The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits

Prologue

Detroit, 2004

“I never should have touched you,”

Russell D’Angelo says to the empty room.

He twists the lock, toes off his cowboy boots, and leans his forehead against the hotel-room door, against the framed placard.

He’s too close to read the emergency evacuation routes it details, even if his eyes weren’t blurry with tears.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, hard.

This is an emergency, the worst he’s ever been in, and knowing how to exit the building safely won’t help.

He is thinking about how she looked, about what he’d said.

I never meant for this to happen, he’d told her as she’d glared at him from the hallway, her face shocked and pale and heartbroken.

He’d kept talking, hating the pleading sound of his voice.

I’m sorry.

Russell shakes his head to stop the thoughts.

Three paces bring him to the bar cart.

He unscrews the cap of the whiskey bottle and lifts it to his mouth, welcoming the burn of the liquor.

His eyes are closed, but he can still see them both.

Two sets of eyes, two faces, turned toward his.

Different faces, but with the same shape to their lips, the same slope of their cheeks.

Two women, waiting for an answer Russell didn’t have.

“I’m an idiot,”

he tells the room.

And it’s true.

He hadn’t even noticed what was happening until it was too late.

It wasn’t until he was standing in front of an officiant, thirty of their closest friends, three hundred fellow celebrities, and a photographer from People magazine that he’d looked over his bride’s shoulder and caught her sister’s eyes, and the knowledge of the mistake that he was making hit him like a punch to the breastbone, rattling his heart. “I do,”

he’d said.

I’m fucked, he’d thought.

And from that moment on, a part of him has been waiting, counting down toward this place and this night.

You have to choose, she’d told him.

Except there isn’t a choice here.

Not really.

Not at all.

Twenty minutes later, half the whiskey is gone, and Russell’s leaning heavily against the wall, looking blearily around the room.

His eyes move from object to object without seeing.

There’s the bed, still made.

His suitcase, open on the luggage stand, clothes spilling out from its unzipped top—his jeans and tee shirt, the silly leather pants the stylist insists on because he’s the lead guitar player in what is, currently, one of the most successful bands in the country, and leather pants are what cute boys in hot bands are required to wear.

There might even be a law about it.

“I never should have touched you,”

Russell says again.

He hums a handful of notes in a minor key and decides to write the words down.

Moving carefully, deliberately in his inebriation, he locates the tiny pad of hotel stationery and a pen, and writes with care, imagining piano chords, a mournful twangy guitar.

Maybe the words will be the backbone of a chorus, the way into a song, he thinks.

And then remembers what he’s done, and how that door is closed.

There will be no more songs for him.

He bends to collect his boots, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull them on before walking out into the hall.

It’s the middle of the night.

It’s quiet, and all the doors are closed.

Nobody sees him as he walks through the lobby, bootheels clicking.

Nobody sees as he pushes the heavy glass doors open and steps out into the cold and the dark.