Chapter 9
Finn
“Be quiet, everyone. Be quiet,” Josie Barstow said, standing and waving her arms. “I have something to say.”
In my chair beside Alistair, I slid down and felt my shoulders relax. Everyone had turned to look at Vicki and Juliet’s mother, and for the first time, no one was looking at me.
We were in the back room of an Italian restaurant, which had been rented out for a dinner for the wedding party. There were twenty people here, and even though this was an informal social occasion, I’d taken selfies and signed autographs for at least half of them. The only drag was Hayley’s drunk husband, who had treated me to the insufferably smug look that men sometimes gave me. It said, You thought you were a big deal, but now you know what failure’s like, don’t you? You’re no better than me. When introduced, he’d made a point of saying that he was a “million-dollar investor.” Even as a man, I could admit that sometimes my own gender’s dick-measuring was exhausting.
“This is a very special weekend,” Josie was saying now that everyone had quieted down to pay attention. She looked at Vicki, her eyes misty. “It’s a very special occasion. The best occasion.”
Vicki didn’t look much like Juliet, except for the eyes. She had chestnut-brown hair that she wore long below her shoulders, the locks twisted carefully with a curling iron. She wore a tidy navy blue sleeveless top and stylish high-waisted pants. When she returned her mother’s misty look and clapped, her diamond ring and her expensive bracelet flashed under the lights.
My gaze moved from Vicki and cut to Juliet, sitting two chairs away. In this small room, it was easy to look at Juliet, so I did it often. And every time I did, my heart ached.
Juliet was sitting with her back straight, her palms pressed together and squeezed between her knees. After checking in at the hotel, she had changed into a blue-and-white plaid blouse that she had tucked into her jeans and matched with a black belt. Her jeans were seventies-style, narrow in the hips and flared at the bottom, and she wore black boots. Her blond hair was brushed and tied half-up with a small elastic, and she had left off most makeup except for lining her eyes with black.
I knew, with the same depth of knowledge as if I’d packed her bag myself, that this was what Juliet considered her best outfit, her tamest clothes. The blouse was buttoned to the second button and carefully pressed. The jeans were clean with no holes. She wore no jewellery, and she sat so carefully still that I knew she was on her best behavior. And still, in this room with these people, she looked like another species, a stranger who didn’t belong.
Juliet was trying. She was fucking trying. And not only was no one acknowledging it, no one was talking to her at all.
It wasn’t outright rudeness. Vicki had given Juliet a hug, as had Josie. They had both talked to her for five minutes—and then they’d drifted away to talk to the other people in the room, as if Juliet was an acquaintance at a cocktail party. I wanted to walk over and sit next to her myself, but she was telegraphing that she didn’t want me to. Besides, no one had left me the fuck alone.
“My baby is getting married,” Josie said, even though Juliet was the younger daughter of the two. “And all of you came for this weekend, and you’re coming for the wedding, and this is so special I can’t even tell you.”
Next to me, Alistair elbowed me. “Josie is on her third glass of wine,” he explained, a little apologetically.
“My grandchildren are going to remember this forever.” Josie’s gaze was misty again. Vicki and Alistair’s kids were with a sitter for a few hours while the family had dinner. I had seen Alistair check his phone at least three times, clocking how long he had until he went home. He was in charge of going home to the kids tonight, leaving Vicki free to stay later with her friends. I didn’t mind, because the sooner this painful gathering was over, the better.
Josie talked a little more, then Hayley got up to say something. It seemed that there would be impromptu speeches tonight. I thought I was the only one tuned out but pretending to listen, but Alistair said quietly, “It was nice of you to give Juliet a ride from Portland.”
“It was no problem,” I said, taking the excuse to look at Juliet again. Petra—Vicki’s college roommate—had pulled up the chair next to her and was saying something politely.
“You pulled through,” Alistair said. “You got her to come for the whole weekend.”
I shrugged, intending to brush that off, but then I said, “It isn’t easy for her to do this.”
“I know. We’re asking a lot of her. You’re going to be paired with her most of the time. Can you help her?”
“She doesn’t want my help,” I said, which was skirting the question, because of course I was going to help her. I just didn’t want to telegraph Juliet’s anxiety to her entire family. Petra was sitting quietly next to Juliet now, clapping when Hayley paused for applause. I pulled out my phone and typed a quick text.
Finn: Ask her what music she likes.
I watched Juliet blink when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, then pull it out. She glanced at it, then put it away without looking at me.
“I mean, I know you guys are opposites,” Alistair was saying. While I was sending my text, he had looked at his own phone, checking the time again. “You don’t have to get along. But give it a try, would you? Do whatever you can.”
“Juliet isn’t a charity case,” I said as Hayley wrapped up her speech. “It’s me who’s a charity case.” When Alistair gave me a puzzled look, I took out my phone again and swiped open Instagram. I showed him the photo Hayley had posted half an hour ago, a selfie of me and her. Bestie’s wedding party gathering with Finn Wiley!
I tapped the comments, showing them to Alistair.
OMG what? I didn’t know he was still around?
Get him to sing Ice Cream Girlfriend lol.
Nooooo, don’t let him sing it. Worst song EVER!
I loved that song when I was 15!
That is so random. Where has he been?
Maybe he is making a new album lol.
LORD he grew up HOT.
Alistair scanned the comments and rolled his eyes.
“At least no one has said I’m dead yet,” I said. “It’s still early.”
Alistair dutifully clapped for the speech Hayley had given that neither of us had listened to. “Since when do you have an Instagram account?”
“A few weeks.” I had shut down all Finn Wiley social media years ago, uninterested in the mix of petty insults and rabid stalkers that joined the bots sending me comments. But the Road Kings had an account now, and in order to follow it I had made an anonymous account called musiclover followed by a string of numbers. Juliet didn’t have an account, but sometimes she showed up in the pictures posted by the Road Kings. I liked seeing her, and I wasn’t even sorry about how pathetic that was.
“Wow,” Alistair said, his eyebrows rising. “You really are rejoining the land of the living.”
“I’m working up to it.”
He smiled. “Work up to it with another beer. Do it for me, since I’m driving tonight and you’re not.”
I caught the eye of one of the servers assigned to the room and lifted a hand. She jumped into action, taking my order and bringing me another bottle of beer. I had given her an autograph earlier, and when she brought my drink, I tipped her a ten-dollar bill, because serving a room full of people is hard work. Dad had taught me early to look out for the people who do all the work for none of the money, no matter how famous I got. You don’t have character worth knowing if you treat the people at the bottom like dirt, he’d said. Even when I was a snotty teenager with an expensive haircut and a hit song, I had lived by those words, and I still did.
“Mom sent me a card,” Alistair said, as if following my train of thought.
“Wow. That’s a big effort for Mom.”
“Right?” Alistair’s tone was dry. “I’ll cherish it always.” He raised his glass of soda and I clicked it with my beer bottle.
Our mother had left when I was eight. She had moved away, remarried, and apparently left us out of sight and out of mind. It was the kind of thing that screwed up a kid, but Dad had been both parents to Alistair and me the best he could. He wasn’t perfect, but just knowing that I had one parent who was truly doing his best—who loved me that much—had gone a long way. Well, that and therapy.
Mom had made overtures about reconnecting after I got famous, but even though I was still wounded back then, I had sensed how hollow it was. She was only interested in me because of my fame and because I had made money. When I didn’t jump at the chance to get closer to her, she’d ghosted me again. I had come around to being grateful that she’d taught me a lesson about knowing which people care about you as a person and which people only care about fame.
“What about Vicki’s father?” I asked Alistair. “Did you hear from him?”
“The usual excuses,” Alistair replied with an eye roll. “He has to be somewhere, he has to do something, he can’t get away. He really would like to come to the wedding, but he just can’t. He’d like to see the kids, but he can’t. It’s always the same line.”
I nodded. I knew that Vicki and Juliet’s father was a musician who had never made it big. He’d spent the last thirty years going through a succession of women, making promises to his kids and not keeping them. “Do either of them even talk to him at this point? There doesn’t seem to be any relationship there.”
“We hear from him once a year or so,” Alistair said. “He calls and makes a bunch of noise about visiting, but he never means any of it. I don’t know if Jules talks to him. Except for the fact that he’s a complete asshole, she’s a lot like him. She even looks like him.”
I felt my defensiveness rise, and I had to take a second to grip my beer bottle and inhale a breath. Did Juliet’s family think she was like her father—careless, irresponsible, selfish? She was nothing like that. She lived the musician’s life, but she hadn’t dragged anyone into marriage only to abandon them, and she sure as hell hadn’t brought children into the world only to ditch them when things got hard. She could have made promises and bailed on this wedding, just like her father had—but she hadn’t. Instead, she had showed up.
I looked across the room. Juliet and Petra were talking, and it didn’t seem overly painful. Petra leaned forward. Juliet smiled as she spoke. I wondered if she had taken my advice and asked the other woman about music.
“You went awfully quiet,” Alistair said. I had spent too long watching Juliet, the way her face relaxed when she smiled.
I dropped my gaze to my beer and thought about what to say. “I don’t think you understand Juliet very well.”
“No one understands Jules. I don’t think it’s possible to figure her out.” His tone was flippant, and I started to get angry. Before I could do anything—like, say, start an ill-advised argument—he looked at his phone again. “I have to go. The sitter has to leave by ten.” He put his soda down and stood up. “See you tomorrow at the fitting. Eleven o’clock sharp. You have the address, right?”
I nodded, and he left, too distracted by his family to notice the funk I was in. Maybe it was the conversation about estranged parents. Maybe it was the way everyone accepted as fact that Juliet was unknowable, impossible to figure out, when she was so clearly knowable to me.
I didn’t have the time to dwell on this, because a guy immediately sat in Alistair’s vacated chair. He was the husband of Melanie, the bridesmaid, and he wanted my autograph. For his cousin, he was careful to emphasize. Not for himself.
Because wanting Finn Wiley’s autograph for yourself wasn’t cool.
I smiled, put down my beer, and asked if he had a pen.