Page 159 of Wingwoman
Rick finished his coffee and slid the mug away from him. “Well I’m not known for feedin’ chickens or taking care of puppies or interior design or goat wranglin’, but here I am. Better at it than I ever thought possible. Sometimes the things we’re not known for are exactly what we should be doing with our lives.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Actually, no. It’s the hardest damn thing in the world for me to say. Look here, this wedding song… it doesn’t have to behappy.”
I raised my brows. “It doesn’t?”
“No. It just needs to be hopeful. You can be in your darkest days, but instead of leaning into the despair, look forward to the future. Write about the optimism of days to come. Your first hit was fictional about a girl taking her life, right?”
My throat clenched. “Yeah.”
“Well… this can be fictional about your happiness. Createthatstory. Who knows…” He leaned in, gently jabbing his elbow into my ribs. “Maybe by writing it into the song, you’ll manifest it to be your reality.”
Just like I had almost manifested Jenn’s suicide.
I wiped at my weary eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Yeah, right. A lying asshole like me doesn’t even deserve to win your daughter back.”
Rick shrugged. “Well, if a drunk asshole like me still deserves a second chance with my kids and Vivian… then you do too. Our two realities don’t exist in a vacuum. So which is it, Josh? Do we get the girl? Or do we live our miserable lives alone? You with your music… me with my whiskey.”
His words struck me like a mallet to the head. Did I deserve Hope despite everything? Could that even be possible?
On cue, the bells over the door chimed and Hope’s voice filled the empty bar. “Dad!”
A rainbow entering a darkened room.
The sight of her after all this time was the fresh spring water after weeks in a desert. She was a ray of sunshine peeking through storm clouds.
And the moment I saw her, lyrics and melodies slammed into me, faster than I could scribble them down on the napkin beside me.
Forty-Five
HOPE
“Dad! Are you okay?”I rushed over to where he was slumped at the bar and inspected him.
Eyes: bloodshot. Skin: clammy. Breath…whoa. Whiskey.Allthe whiskey.
“I’m fine, Lovebug. Other than being a damned idiot and falling off the wagon hard.”
“You’re not an idiot—” Both Josh and I spoke at once.
Time slowed as from over my dad’s head, my eyes slowly met Josh’s for the first time in weeks.
I wasn’t prepared.
I wasn’t prepared for the sharp blue depths of his eyes. Or the way his hair had grown out just a bit more, curling over his ears and falling across his forehead. I wasn’t prepared for the quick flash of dimple as his mouth curved at the sight of me.
How dare he look this good while I had spent the better part of a week crying into a pint of ice cream and basically being a living, breathing cliché.
He was hunched over several napkins scribbling what looked like lyrics in his messy cursive. Curiosity ached at my core, but I forced my gaze away from them. If they were anything like his last song, I wanted nothing to do with it. Or him.
“Iaman idiot,” Dad said. “I’m an idiot for blowing a year of sobriety. I’m an idiot for risking everything I’ve built with Vivian.”
“You’re not risking anything,” I said, pulling my credit card out of my purse to hand to Nina. I’d been through this before and rookie mistake number one is leaving without settling the bill.
Nina waved me away. “Josh already settled the tab.”
Great. Just great. Add on another hundred bucks to that fifty thousand I owed to Josh.
