Page 39 of Reverb

“She found out about Chase,” I said. “On her own.”

That surprised him. He flinched, looked up at the ceiling. Then back at me. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “That must have flipped you out.”

I shrugged, my throat tight. “It was twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years,” Denver said, “doesn’t mean a fucking thing.”

A weight lifted from my shoulders. Because Denver got it. He just did.

Twenty years or not, I could still see Chase. I could still hear his voice. I could still smell the old car we took to L.A. and hear the music we’d played on the trip down—I’d never be able to listen to the Pixies again.

I could still hear the silence of our apartment the day I’d come home and known that somehow he’d left, even though he was still there. I could still feel the moment I’d known it was too late, that I would give everything I had for a rewind button to take me back a few hours.

I’d written “Fuck You California” because I was angry about it. But maybe I felt other things, too.

“If you ask her not to write about it,” Denver said, “I think she’ll listen.”

He was right. She would listen, and not just because we’d done what we’d done in her attic. She’d listen because she was trying to tell the real story, not just whatever was sensational. I hadn’t understood that in New York, but I understood it now.

“She can write about it,” I said. “I won’t stop her. It’s the truth. If she’s writing, she may as well write the truth.”

He didn’t have an answer for that, and I bent to the guitar again, fixing the last string.

Denver turned the page in his notebook and picked up a pen. “If she didn’t like you,” he said, “she would never have stayed in your room. You know that, right?” He glanced at me. “Sometimes, the smart ones, the ones who aren’t impressed by fame—they’re harder to win. They don’t care about bullshit. You have to work at it. You have to be better than you were before. But when they like you, if you earn it, they give you everything. You just have to be patient.”

My throat tried to close again. Sienna was nine years younger than me, smarter than me, just starting her career. Nothing about us would work.

I picked up the guitar and played a few notes. It sounded much better than before, just needed a few minutes of tuning. “Enough talking,” I said. “Let’s get this song down.”

“Yeah,” Denny said. “Let’s do that.”

FIFTEEN

Sienna

“Of course,” the woman sitting across from me said, “dating a musician is the worst possible idea.”

I looked up from the note I was writing. “Excuse me?”

“You know, the usual.” She ticked items off on her fingers. “The drinking. The drugs. The nonstop cheating. Never home. Irresponsible. Always broke. Unreliable. He’ll dump you and forget you in a heartbeat.” She lowered her hand. “Right? Any woman with self-respect runs the other way.”

I kept my features schooled, willing myself not to show a reaction. This was an interview, and I was a professional. This was my career, not a comment on my personal life.

Besides, Stone and I weren’t dating.

Raine Baker picked up her mug of tea. I’d been trying to pin down the words to describe her while we sat here in this coffee shop, and now they came into my head: Raine had the air of a real, honest-to-goodness grownup.

She was in her midthirties, beautiful, with a slim body and long, toned legs. She had a successful, self-made career as a real estate agent. She was wearing a well-tailored pencil skirt and a silk blouse because we were meeting in the middle of her workday. Her makeup was on point. She was the mother of a thirteen-year-old girl who was already very cool. She’d been married and divorced, and she owned a house.

She was maybe seven years older than me, and she was a freaking adult. She likely didn’t work in her dad’s attic. She probably knew all about things like under-eye creams and what the price of eggs should be and how life insurance worked. My own mom would probably ask Raine for advice.

It should be intimidating, talking to her. But I’d seen her much messier when she visited Neal during the tour, and the weeks on the road with the Road Kings had given me confidence. They’d been jerks to me, and I’d survived it. I’d driven myself halfway across the country instead of riding on a cushy bus. I’d lived on granola bars, gone without sleep, and driven to Cleveland while sick with a cold. I was a lot harder to intimidate now than I’d been before I left.

I should probably thank the Road Kings for that. But I wasn’t going to.

“So dating a musician is a bad idea,” I said to Raine, “and yet you just told me that you and Neal are back together.”

“That’s now,” Raine said. “But when we first met, when I got pregnant—we were both so young. And he was on the road. We could never have made it work, settling down together and raising a child. That’s why we didn’t get together back then.”

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