930 A.M. — November 21, 1996
ENCINO, CALIFORNIA
ZANE MCCREIGHT
This was the worst day of Zane McCreight’s life.
Well, maybe not the worst one. How does one rank these things anyway?
It’s not like there was some chart used to quantify the most heart-wrenching moments of your life.
Stubbing your toe, one point; getting fired from a job you love, forty-six points.
Not that it would be useful to arrange them in order from slightest to worst pain, because how would having that information change anything?
The awful thing still happened and there was no way to undo it.
But if such a tool existed, Zane was sure this would be in his top three.
Oddly enough, all of them had taken place in the last five years, highlighting how incredibly charmed the first forty-four had been.
Losing his dad was by far the worst. (At least a hundred points.) It was a beautiful sunny day like this one.
He was here at home playing in the pool with the kids when his phone rang.
Heart attack. Sudden. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.
Zane was still experiencing shockwaves from that one.
And the other event was still so raw, he couldn’t even bear to think about it. Not today.
He watched his wife, Sienna, from inside the sliding patio door in their expansive Tuscan-style kitchen.
It was unseasonably warm for November, and she was outside doing yoga on a mat next to the pool.
Her long, lean body gracefully moved from down dog into plank, then to up dog with ease.
She was always trying to get Zane to join her.
It’ll be good for you, darling. It’ll keep you young.
Her hair was up in a messy bun on the top of her head, and she didn’t have any makeup on, which was her usual state around the house.
Sienna was still stunning, even though forty had come and gone.
She had the kind of beauty that made it hard to look away from her.
Even their golden retriever, Billie, who was lying on the grass near her, couldn’t stop staring at Sienna.
Zane stood helpless as a swell of panic grew inside his body, threatening to swallow him whole.
He was about to deliver a blow to his wife from which they might never recover.
She would hate him after this. And the children would hate him more.
The dog, too. Billie had strangely human eyes, and when she looked at him, he squirmed a little.
She knew. She could smell it on him. He was just another rich, entitled asshole.
Their son, Parker, who was fifteen, would never look at him the same way again.
Zane was his idol, and the man he wanted to become, which simultaneously thrilled and terrified him because he knew he wasn’t living up to his son’s expectations.
It had been inevitable from the start. When the delivery nurse placed his crying son in his arms, it was as if Zane could see their entire future all in one furious moment.
Parker would put him on a pedestal, and Zane would desperately cling with everything in him to stay up there.
(Well, not everything. There were certain things he wouldn’t give up.) But he knew someday he’d screw things up in a way that would knock him off it forever.
That day had come.
Ivy, their fiery almost-eighteen-year-old, who was always the last of the kids to warm up to him again when he’d come back from a long tour, would keep him at arm’s length for the rest of his life.
And Poppy, at age seven, would stand in the middle of the kitchen with her mouth open and no sound coming out for a painfully, terrifyingly long time until an endless wail filled the room and tears finally streamed down her little cheeks.
It wouldn’t be the wail that would echo in his soul forever, but the silence that came before.
His little Poppy Seed—a waif of a child like her mother had been—would have to live with what he’d done for almost her entire school career.
And the other kids were going to be cruel, no question about that.
Sienna stood still in mountain pose, squinting her eyes to see into the house.
A wide smile appeared on her face when she saw Zane watching her, and she blew him a kiss.
He smiled back and caught it. It was a cheesy little routine they did to make each other laugh.
As if they were too cool to act like people in love, even though they had been together for almost twenty years.
His throat constricted, and he pressed his hand on the patio door to steady himself.
He would yell at the kids if they did that—leaving a handprint for their housekeeper, Valerie.
Oh, God, Valerie would be so disappointed.
She was always going on about what a good man he was.
What a good father. And now he’d gone and put a handprint on the window too.
He should find the Windex and clean that up before she came back.
But he couldn’t help the leaning. What if that was the last kiss Sienna would blow him?
The thought was too much to take. He knew what was coming.
He was sure it was his child when Claudia told him she was pregnant.
That was five months ago, and since then, he’d been living in this awful purgatory, waiting for the baby to be born so the paternity could be confirmed.
The band’s manager, Dean, was the only one who he’d told.
Dean had pushed for an in vitro paternity test, but Zane said no, on account of it being dangerous for the baby.
Dean’s response repulsed him, but not as much as it should have. And the downside would be…?
The baby, a tiny boy Claudia named Elliott William (after both of her grandfathers—the nice one got top billing over the overbearing one), was born six weeks earlier, and Dean had quietly arranged for the test to be done at a place where, if you have enough cash, you don’t have to provide the identity of the potential father, just a sample.
He’d done it before, but in the past, there was a happy ending (for the guys in the band, anyway).
Dean had begged Claudia not to add Zane’s name to the birth certificate and made promises that Zane would have to keep.
So, she wrote unknown, even though she was certain.
He was the only one. Zane’s one last dwindling hope was immaculate conception, but that had been snuffed out now like a candle in a flooding basement.
So, in the weeks leading up to this moment, Zane had gotten out ahead of the whole thing.
He’d become the loving, attentive husband and doting father his family deserved.
Instead of saying yes to every invitation or locking himself away in the studio until all hours of the night, only to stay in bed ‘til mid-afternoon, he woke with the kids to get them ready for school so Sienna could sleep in. He took her for leisurely lunches and went to bed with her at eleven. He had started playing Super Mario with Parker, swimming with Poppy in their pool, and writing songs with Ivy. They’d even had three family game nights in the last couple of months, at Zane’s suggestion.
He set out bowls of potato chips and sour candies on the big wooden table in the kitchen.
The kids argued the entire time, and he and Sienna gave each other a look that said, ‘Oh well, nothing’s perfect, but at least we’re trying. ’
And all of that was paying off because Sienna was happier than she’d been in years.
In fact, Zane would say she’d fallen back in love with him.
They’d fallen back in love with each other.
And it hadn’t been all that difficult to make it happen.
It just took a little effort on his part.
Being married wasn’t nearly as hard as he’d made it out to be all these years.
It was easy, in fact, if you paid attention.
If only he’d gotten his head out of his ass sooner.
Like, eleven months ago. Then none of this would be happening.
His Motorola StarTAC cell phone rang. He took it out of the pocket of his low-slung jeans and flipped it open to see Dean’s number across the tiny screen.
Not wanting to hear what he had to say, he almost flipped the phone shut again.
But then he remembered Dean was his one and only ally.
Pissing him off wasn’t exactly a good plan. “Hey Dean.”
“So? Where are we at?”
His phone was slippery against his clammy palm. “I haven’t done it yet. She was doing yoga when I got home from dropping off the kids, and I figured I’d let her finish.”
“Come on, Zane,” Dean said, leaving out the lecture he deserved.
“I know. I know,” he answered, his stomach roiling like a rowboat in a gale. “It’s just … so hard, knowing I’m about to destroy everything.”
“Yeah, well, when you got me involved in your little circus, I told you what the deal was.” Dean had warned him that day in June when Zane showed up at his loft, sick with guilt and panic.
First, he called him a giant prick and told him he’d never been so disappointed in anyone.
He knew what Zane got up to on tour, but this time, he had really done it.
Because the mother of his new baby wasn’t some random fan.
She was one of them. Dean promised to help keep things under wraps until the paternity test results came back, but if it was positive, all bets were off.
“She deserves to know the truth. You know she does.”
Zane rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. Is it even the right thing to do? To hurt her like this? I mean, what she doesn’t know—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Zane. Don’t you dare start. I swear to God, I will out you to the world, then I’ll quit. Buy myself a little beach hut in some sleepy town in Mexico and forget I ever knew you.”
“Jesus, you’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this.”