“Someone’s anxious.” I cocked her a teasing brow, going for light as I could when the weight of this reality had followed me all the way back to Los Angeles.
Four days since everything had gone down in Nashville.
Four days since Emily had looked at me with the hatred I knew I was going to leave behind in her eyes.
Four days of feeling like I was slowly bleeding out.
Four days since the fire she’d lit went dim.
Maggie choked out a laugh. “I’ve been desperate to get out of this house for four years. I almost ran down to meet you at the end of the drive.”
She handed me her bag, and I slung the strap over my shoulder, slowing when her expression turned serious.
“I just want to start over, Royce. I want a life. A real one. And I can’t do that here. Not after everything. I’m finished being scared.”
I took her by the chin. “And that’s what you’re going to have.”
Her smile was small and sad. “And now you get one, too. A restart. A new chance.”
I tried to smile back. Was pretty sure it was a grimace. “Think it’s too late for me, Mag-Pie.”Thirty-OneEmilyThe harsh blaze of the summer sun beat down from the bluest sky. Blinding rays glinted in golden streaks against my eyes, the air shimmering with the fever of it. Sweat gathered along my hairline, dribbling down my back and chest, soaking my tank top.
A swell of dizziness spun my head as I stood in the swamp of unbearable heat. But I forced myself to keep going, to keep plucking at the ocean of weeds that had grown up in my mama’s vegetable garden.
It was all I could do.
Keep moving.
Keep busy.
Don’t stop.
Because if I did, I knew I was goin’ to crumble.
Fully succumb to this broken heart that just kept growing wider and deeper. A crevice that had cracked right down the middle of me.
Splitting me in two.
An abyss.
Infinite.
The weeks had passed in a blur of speeding days that dragged on forever.
Future never so uncertain.
Not mine or the band’s or Mylton Records’.
Sorrow clawed through my being, and I blinked my eyes frantically, trying to see past the blinding pain that seared.
Gripping me in a fist of hopelessness.
“Would you come inside before you have yourself a heat stroke?”
My mama’s voice hit me from behind, and I raked my forearm across my face, swiping up the moisture, not sure if it was sweat or tears. Gathering myself, I swung around to face her, pinning on the fakest smile I could find.
She just about stumbled in her tracks when she got a good look at me. “Oh, Emily.”
Sympathy rolled out.
Sympathy I didn’t have the power to stand up under.
“Don’t, Mama. I’m just fine.”
A frown dented her forehead. “Just fine you are not.”
She kept coming closer. With every step, I could feel the exterior I’d been fronting crumbling. The faked smiles and the shallow conversations I’d been giving the last four weeks drying up.
We’d labeled Carolina George’s break a vacation. A celebration of being signed. A commemoration of the huge influx of followers we’d gained and spike in sales after the performance we’d made at the ACB Awards.
We didn’t let on that we’d been crushed. Had the rug ripped out from under us.
Neither Richard nor I able to stand.
He’d been . . . devastated when he found out what Cory had done to me.
Taking on the blame but unwilling to confess to me why he was hiding what he was.
He refused to explain what those pictures meant, even when I promised I’d still keep his secret. That I had no place to judge.
While I’d walked around like a zombie. Unable to feel and feeling far too much.
Watching the tabloids go wild with the speculation over Mylton Records, a barrage of pictures of Royce that had surfaced from years before, when he’d been a rising star.
Streaking and shining and so gloriously bright in all his desperate darkness.
Before he’d fallen.
Bound behind bars in a tiny cell for three years—something he’d never once mentioned—before he’d been released and found himself as Mylton Records second-in-line.
Now at the helm since Karl Fitzgerald had been dethroned.
God, it hurt.
Finding out that I didn’t know him at all.
That his intentions might not have been wicked, but had still been wrong.
That he’d used me up and spit me out.
Now I was left unable to wipe the picture of his wife’s face from my mind.
His fingers in her hair as he’d sagged with clear relief.
Like he’d been overcome with joy that she was free and safe, too.
And how could I bemoan that?
I just wished he wouldn’t have made me fall in love with him along the way.
Just another one of those pawns on his fingers that had been played.
“I’m barely holding it together, Mama,” I said in a rush.
Suddenly weak, I stumbled forward and slumped down onto the lawn that stretched between the garden and the back of my childhood home.