Page 35 of Wicked Destiny

The “oh shit” moment.

I’m caught.

There’s nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.

sixteen

The Same Day

Carter talked me into staying.

We played opening night and instead of getting on a plane like sensible men and spending our off-week in Capri, we let the promoter talk us into a few more days in Paris for the whole rockstar she-bang.

We’ve been to Michelin star restaurants. Fashion houses I’ve never managed to learn the names of. I’ve spent a lot of time in my hotel trying to catch up on sleep.

Tonight, though, it’s Carter, Lianne, and me, back at the festival grounds on a warm evening to catch a fellow Seattle musician called Lake Lyon. The whole industry seems to think he’s the next big thing.

I haven’t seen Lianne since the funeral. Carter’s on-and-off forever has been in my life almost as long as the band has. She’s the mother of his son, a prima ballerina who’s performed on three continents and still crosses a crowded field like it ought to part for her.

Carter’s off finding the VIP loo, leaving me at the back of the crowd with her, which is dangerous, because Lianne is one of the few people alive who can pull the truth out of me without trying.

Tonight, she took one look at my face and asked what was eating me. I told her. All of it. My utter loneliness. The class. Elodie. How it started. Spending a month together holed up in my house. The morning my daughter walked in and the phone call where I did the right thing and ended it. Also, the fact I’ve regretted it with every cell in my body.

I’m done pretending to be altruistic. Lianne would see right through me anyway.

“I did it for Billie.” It’s the cleanest way I can explain it. “She lost her mother and I couldn’t be the father who humiliates her on top of it. She asked me to end it, so I did. It was the right call. The responsible, adult, correct thing, and it’s hollowing me out from the inside.”

“Are you sure it was the right thing, Beau?” Lianne leans in and stares through my soul.

“I don’t know, and I’m finding it hard to even do my job anymore. When I get up on a stage, I can’t find the man who’s supposed to own it. There’s nothing up here now but her.” I tap my own temple, disgusted. “The punchline is, if it ever came out I was in love with a twenty-two-year-old, the fans wouldn’t crucify me. They’d crucify her. Label her a gold digger who sunk her claws into the sad, rich widower to take him for everything he’s worth. They’d reduce this beautiful soul into a social media meme.”

As I’m speaking, Lianne slides an arm around my waist and leans into me and I drop mine over her shoulders, because thirty years of friendship through the worst of times makes it easy. We’re two old pals holding each other up at the back of a festival.

She lets me get all the way to the end. Stays quiet a while, contemplative as the stage lights shine in the dusk.

“Love doesn’t check a birth certificate, my friend. It never has, and you of all people know how little sense it makes about who connects with whom, why and when.” A pause. “You want to know what I’ve done my whole life? Run love on a plus/minus comparison in my head. Every round with Carter, and God knows there have been a hundred, I make the list. He’s an addict. He’s my true love. He’ll hurt me again. He’s changed. It won’t last. Maybe we’re meant to be. The math never works, so I keep walking away from the one thing my heart is sure of.”

She looks up at me. “My great regret isn’t the times he hurt me. It’s the years I threw away being reasonable. If I had them back, I’d lead with my heart every single time, because when you love someone, you know. You don’t decide it or earn it or age into it. You know. You spend the rest of your life either honoring it or explaining it away.”

I tell her what Billie said. The whole brutal, mostly accurate, tough love speech.

Lianne doesn’t wave it off, because she’s a parent too and she knows the fear of fucking up in front of your kids.

“Billie loves you and she’s frightened. She’s also not entitled to tell you how to live your life.” Lianne takes my hand, the way she’s taken it over the last three decades at funerals, after overdoses and through green-room catastrophes. “You’re not a cautionary tale. You’re a survivor. A man who nursed a dying woman for years and never once let her see you falter. When she died, you became a hermit, which is understandable. Beau, honey. You’re allowed more than that. Whoever walks into your life, at whatever age, however it looks to the neighbors, you owe it to yourself to stay open. You’ve grieved Yolanda respectfully and you’ve earned the right to have a second great love.”

The minute Lianne’s words leave her mouth, I feel an overwhelming energy near me. I don’t decide to look. Something in me turns my head the way a compass needle turns, no thought in it, and I gaze out over a sea of strangers in a Paris park and find her.

Elodie.

A few feet away, frozen midstep, a beer in each hand, staring at me like she’s watching the dead get up and walk.

For a second my brain refuses it. She can’t be here. It’s impossible. She’s anywhere but the one field I’m standing in and my first thought, God forgive me, is a paranoid little flare.

Did she follow me here?

Then I see the shock and the horror on her face and the way she’s stumbling backward. She’s as blindsided as I am and it’s cracking her open where she stands.

Elodie finds her footing, drops the beers and turns to disappear into the crowd.