Fractured Destiny (Backstage Confessions #2)

Prologue

My knee won’t quit bouncing.

Sixteen minutes isn’t a long time unless you’re sitting alone in a conference room with nothing to do except watch ferries cross Elliott Bay and wonder why your manager hauled you into the office the morning after you got home from tour.

The windows stretch from floor to ceiling, giving me an expansive view of downtown Seattle pretending to have its life together while a glass of ice water slowly sweats onto the conference table in front of me.

Linus texted me last night at midnight.

Linus: Urgent. Come to my office at 11. Alone.

I confirmed but he sent the exact same message again this morning.

WTF?

The alone part shouldn’t bother me. Who else would I bring to a meeting with my manager?

Still… It’s unusual.

Linus doesn’t waste words. If he tells me to come in, there’s a reason. The problem is he neglected to include what the hell it is, leaving me to invent my own using my wild imagination.

Who knows, maybe the Grammy shortlist leaked. Or, perhaps I was finally offered a stadium tour. There could be a film soundtrack sitting on his desk with my name on it.

Hell, maybe somebody wants to throw an obscene amount of money at me or some other reason I’ll happily pretend to understand.

Things have been moving pretty fast lately. Yesterday I woke up in Europe. Today I’m back in Seattle, running on jet lag and airport coffee, trying to figure out where I’m gonna live. I gave up my apartment over a year ago and need to find a place to call home.

My thumb finds the folded wad of paper in my pocket without me thinking about it. Old habit.

Whenever I’m wound this tight, I end up rubbing the edges smooth.

The outside layer is a Greyhound ticket from Tacoma to Seattle, folded into a square no bigger than a guitar pick. I left at seventeen with forty-two dollars to my name with the clothes on my back and a guitar glued together after my foster father snapped it in half.

Taped beneath the ticket is another scrap of paper. Smaller. Somehow, more valuable.

One word in handwriting I’ve memorized.

Neeley.

Three years ago she turned my world upside down and snuck out of my apartment before sunrise, leaving mascara on my pillow and her name scribbled across a torn piece of my lyric notebook. No phone number. No explanation.

Strangely, enough to make sure I never forgot her.

Or, it could have been the sex.

Either way, she’s lived rent-free in my mind ever since. Turns out unanswered questions make pretty decent songs, so there’s a plus.

It’s funny how one moment can alter the direction of your life.

The office door opens. Linus walks in carrying a mug of coffee and none of the relaxed confidence I’d been hoping to see. Instead of disappearing behind his desk, he crosses the room and drops into the chair across from me.

The one he refers to as the “bad-news” chair.

Fuck.

He’s never sat in it before, at least with me.

My knee stops bouncing. Something cold settles in my stomach.

“Lake.” He rubs the back of his neck before looking at me. “Thanks for coming. I… ah…have a bit of news today. She’s in the lobby, on her way in.”

I frown. “I’m meeting somebody?”

“Aye.”

“So this isn’t about work?” I stare at him quizzically.

“Ummm. No.” He looks everywhere except at me now. The windows. His coffee. The table. Anywhere but my face.

The room suddenly feels suffocating.

I flatten one hand against the leather arm of the chair while my other slips back into my pocket, thumb worrying the edge of the wad of paper hard enough to fray the corner.

“Linus.”

Nothing.

“Dude, seriously?”

He finally exhales. Shakes his head.

“What’s going on?” I lean forward.

“Her name is Noa Calder.”

I know the last name. Everyone in Seattle knows the Calders. Technology money. Philanthropy. They’re the kind of family you read about, not the kind you meet with no warning.

Maybe she wants to sponsor the tour? License a song for a commercial or something?

My brain keeps throwing possibilities at the wall because every one of them is better than whatever pained expression Linus is wearing.

He studies me for another second before speaking. “Whatever happens, brother…” His voice softens. “I’ll be right here.”

Again, WTF?

Before I can ask another question, there’s a knock.

Linus’s assistant cracks the door open. “Noa Calder to see Mr. Lyon.”

A woman steps inside. Recognition doesn’t arrive all at once. It starts with her eyes. Blue. Gray. Silver when the light catches them.

I’ve spent three years writing songs about those eyes without ever managing to get them right. Then her mouth. Pink, full lips in a perfect bow. Milk-chocolate wavy hair with gold highlights. Longer now, loose around her shoulders instead of tumbling wildly everywhere at once.

The cream sweater she wears has nothing in common with the low-cut, cherry-red dress she wore the night we met, yet somehow every cell in my body knows it’s her before my brain catches up.

I don’t remember standing, but I do.

She closes the door behind her and turns toward me, a folder tucked against her chest. “Hi, Lake. It’s been a minute.”

Goosebumps ripple up my arms.

Three years disappear.

I’m back at The Mission after a sold-out gig, with two whiskeys in me and Linus’s management offer still buzzing through my veins. She strutted across the room, stopped close enough for me to catch the vanilla and citrus in her hair, and said seven words I’ve never managed to outrun.

“I dig how you embrace the silence.”

Nobody had ever described my music that way.

She caught my vibe without me having to explain it.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Neeley.”

She held my eyes just long enough to make the room disappear. “Don’t forget me.”

“Oh, I’m gonna remember you.”

“You won’t.”

“I will.”

A smile tugged at one corner of her mouth before she stepped closer and rested her thumb against my wrist. “How ’bout you come home with me so I can make sure?”

I was stupid and brazen enough to believe the world had finally decided to give me everything I’d ever wanted. “How ’bout you come home with me instead?”

Suddenly we were in the hallway. Brick at her back. My fingers in her hair, her tongue in my mouth. Then, the Uber. My hand under her dress shoving her panties to the side to find her slick and ready. For the entire drive, she and I went at it while the driver pretended he didn’t see anything.

The night comes back the way it always does. More vividly now, with her here in the flesh.

Not in order. All at once.

I didn’t ask questions a smarter man would think about. I’d never had a woman so beautiful allow me to fuck her without boundaries. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have stopped myself for anything on earth.

It felt pre-ordained or some shit.

After hours of mind-blowing orgasms, unlike anything I’d ever contemplated, she fell asleep with her cheek over my heart. I was ready to ask her to move in with me and be mine forever.

My big head thought we had connected on a different level.

The next day, I woke up to an empty bed with her name scribbled on a torn scrap of paper. No number. No way to get in touch.

For over an hour, I sat naked on the edge of the bed, wondering what I’d done wrong to scare her off.

Waited to feel something other than hollow.

I never did.

Even three years later, I can’t escape the woman whom I’ve never been able to forget. The only question is, why does she have a different name and what the fuck is in the folder she’s holding against her chest like a shield.

“You’re Neeley,” I manage to spit out.

It’s a name I’ve sung eleven hundred times on three continents. Today it feels like sawdust.

“Well, no.” She sits across from where I’m standing. “Actually, my real name is Noa.”

Noa.

Anger takes hold. Fast, stupid, and hot. Three years of agony arrives all at once. Right behind it, crowding into the same emotion, comes the fear.

A woman doesn’t track you down after three years for no good reason.

I force myself to look at her instead of through her.

Neeley—Noa is still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but the woman in my bed seemed lit from the inside. Burning, impossible to hold on to. This version is quiet. Dulled. Her hands are folded in her lap and something in her face seems weary.

“Well, why are you here?” It comes out like an accusation.

She sets the folder on the desk. Slides it toward me. “I need to make things right.”

She wants to make things right? I’ve spent three fucking years writing songs to a woman who, apparently, isn’t real. Dreaming of a day I’d run into her.

Now she wants to make things right?

The fuck.

Some animal part of me already knows, the way air goes wrong before a storm. Every cell in my body screams at me not to touch this folder because once I read what’s inside, there’s no turning back.

I open it anyway.

Out spills a stack of paperwork. A photograph of a small child with dark hair. Light-green eyes I’ve seen many times before.

In the mirror.

I feel very far away. Like I’m hovering from above and witnessing this nightmare scene in a dream.

“His name is Levi.” Her voice cracks down the middle. “He’s two years old. You’re his biological father. The DNA records are inside. I was dealing with some personal issues but I didn’t want to wait any longer to let you know.”

“How—”

Linus reaches over and grips my wrist. “I took some hair from your brush a few weeks ago when I met you in Orlando. I wasn’t going to disrupt your life until there was proof.”

I don’t stand up. I can’t. My legs have stopped being mine.

For three years I’ve tried to sing her out of my system.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

I couldn’t have guessed my lyrics were never about a woman who left.

They were about a son I’ve never got to hold.