant the two pregnancies they'd lost, one when they were too young to be parents, one when they were too old.

"No! Neither of them!" Lindsey assured her. "She may know about 1979 if she was reading the internet carefully enough, but I doubt it...and that had nothing to do with me."

"You know we can never actually be sure about that, Linds." Stevie recalled confiding in Christine in a hotel room in Tacoma, Washington that while she'd told Don she was pregnant with his child, that had been in an effort to be able to go through with the abortion with no second thoughts. There was the possibility that her baby, whom she'd named Sara in her heart, could have been Lindsey's, and if she'd known that for sure, she'd have a twenty-four-year-old daughter now. She could never have aborted Lindsey's baby, so she had convinced herself Don was the father so she could do what she had to do and Fleetwood Mac could live on.

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