Chapter 68
Joni sat with her arms hugged to her knees, chin resting on them. She let the tears pour hot and salty down her cheeks.
Her bare legs were studded with goose bumps, but she didn’t feel cold. She didn’t feel anything except shame. It suffused her body, made her feel dirty from inside to out.
She replayed Liz’s expression, racked with pain, like Joni’s admission had torn her open.
Liz, whom she loved. Who was the one person who’d been there throughout everything. Who’d never abandoned her. Who was as solid as the rock she was sitting on.
And Joni had done that to her.
For what?
She pushed forward onto her hands and knees, crawling to the edge of the rock platform.
She peered over the edge and saw it down there—the bag of cocaine caught on the ledge. An hour earlier she’d tossed it away, feeling empowered and bold. Now she wanted it in her bloodstream, to blast far away from herself.
Could she climb down to the ledge? It looked almost vertical in places—but perhaps there were enough handholds and nooks.
And if she slipped?
Then it would all be over.
Her head spun as she looked down into nothingness. Hadn’t she already lost it all?
Her best friend.
Patrick.
Helena and Maggie.
Her band.
Her career.
She’d made bad decision after bad decision. She pictured her own face glittering on-screen, people cheering and hollering and wanting to be her.
But she didn’t want to be her.
It was a mistake, Dublin. She knew it and Patrick knew it.
He’d been released from family life for a night, and she represented all the things he’d missed: freedom and music and novelty and sex.
And for Joni—who’d been living in a world of chaos and flux—being in Patrick’s company was like finding land after being at sea.
Joni and Patrick . . . it wasn’t love. Maybe she’d thought it had been, once.
Not now. Joni cared about him deeply—loved him as a friend—but they both knew it would never be more than that.
She’d called him when she’d arrived in Norway to say as much.
Sleeping together was about trying on a life to see if it would fit.
It wasn’t Patrick she wanted—it was someone to love her the way he loved Liz.
She just wanted to be loved.
There it was. The raw, pathetic truth that ran beneath everything else.
She saw herself with a startling clarity. That wanting ran like a river beneath everything in her life. Her need to perform for people. To be seen onstage. Her name cheered. The applause and adulation were just another addiction.
Tears dripped down her face as she pushed to her feet. She turned away from the edge and began to walk, lost in her own wilderness.