Page 106 of The Next Chapter

I shrug, feeling the urge to squirm at the way she’s looking at me, as if she’s trying to see through me.

‘I haven’t really sung anything in a long time,’ I tell her.

‘Why is that?’

I’m not about to get into this.

I shrug. ‘No real reason.’

There’s a moment of silence and I think that somehow, I’ve given the game away. Though how could I have done? I’ve sung a load of generic karaoke songs. Lola takes a breath, and I think then that she’s going to tell me that she knows, she knows who I am.

And… I don’t mind. At first, I just wanted the space to get to know Lola without this thing hanging over us. Then not telling her became the default, because I didn’t want to admit I lied about knowing who she was. But now, I’m past that. I want her to recognize who I am to her.

I steel myself for hearing her say the words.

Except those aren’t the words she says. Instead, she says, ‘Lily, I don’t suppose you’d sing with me?’

Chapter Nineteen

‘Okay,’ I answer, way more nervous to sing with Lola than anyone else. ‘Sure, why not?’ I give the fakest nonchalant shrug in the history of fake nonchalance. My voice is unnaturally high.

‘I’ll go get my guitar.’ Lola leaves, and I know that she’s going to her office to get the guitar that she has hanging on the wall there.

I walk back over to Noah. He’s leaning against the wall to the dining room, watching everyone else mingle.

‘I’m going to sing with Lola,’ I tell him where he’s standing with James. Saying it makes it even more real.

James’s eyebrows lift up. ‘Lola hardly ever sings on karaoke night.’

‘She doesn’t?’ I swallow.

‘I think you’ll sound great together.’ Noah must be able to sense my nerves. ‘Look, she’s waiting for you.’

I twist around and sure enough, Lola’s stood by the laptop, her dad’s guitar strap over her shoulder, looking closer to Lola the star from Beyond Baton Rouge than I’ve ever seen her.

‘Did you want to play the piano?’ she asks. And at this point it’s very much in for a penny in for a pound, because in a second, I’m pulling the piano out from the wall, opening the lid with a clunk. The whole thing is very sobering.

‘It’s been a long time since I played.’ We seem to have agreed on what we’re singing at least. Lola strums and I recognize the opening chords of ‘Eyes Full of Wonder’. I suppose that I did tell Lola it was a favourite of Mum’s. And Lola obviously knows all the words. She wrote them, after all.

She strums the guitar some more and fiddles with the tuning keys at the end. It’s the most melodic of all Beyond Baton Rouge’s songs. ‘Pared back’, I’ve seen it described as. Apparently, people went absolutely wild for it. It was their last single and it made Lola quitting seem even more inexplicable.

‘You said that about singing.’ Lola brings me out of my recollections.

I risk a glance out and see that everyone has moved to stand in a semi-circle around the front of the hall. At least some of these people must know who Lola is. So, they know that they’re about to get a show from a real-life superstar, for free. I wonder if this is why more people seem to come to karaoke than anything else that Lola offers.

Lola starts to strum the opening notes again and I hover my fingers over the keys I’ll need, hoping that muscle memory kicks in. It’s all so painfully familiar to what I used to do with Mum. Something catches in my throat and the keys get blurry in front of me.

Lola’s voice is, well, it’s amazing. I’ve heard her before, of course. There are plenty of videos of the band on YouTube and I’ve probably contributed no small amount to their crazy high views over the years. But hearing her in real life is different. And it’s completely at odds with the quiet, softly spoken Lola.

I join in after a second. I’m nowhere near as good as her, but we sound nice together. The words come back to me like I sang them yesterday and I’m sure my fingers aren’t in any way connected to my brain. They dance over the keys like they’ve a mind of their own.

With eyes wide in wonder, you looked at me and I think you knew.

That I was just no good for you.

I’ve sang the words before, but I’ve never really thought about them. About what Lola was trying to say. Everyone assumed that she’d written the song about a lover, possibly Ashton after things went wrong between them. But what if it isn’t a song about lovers? What if it’s a song about something else entirely?

And now you’re gone, it’s just too late.