Page 12 of Shattered Chords

Curious, I listened to the wall of sounds that assaulted my ears. “He’s not bad.”

“Not bad?” She rolled her eyes. “His riffs are sick.”

Maybe that’s because of all the drugs he’s done,a voice in my head suggested. Psychedelics fueled creativity. It was a well-known fact.

A chill zipped down my spine at the mere notion that my daughter’s idols were junkies. I tried not to overthink it. Addiction wasn’t a choice but a disease, and measuring a person's worth by their flaws and weaknesses didn’t seem fair, but at the end of the day, I still asked myself whether I was making a mistake by being so liberal with Ally.

Was I a good mother?

We spent the rest of the drive listening to Dante’s guitar magic and arguing over tattoos. Apparently, my teenage daughter thought fifteen was a good age to “get inked.”

“Over my dead body, Ally,” I said, turning the corner.

“But I’m in a band, Mom,” she squealed. Her voice grew high and meshed with the music. “No one’s going to take me seriously.”

“Tattoos won’t make you play better.”

“That’s not why people get inked.”

“Exactly. And that’s why you don’t need any ink. We’ll talk about it in three years.”

“You don’t understand anything,” Ally grumbled under her breath.

Heaviness filled my chest. My little girl wasn’t little anymore. She was all attitude and sharp edges, an angry animal who wasn’t afraid to show some teeth.

With the music still playing, we entered the driveway of our ranch-style two-bedroom house that sat on a small stretch of land on the cul-de-sac of a street in Woodland Hills. My family was well-to-do and Ally’s father provided agreed-upon financial support, but it wasn’t enough to buy real estate closer to Dream Bride. Even for a business-savvy person like me, Calabasas was too expensive, and I had a fifteen-year-old daughter who thought I was a millionaire.

I parked the car and killed the engine. The music was replaced by tense silence. Part of me expected to hear more nagging from Ally, but she scrambled out of her seat, grabbed the guitar, and rushed inside without a word. Doors slammed. One after another in typical tantrum manner. Nothing this or any house with a teenager hadn’t witnessed before.

Fifteen minutes later, when I was getting ready to start dinner, a rumbling noise came from Ally’s room. She was relentless. Even the walls I’d let her soundproof so she could practice at home didn’t contain her anger. The guitar screamed for a good hour. Maybe longer. And I had no choice but to bake chicken and chop salad surrounded by the roar of rock classics instead of my usual new age playlist.

At a quarter to eight, Ally sauntered into the kitchen with a demand. “Can I have my twenty bucks?”

Don’t let her push you around,my voice of reason that often failed me said.

Hands on hips, I spun to face her. “You just received a six-thousand-dollar guitar.”

“That doesn’t count.” Frustration pinched her features.

“Yes, it does.” I heaved out a loud, exasperated sigh.

We locked gazes and stared at each other for a long moment. This was our thing.

I dined alone on the terrace under the dark, star-littered sky. Obviously, my back yard couldn’t compare to the lush lawns of the Malibu mansions and Calabasas estates, but it was cozy. Every week, a gardener came by to take care of my flowers and orange trees. Ally’s old swing, which she hadn’t used in years, hung from the branch of an old oak tree spread over a good portion of the property. A couple sets of string lights that I’d been promising myself to put away since last Christmas still decorated the fixtures and dangled from the roof of the porch. The house didn’t come with a pool, but it had a small barbeque and a picnic area, and in the summer, when school wasn’t in session, we loved having meals outside.

Opening a bottle of wine Harper brought me from Napa Valley a few months ago seemed more than fitting tonight. Sunday was my only day off and a war with my daughter over tattoos and money had turned my homemade dinner into a lonely and depressing venture.

Lately, I’d been having a lot of those.

My phone sat on the table next to my glass, screen dark. Then the wine I’d been nursing for what seemed like an eternity finally hit the sweet spot. A pleasant haze swirled in my head and stomach. I felt at ease and rather curious. My mind leapt back to my earlier encounter with the rock star Ally idolized. I still couldn’t understand how I’d agreed to his offer. Silly me, I’d fallen for his words. He was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Too charming. Straightforward. Ruggedly handsome and impossible to resist.

Don’t go there, Camille. Men are full of shit. All of them.

Setting my glass aside, I grabbed the phone, opened a browser, and typed in his name.

Let’s see who you really are, Dante Martinez, and why the hell you needed to buy my daughter a guitar that costs more than my mortgage payment.

The moment I hit Enter, countless headlines came up on the screen. Tabloids loved him. He was all over BuzzFeed, TMZ, and other less than reputable publications that specialized in celebrity gossip. He was also inRolling Stone,People, andTime.

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