Say You Love Me (Double Love Trilogy Conclusion)

Help Me Make The Feeling Grow

Penn Castle
Dorset, United Kingdom
Saturday, February 11, 2023
(5:00 pm)
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"Holy shit, Aunt Stevie! Can this place be more extra?"

LeeLee Buckingham was walking a few steps behind her brother and sister, her head back as far as it would go to look up at the massive chandelier that hung in the large foyer of Penn Castle, and she slowly spun around, still walking, taking it all in with a look of awe on her face.

"Listen, I'd love to take credit for all of this because extra is my middle name," said Stevie as she entered the foyer to greet Lindsey's three grown children with hugs. LeeLee's voice echoing in the foyer had alerted her that they'd arrived, and she hugged LeeLee tight just as she had since she was a little girl, running around the studio and backstage areas with her big brother and begging to try on the "Gold Dust Woman" cape. She released her future stepdaughter finished her thought with, "Actually, blame Aunt Christine for this one!"

"Bullshit!" Will Buckingham came towards Stevie smiling, and they hugged. She kissed him on both cheeks before letting him go. He said, "Aunt Christine knows her English houses, but this is all you; I know it."

"You'll lose that bet, kid." She winked at him with a smile, and that's when she saw Stella lurking quietly by the door and pulled her into a hug, saying, "Stella Bella! Don't stand here like a bump on a log! Come in, come in!" Stella smiled shyly back as she walked with Stevie through the foyer. Lindsey appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen and broke into a smile - his kids had arrived to watch him marry the woman who'd sacrificed her heart for years so they could be born into a loving family.

It had never ceased to amaze Lindsey how Stevie had loved his children from the beginning. He remembered her sitting in the backyard of his first house with Kristen on his birthday in 1998, in from Phoenix where she'd spent most of the year after the fantastic high of The Dance and the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and the gut-wrenching low of letting him go to Kristen for the chance to have the family he'd always wanted. She had talked a blue streak as if everything was normal over iced tea, and then held Will in her arms like the most natural mother ever and called him "Little Linds" - except she wasn't his mother. A cruel twist of fate had ensured that he'd always be the baby of Lindsey's that had thrived while the one they'd conceived was lost. She'd rocked him to sleep later that day in his Jungle Book nursery and sang John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy", and that had been his nickname ever since. Lindsey has felt like his soul was shaking that afternoon, like he was feeling someone pulling his heart out of his chest and crushing it in their hands. He'd never felt so terrible for another human being in all his life.

That is, until LeeLee came along two years later. Lindsey hadn't spoken to Stevie since their tear-filled phone call the night of his island wedding; he'd respected her wishes. She was touring with Trouble In Shangri-La in 2000, and be remembered her appearing on The Rosie O'Donnell Show and talking about "Fall From Grace" - Rosie's favorite track on the album, she'd told Stevie during the interview - and knowing damn well what that song was about. She'd told Rosie she'd been too depressed to write and that Tom Petty had given her the nudge she needed after she'd asked for his songwriting help and Tom had seen it as a red flag. He knew why she was too depressed to write; he was the reason! There he was, married now to the woman who'd given him a son, now a daughter...but there was trouble in Shangri-La, Stevie knew. It was the trouble that came when two very different people tried to make a life together, the trouble a man had at home when the woman he slept with at night was not his first choice. And he knew Kristen a lot better by the time LeeLee had come along...he knew she was a smart woman, and smart enough to conveniently get pregnant with a second child so that after two years, marriage seemed all the more inevitable. Stevie had rocked another one of Lindsey's babies in her arms and sang her to sleep during her visit to the house to meet the new baby between tour dates - "I Hope You Dance", her favorite new song on the radio that year - and had loved her just as much as her big brother, who was two and spent much of her visit to the Buckingham residence that rainy afternoon clinging to her shins and yelling, "Sing, Aunt Steebee! Sing it bigger!"