Chapter Twenty-Six. Mackenzie
chapter twenty-six
MACKENZIE
There are no two words more perilously at odds with each other than “if” and “when.” “If” can fill you up with false hope or false dread. “If” is an infinite number of ways a scenario can shake out, in or out of your favor.
“When” is a hammer drop. There’s no undoing it once it lands.
Right now, I am stuck between the two. Nobody has tracked the deleted video back to me. But there are screenshots of it all over the internet. It’s only a matter of time.
“I thought you were okay with this,” says Serena.
It’s just the two of us in the reading room now, a cozy space on the first floor of the lake house with wide windows and built-in window seats, bookshelves, and a pillowy blue couch.
We sent Hannah back out to the party. She was reluctant to leave, but technically nothing’s happened yet.
There’s still a chance nothing will happen at all.
But not a likely one. I sink onto the couch, pressing my palms to my face. “That song was never meant to go live.”
“Last” is scathing. Unfair, even. I poured all of my hurt into it because there was no place else for it to go.
Not just because I was too proud to admit that I’d fallen for him, but because I knew, deep down, I couldn’t blame him for it.
Sam was a lot of things back in the day—reckless and cocky and a pain in my ass—but he was honest with me from the very start.
“Are you two together?” Serena asks.
I give her a bare nod. “Yeah.”
She clears her throat. “He’s changed, then?” she asks.
I glance up warily, but there’s no trace of judgment in her eyes. “We both have,” I say.
She’s quiet for a moment. “Well. He’ll understand, then. He’s an artist, too.”
Some of the tightness in my chest finally eases up. She’s right. It doesn’t make the guilt disappear, but it helps with some of the fear.
I know Sam isn’t looking for an easy out like so many others did, once they were bored of the chase. But I can’t turn off that anxious voice in my head. The one that reminds me this would be the perfect out if he was.
Because not only is Sam going to figure out the song is about him, but the rest of the world will, too. I know all too well how it could play out. Poor Mackenzie Waters, America’s perpetually tragic sweetheart—versus Sam Blaze, a former bad boy too easy to turn into a villain.
Serena sits next to me and does something she hasn’t done in ages, and did rarely even back in the day. She wraps an arm around my shoulders and presses me to her. It’s stilted and awkward. But it means more coming from her than the perfect hug from anyone else would.
“The rest of it will be fine,” she says. “We planned for this pos sibility. Isla will be surprised, but she’s trained to handle things like this.”
I let myself take my first full breath in an hour. “Thanks.”
She squeezes my shoulder. “I know I’ve been—” She stops short. “Distant,” she says. “But I’ll always have your back.”
I close my eyes. I don’t know if that’s true. I know in my heart that Serena would do anything she could to protect me from the rest of the world. But there’s not much in this world that would feel as hurtful or personal as the way Serena has pushed me out of her life.
“Serena,” I say carefully. “Why are you delaying the tour?”
I feel her chest go still against mine. After a moment she says in a quiet voice, “Why are you so worried about it?”
“Because I love you,” I say, without hesitating. “Because I’ll always have your back.”
She pulls her arm back, setting her hands in her lap and staring down at them. “I’ve been awful to you.”
It’s the last thing I’m expecting her to say. It’s not an apology or an explanation, but it’s a relief to hear it. To know the hurt wasn’t just in my head.
I nudge my shoulder into hers. “We’ve both had our moments. But you and me—we’re each other’s family. The one we chose.”
I don’t have to go any deeper than that for her to know what I mean.
My relationship with my parents might feel hollow sometimes, but hers is transactional.
They were treating Serena like an ATM even before we made it big.
The money she supports them with is drops in a bucket now, but I know that doesn’t make it hurt any less, that their love comes with an agenda.
Still, I’m not expecting the way she starts to shake.
“I can do all this on my own. But I just—didn’t think the pressure would be so different, when it wasn’t all three of us.” She lets out a breathy laugh. “So many people’s careers depend on strangers liking me.”
I try not to sound too surprised, but I can’t help it. “People love you,” I insist.
Serena shakes her head sharply. “You know how it goes. They love the idea of me. And that’s fine. It’s easy to be in control of an idea. I was so good at being in control of everything in Thunder Hearts that I thought it would be easier when I was just doing it alone.”
She pulls in a shaky breath, her fingers curling and uncurling.
“It turns out it was you two who made things easy. Hannah kept everything so calm, and you were always a natural. You didn’t need people to love an idea of you. They already loved you .”
Serena’s words from Hannah’s launch flash back to me: You got to be the fun, messy one that everyone loved. I chalked it up to her trying to get a rise out of me. I didn’t realize it went so deep, but maybe I should have. Serena has always been so particular about the way she’s perceived.
“They just liked me because they thought I was a mess,” I remind her wryly. “I didn’t want people to see me that way. And I know deep down you don’t, either.”
Serena swallows hard. “The funny thing is, deep down I don’t want anything.
I don’t care if people like me. But I know what happens if they don’t.
There’s so much money on the line. So many people depending on me.
Not just my family now, but the label, and the crew, and these kids —” Her eyes well up fast. “The ones who have been opening for me. Every single one of them took that shit contract. They’re all tied up in it. ”
She puts a hand to her chest, as if she’s anticipating the hives before they come. There’s an ache in her face that I recognize. It’s the same guilt I’m feeling right now.
But I knew what might happen if I lied about Seven. Serena was only doing what she does best: trying to help.
I know she doesn’t want to hear it, but I say it anyway. “It wasn’t your fault, what happened to Rocket and the others.”
Serena is shaking her head before I can get the words out.
“It was,” she insists. “I thought I was right. I always do. And I bullied him into taking that deal, the same way I bullied you into trying to do that duet with me, because I just—always think I’m right about everything.
” Her eyes well up. “But all I did was hurt people.”
Her voice cracks, and then the rest of her does.
Silent tears stream down her face. She blinks, stunned at herself, but doesn’t stop.
Instead, she looks to me like she’s lost, and doesn’t know what to say next, or how to say it.
Like she’s looking for that wavelength we used to share, and can’t find it anymore.
But I will. For so long I’ve been worried about saying something that might push Serena away. Instead, I tiptoed and let things slide, and it let this tension between us go on so long that it almost finished us. If I don’t want it to happen again, I have to tell her the truth.
“You pushing for the duet didn’t hurt me,” I say. “The way you pushed me away did.”
Serena closes her eyes. “I never meant to hurt you,” she chokes out.
“I know,” I say easily. “Because I know you. And I think you were doing it to hurt yourself.”
She pulls in a shuddering breath, but it still takes her a few moments to collect herself enough to speak.
“I was angry about the way things were,” she says.
“Things that weren’t your fault, but—things you didn’t have to deal with anymore, so I felt angry at you, and then angry at myself for feeling that way.
So I just—had to avoid you, because that wasn’t fair to you, either.
” She presses her hands to her eyes, shaking her head into them. “I know that sounds crazy.”
No, it doesn’t. It sounds a hell of a lot like what I did to Sam. I thought I was alone in the way I felt for him, so I pulled back hard and fast before he could see how much it hurt. Before he could think I was crazy for feeling that deeply at all.
“You can just tell me stuff like that,” I tell Serena. “After all the shit we’ve been through, we passed ‘crazy’ a long time ago.”
Serena doesn’t laugh. Instead, she holds my gaze, blinking back another round of tears, and says, “I’m so sorry.”
I don’t need her to say it. I felt it a long time ago. I felt it before she was willing to admit anything was wrong at all.
But I nod and tell her, “I’m sorry, too.”
I should have checked in more. If anyone was going to see the hairline fractures before Serena cracked, it was me. But I was so wrapped up in my own feelings that I buried myself in them, one song at a time.
It clicks, then—the real crux of this tension. Serena has always avoided her pain by trying to fix everyone else’s. I held on to my pain as if it could protect me from taking on any more of it. We were so at odds that it was only a matter of time before we hit a breaking point.
These past two years have been a seismic shift between us, but all the love is still there. We may spend our lives pushing up against each other, changing each other for the better, but we will always find our way back to this.
Serena puts her head on my shoulder, and I wrap my arms around her.
“They haven’t rescheduled the tour dates yet,” I remind her gently. “If you want to do it, you can. But if you aren’t sure, this is the best time to call it off.”
Serena’s throat bobs. “If I stop, Rocket and the others won’t have anywhere to perform. They won’t get enough buzz to get new contracts after they get released.”
“You know that’s not true,” I say. “There are plenty of other ways to help them that don’t involve you being miserable.”
Serena pulls back enough that I can see her face. “Like what?” she asks.
“I don’t know yet,” I say honestly. “But I do know we’ll figure it out together. It’s like you said—we’ll always have each other’s backs. You have to let us have yours, too.”
Serena swipes a lone tear off her face. “Thanks,” she says wetly.
We sit there and breathe, listening to the happy clamor of the party outside.
No matter what happens with Tick Tune, I’m grateful that it brought us here—back to each other, where we belong.
The three of us learned to love each other in the whirlwind of Thunder Hearts, but it’s the aftermath of it where we’ll get to see all the ways that love grows.
After a few minutes Serena straightens her spine, taking a breath.
“I’ll call Isla,” she says. “You should go find Sam before anything happens.”
I let her go, the pit in my stomach already starting to drop. I have no idea how to tell him about Seven, but there’s no time to think about it. He deserves to hear it from me before he hears it from anyone else.
I step outside, scanning the party for Sam. But it’s not the same party I left an hour ago, when everyone was clamoring for seconds of the food and belting eighties hits with the karaoke mic. Now it’s just eerily quiet, and every pair of eyes is staring at the door.
No. Staring at me.
It’s Rocket who darts forward, grabbing me by the arm, eyes comically wide. “It’s all over the internet. I swear I didn’t say anything. I swear .”
And just like that, the if becomes a when .