Chapter Twenty-Two
Gwen slid off Alex, trying to gather her thoughts. Every hair on her body stood on end as she braced herself for this conversation.
“So you see no problem with abandoning the Pops? Midseason?”
He ran a hand through his hair and frowned at her. “Are you sure you heard me correctly? U2 wants us to travel the world together playing music to crowds one hundred times as large as tonight’s.”
“I…” She twisted to her knees next to him. “Are you sure you heard right? U2 wants Thorne and Roses to open for them—”
“Gwen Jackson and Thorne and Roses,” he corrected.
“That music group doesn’t exist.” She laughed tightly. “I mean…what we did tonight was amazing, but—”
“It was incredible, Gwen—”
“But how does Dom fit in!” She blinked at him. “I played his parts!”
“I’ll write a second violin part for him,” Alex said quickly. “He can fill out a couple of places…or…”
She lifted her brows, waiting. “Or…he’ll be replaced? Just like Forrest was?”
He scowled at her. “No, that’s not—”
“That’s exactly what will happen—”
“You’re missing the point.” He rolled off the bed and paced in front of her. “You don’t want to leave the Pops, do you?”
“I can’t leave the Pops!” Her hands rose, gripping the empty air like she could force him to understand if only she could materialize it. “I have a position there that I’m happy with—”
“Happy? I saw you play tonight. You were more in tune with the music than I’ve ever seen you. That—tonight—was happiness.”
She shook her head, refusing to let his praise reach a place deep inside of her. She reached for her clothes. “You know, I was finally feeling confident as first chair—finally feeling comfortable—”
“Comfortable,” he repeated. “You’re not supposed to feel comfortable, Gwen. You’re supposed to feel challenged!”
“Don’t—” She huffed, pulling her shirt over her head. “Please stop explaining to me what I’m supposed to be feeling when I play music. You’ve been doing that since the first moment we met, and it’s insulting, even when you don’t mean for it to be.” She grabbed her underwear and tugged them on, trying to push all of Mabel’s warnings out of her head. The things she’d said about Nathan and Ava—so many times he treated her like a pupil instead of an equal.
All the parallels Mabel had seen from a distance that Gwen couldn’t possibly pick up on when she was inside of it.
“Why are you getting dressed?” he asked.
“I can’t fight with you while we’re naked,” she muttered.
“We’re not fighting, we’re discussing this.”
She snorted derisively and flung his boxer briefs at him. “‘Discussion’ implies that we’ll come to an agreement.”
He caught his underwear in one hand, eyes digging into her. He slipped them on and said, “Why aren’t you considering it? Why won’t you leave the Pops? What’s keeping you there?”
“The Pops is the first place…” Her throat closed. Memories flashed before her—her mother in a hospital bed, her grandfather hooked up to a respirator. She swallowed. “I have family there. I have consistency. I have Henry, and Mei, and even fucking Diane! I can show up and know I belong.” She looked up at him. “You have actual family there, Alex.”
“They’re not my family,” he said with a shake of his head. “They haven’t been in a long time and—”
“I was at your mother’s house this morning. She misses you. She was hoping you would show up, like she’s always hoping for you. Waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me to fail,” he snapped. “Waiting to take the dangling carrot away. That’s what they do, Gwen. Has Mabel even told you what they did to her?”
She stuttered and refocused, unwilling to let him change the subject.
“Did you even want first chair?”
“My entire life,” he said sharply. “That’s what they raised me to want. ‘Three videos a week, Alex, and then you’ll be special. Just one year in cellos, Alex, and then it’s yours.’” He looked like he wanted to kick something.
“And you would have given up ‘Xander Thorne’ to return to violin?” She shook her head at him. “They gave you a year to prove yourself, and you were late, hostile, and unprofessional. If you really wanted out of your contract with Lorenz, you would have tried, Alex.”
He stepped toward her. “I was running two different careers—”
“You didn’t have to be! You could have cut ties with Lorenz and come to the Pops. Were you really so afraid of being no one for just a little while?” She stared him down, and his hesitation was clear. “You were. You were scared to leave Xander Thorne behind.”
“Do you have any idea how hard I’ve worked to get where I am?” he said. “How much I had to leave behind already—”
“You mean your family? Your name? Those things that could have opened any door in the world for you?” She felt her top lip curl.
“It was suffocating, Gwen!” His hand went to his chest. “I was drowning for years! The need to be perfect, the need to be better. None of it was for me, it was for everyone else!”
“That’s not true, Alex,” she said softly, trying to make him see. “I know you. I know how you play. You start over when it’s not good enough. You can’t stand it when you feel you did less than perfect. You might have thought you were trying to be perfect for your parents, but it was for you as much as for them.”
She moved to him, hoping she could convince him to stay. To give it up. His jaw was tense and his eyes locked on hers.
“I know you put in a lot of work and time to the Roses. But it doesn’t belong to you, Alex. It belongs to Lorenz.”
He blinked at her, brows furrowing.
She placed her hands on his arms. “You think you got away from the need to impress people, but Lorenz is still in charge. He owns too much of you. Come back with me. Finish out the season. Fulfill your obligation, and then choose something else.”
He swallowed. “And what are you returning to, Gwen? When you first picked up a violin, was it your dream to tune an orchestra and notate the score? To step aside when a guest soloist blew into town?”
Gwen bit her lip, her breath moving quickly. She thought back to watching videos of the New York Philharmonic when she was twelve. To asking Mabel why the first violin had to step aside for Hilary Hahn when she was the one who did all the work. Was an entrance and a bow really what she wanted? Or was it the hum of the crowd tonight, the deafening noise from hundreds dancing that still overpowered the acoustic applause of thousands in velvet-lined chairs. The lights. The thrum.
Shaking her head, she closed her eyes and willed away the thoughts and wishes that could take her off course. She plucked up her socks from the floor.
“This is off topic. It’s a moot point, because, unlike you, I don’t break contracts.” She grabbed her shoes and swiveled to him with acid in her veins. “Sorry, Xander breaks contracts, doesn’t he? Because Alex certainly never would.”
His eyes narrowed at her. “You think they’re different people?”
“I know they are!” she said. “Xander is a stage name. A persona. It’s someone you like to dip into for a bit.”
“And who is ‘Alex’?” he asked, and she noticed he was perfectly still, waiting for her answer.
She stepped into him and reached her hand up to his jaw. “Alex is who I fell in love with.”
“They’re…they’re both me, Gwen.”
“Your closest friends call you Alex,” she argued. “You told me you liked when I called you Alex!”
“But I didn’t say you could choose one over the other,” he said. “You think Alex is who you fell in love with, but you wouldn’t have noticed me if I hadn’t been Xander Thorne.”
A frustrated laugh popped from her throat. “Xander Thorne doesn’t exist! It’s a stage name. And it belongs to Lorenz!”
Alex flinched, like she’d struck him. He stepped away from her, looking down at the hotel carpet.
“So…you’re asking me to choose you over my career. But you won’t do the same for me.”
Gwen opened her mouth, a squeak of sound coming out. “But…but you’re so much more than Xander Thorne. You’re a composer, you’re a classically trained musician. You even told me you want to conduct! Xander Thorne isn’t your whole career, Alex.”
His face was stony. “The Pops shouldn’t be yours.”
Her skin itched. She wanted to scream at him that just because he owned a Stradivarius and a Porsche and a twobedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, he didn’t get to tell other people how to make a living. Because that’s what a career was to her—what the Pops was to her. It was a living.
He ran a hand through his hair and stepped back. He looked like he was about to say something else, but then just turned to disappear into the bathroom.
The shower ran. Gwen stared at the closed door, wondering if she should push into the bathroom and force them to fix this. But she didn’t know how. Would he always be searching for the better opportunity and abandoning projects and people along the way? What if one day she was one of those abandoned people?
She grabbed her bag and squeezed through the hotel room door.
No long goodbyes.
The Boston bus station at two in the morning was officially Gwen’s worst nightmare. She’d received a few texts from Alex in the past hour asking—
What room are you in? I’ ll bring your toothbrush and makeup.
I can ask Carlos to drive you back so you don’t have to be in the car with me. Just tell me what room?
Gwen let them pile up, read but unanswered.
When the bus finally took her away from Boston, two hours into the ride, the bus driver announced that the roads were too icy for them to continue, despite the plethora of cars that Gwen could see still driving on said roads. They pulled off to a rest stop with a Motel 6, and for fifty bucks Gwen spent two hours sitting in a chair by the window, waiting for Mabel’s ratty old Civic to pull up.
She said nothing as Gwen placed her bag in the trunk and took the lukewarm coffee thermos she’d offered. It wasn’t until they crossed into Connecticut that Gwen asked, “What haven’t you told me about Ava Fitzgerald?”
It was quiet. She thought maybe Mabel wouldn’t answer.
“I told you we were writing music together,” she finally said. “One day we landed on a really nice idea for a symphony. We were transcribing and writing for about ten years— through her first marriage, the birth of her son, my father’s death, her divorce. We had a lot of bumps along the way, but we kept working at it.
“But she showed Nathan our score and asked if it was something the Pops could do. He said it wasn’t a good fit for the Pops, and maybe he was right.” Mabel’s voice grew tight as she said, “But one day when Ava was playing a showcase in DC with him, he encouraged her to play one of the violin sections. There was a video posted to the internet. That’s the only way I found out about it. Because I definitely wasn’t credited. Not in the newspapers, not in the orchestra chat rooms—yes, those were a thing.” Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “‘Ava Fitzgerald Plays First Original Composition,’ it said. We co-wrote that section. It was probably more like sixty percent mine. I picked up the phone and asked Ava why I wasn’t mentioned—anywhere. She told me, ‘Don’t worry, Mae. It was just a bit of fun. There’s no money in it, so it wasn’t worth going into detail.’”
Gwen’s heart was choking her, watching as Mabel navigated the icy roads.
“It didn’t sit right with me, but it seemed a moot point because we hadn’t worked on it in a year. He wanted Ava focusing on performing, not writing. About five years later, Nathan was doing an interview, and the interviewer brought up that performance. I remember Nathan’s exact response: ‘Ava is a truly talented composer. It’s a shame she doesn’t get much time to work on more projects, but that violin solo is one I was very happy to hear again. We’d worked on it a lot.’ Still no mention of my name.”
Gwen felt a flush of anger in her cheeks. Mabel’s voice was stagnant, resigned. And Gwen wished she could light the fight in her again.
“That’s despicable, and I’m sorry.”
The heater burned and the Mozart hummed. Gwen waited for Mabel to say more if she wanted, but it was quiet for miles.
“Thank you for picking me up,” she said. She took a deep breath. “You are my family, you know. That’s why it hurts me so much when it feels like you’re not proud of me.”
“I’m always proud of you. But I can be better about showing it.”
Gwen nodded, pressing her ear against the window and listening as a hollow wind whistled between them in the silence.