Smiling at Bella and planting the usual, nice-to-see-you-but-please-no-mingling kiss on her cheek, I grab the Grammy and put my lips to the mic. This feels a lot like home. The bumpy metal against my lips. But the only home I’m interested in right now is on the other end of the city, and I’m eager to get back to her.
“Congrats, Alex. I loved your ‘Back to Life’ tour! My personal favorite.” Bella kisses my cheek again. Now I smile my I-heard-your-music-and-I’m-not-sure-whether-to-take-that-as-a-compliment smirk, then turn back to the mic.
“Two years ago, I took this stage and made a fool of myself. I snatched a statue that wasn’t mine from someone who deserved it—yeah, mate, guess your album wasn’t so bad after all.” I shrug and gesture to Will, who laughs softly and shakes his head. His date—a girl he met building a school in Madagascar or something—squeezes his hand as Indie so often squeezes mine. After Fallon finished rehab, she got sentenced to five years of community service, more or less, wrote the Bellamys sincere apology letters, and she is now living with her photographer boyfriend in Georgia and works as a yoga instructor, far away from Hollywood.
“But things have changed since then. For one thing, I checked into rehab.” Pause. “Second time is the charm, right?” People clap, snort, some nod knowingly. “The second thing that happened was that I wrote an album I don’t deserve the credit for. ‘Midnight Blue’ doesn’t belong to me; it belongs to her. And that leads me to the third thing—I met a girl. I fell in love with her, and she fell in love with me. I took her words and her soul and every single original thought and beautiful lyric she gave me, thinking I didn’t owe anything back. But this girl, she became my muse for a reason, and she busted my balls for being a selfish arsehole. This girl can’t be here today because she’s in the delivery room, giving me yet another gift I don’t deserve. Only now I’m going to make sure I come close to being enough for her and our baby. I came here to grab this statue because I couldn’t make it to the last Grammys—I was too busy groveling and rehabbing in order to win the girl back—but now I need to go back to her. You see, my girl is so selfless, she told me if I never showed up to my own party, then she’d leave me, and I can’t let that happen. So, here you go, Stardust.” I raise the Grammy in my hand and look at the camera. “Got us another ugly decoration for the bathroom. Can I come back now? I’d really like to save the therapy money for when our kid finds out I was at the Grammys when she was born.”
The room fills with more laughter, and everybody gets up and claps, and even though it’s nice, I’m done settling for nice. I don’t want anyone to pat my ego, and have no need to prove myself to anyone. I jump onto Craig’s motorcycle—he is waiting for me, double-parked on the curb behind the arena—and we speed through the traffic jams of L.A. and toward the only thing that matters.
Poppy has her father’s eyes.
Brown flaked with green and gold, they stare back at me with a mixture of mischievousness and curiosity, telling me I’m in for a lot of trouble. She curls her fists and yawns toothlessly before closing her eyes again, and I can’t stop looking.
Poppy Elizabeth Winslow is a fresh start. She looks it, she smells it, and she is it. We all eventually experience tragedy in our lives—loss of relatives, friends, and things that are important to us—but not all of us are blessed enough to be given great gifts along with our losses.
I am.
I am that blessed.
I’ve lost my parents and gained a husband and a baby. A family that’s not patchy, like The Paris Dress, but resilient, like Alex and me. Every Friday, I invite Nat, Craig, Ziggy, Blake, Jenna, Cecilia, Alfie, Lucas, and Hudson over for dinner. We laugh and eat and play board games like it’s 1993 and these people are not rock stars. And to me, they aren’t. They’re just…people.
And it will probably be a little sad to leave here and move to our new apartment—or rather, flat, above the Cambridge Castle. But we love the apartment. It’s full of soul, and only five minutes away from the thrift shop I have leased a few months ago and is now getting refurbished.
Alex Winslow asked me to marry him three days after he barged back into my life and into my shitty apartment. I guess I had it coming. After all, everything he does is in spectacular fashion and grand gestures. The proposal happened on the floor of my rundown condo, right after we had kitchen sex. I was letting the cool tiles soothe my sore skin and staring through the window at a tree when he said, “You know, we could be doing the same thing, but on a nicer floor if we just moved in together.”