Chapter Thirteen
· Brooks ·
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it.”
“You do?” I asked.
“Well, not yet. I don’t have a hidden closet full of red-carpet dresses.
” Adriana waved both hands through the air—one wielding a sharp knife and the other half a lemon.
She had a bowl of freshly washed citrus fruits next to her behind the bar and was preparing them for all the drink orders of the day.
“But my godmother just so happens to have a whole costume department of dresses and corsets. There’s like twenty-five years’ worth of all sorts of seasonal and festive Bravetown costumes. I’m sure I’ll find something.”
My pen swirled over the saloon napkin, leaving another shapeless doodle in the corner.
I couldn’t figure out exactly where Addie stood on luxury.
When I’d first proposed our arrangement, she asked for two of my best vintage guitars, and she told me to get her a pricy ring.
But now she wouldn’t accept my offer to get her a designer dress for the award ceremony we’d be attending next week.
“Are you saying no because of what happened last night?” I asked.
“What does us kissing have to do with you buying me a red-carpet fit?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you feel awkward about me spending money on you.”
“If you want to spend money on me, I have a list of things. An overpriced polyester sequin monstrosity that I’ll wear for a few hours?
Not on the list.” She shoveled handfuls of lemon slices off her cutting board and into a small container before restarting the process with green limes.
“Besides, didn’t you just sink your fortune into this place? ”
“It’s a small local theme park that hasn’t had any major updates in five years, and I only bought forty-nine percent of it.
It was not as expensive as you might think.
” Sure, it had been pricier than my five-bedroom home in the city, but we were talking more like triple the cost, not unfathomable expenses.
At least I could breathe easier knowing that she was more concerned about what frivolous things I spent my money on than about me smothering her after we shared one real kiss.
“The point is, I’ll get my own dress.” She set her knife down and leaned onto the counter with both hands, hoisting herself toward me. “And I don’t feel awkward about our kiss.”
Her rich vanilla perfume mixed in an intoxicating cocktail with the fresh citrus scent.
My gaze dropped to her lips. She had one stray little freckle on her lower lip.
It was the perfect invitation to brush a thumb over her mouth.
I only held back because even with no one else on the balcony, we were out in the open—and I finally had a better understanding of why Adriana didn’t like public displays of affection.
When, even at nineteen, she had been sexualized by the men she was supposed to trust with her art, turned into a popular object of desire, you couldn’t blame her for refusing to put her own desires on display.
Addie constantly expressed how much she cared for me in other ways.
In the help she offered, in the food she prepared for my daughter, in the way she disappointed her own mother to support me in this custody case.
“Show me that.” She snatched the napkin out from under my pen. Her lips quietly formed the lyrics as she read them. When she was done, she looked back up with a radiant smile that sent a shock wave through my chest. “This is lovely, Brooks.”
I never thought that it would look this way,
A kitchen chair, a laugh, a word you didn’t say.
No fireworks, no sudden fall or thrill,
Just a girl that made the noise go still.
“Your turn,” I replied, my voice suddenly hoarse.
And for the first time in weeks, Addie took the pen from me. She bit her lip and leaned low over the counter, both elbows braced. A waterfall of curls cascaded forward, hiding her face and the napkin from my view.
She seemed to be writing but instead of adding one line and sliding the napkin back, she stayed hunched over.
Her shoulders wiggled and the curls bobbed up and down, at least reassuring me that she hadn’t passed out on the bar.
My stomach still soured as I began to doubt the words I’d put down and to imagine the dreadful ways Adriana could respond.
My fingers itched to snatch the napkin back.
Maybe I had overstepped.
Maybe she was uncomfortable.
Maybe she didn’t even realize how much that night in her kitchen had meant to me—the way she’d picked up on my sensory discomfort and hadn’t blinked an eye on adjusting things to help my nerves.
What if her lyrics would make light of my feelings?
Somehow that seemed worse than the other possibilities.
“I’m making it a duet,” Addie said when she finally straightened and pushed the napkin back across the countertop. “And I propose mine to be the first verse, followed by yours.”
Hear your voice, see you laugh, then you glance my way
You smile like home from across the room, and I know
They’d give it all for a night in your arms,
But I will give you my forever if you’d never let me go.
“I’d go high on the ‘and I know,’ then pause after ‘if’ and go low on ‘you’d never let me go,’ so at the end of the song it can be repeated in canon, just as one line. ‘And I know, and I know, you’d never let me go, you’d never let me go.’ ”
I listened to her explanation, hanging on to her every word.
My nerves thrummed at the sound of her voice when she sang the canon by herself.
She carried every tone with such a distinctive rasp and had a fullness to her voice that many singers never mastered, no matter how many vocal coaches they hired.
She hadn’t even warmed up her voice. I wanted to hear it again, so I just sang the first line of the canon: “And I know.”
“And I know,” Addie sang, perfectly harmonizing.
“You’d never let me go.”
“You’d never let me go.”
The last note hummed in the air between us.
We shared a small smile. A moment of admiration and inspiration and love for how music could turn this simple little napkin into something meaningful.
She blinked and I watched the shutters close over her face.
The corners of her mouth fell, and her eyelids fluttered as she tried to find somewhere, anywhere but me, to look.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’ll be right back. I nee-need to…
bathroom.” She stumbled over her own words as she shoved through the door behind the bar.
I followed because something was clearly wrong, but by the time I made it to the back room, the bathroom door in the hallway slammed shut and the lock clicked into place.
“Addie?” I tapped a single knuckle against the door.
“Oh my god, can a woman pee in peace? Stalker much?” she yelled back, only confirming what I already knew. Something had rattled her enough for her claws to come out.
“Take your time.” I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, but I knew not to push it. “I’ll be back with your lunch later.”
When I did come back with a bag packed with food, Addie had returned to her usual self.
It wasn’t really a lunch break since she worked the lunch shift herself, but an afternoon-lull-during-the-stunt-show break.
I’d allowed Skye to tag along, so instead of hiding in the stairwell, we spread out in a corner booth, and Skye cheerily presented all the options we’d picked up at the different food carts and restaurants in the park.
We had everything from hot dogs to pastries to cotton candy in a bucket.
“Have you already had lunch?” Addie asked Skye as they shuffled around the takeaway boxes and paper bags.
“Yep,” Skye said but very obviously cradled the box of curly fries under her left hand.
“Sorry, that wasn’t a good question. Lunch or not, are you hungry? Do you want to share some food with me?”
“Can I?”
“Yeah, dig in.” This time, Addie caught herself. “I mean, you can eat anything you want. I’m happy to share.”
“Awesome.” Skye beamed and tore the lid off the curly fries. “They sell these as tornado potatoes, but they’re not really tornado shaped. A tornado is narrow on one end and wide at the other. These are just curly fries, but I love curly fries, so it’s fine.”
Addie smiled at her, then at me, while she swirled a mozzarella stick around in marinara sauce. Her shoulder rose and fell in a short sigh before she quietly mouthed, “I love her.”
Warmth flooded my chest, but it was quickly doused by dread.
Skye’s grandma had been wrong about Addie. I didn’t think for a second that she would disregard Skye because she’d want children of her own. This woman had so much love to give inside her, it would be an insult to think she’d have to redirect any of it away from Skye if she had a baby.
The problem was that I didn’t know how any of that compared to the love of her life.
I glanced back at the bar. The napkin I’d left there was gone.
I knew how to pluck a few strings and assemble a couple of words that rhymed.
Over the years, I’d also sung plenty of hits that had been written for me by other musicians and decided on by market research professionals.
I wasn’t going to feign humility, because I knew I was good.
But I wasn’t great. Adriana had written a second verse, arranged both of them into a duet, and come up with a melody and a beautiful echoing canon within a matter of minutes.
And I hadn’t seen her with her own guitar or scribbling in her notebook even once over the last few weeks, so this could very well be her being rusty. She’d just get better with every song.
Being one of the greats didn’t leave a lot of room for small-town family life.
“Hello, paging Mustache Daddy, please respond. Blanket fort, yes or no?” Addie waved her hand in front of my face, the ring on her finger catching the overhead light. I reminded myself that at the end, we’d both get something good out of this. She’d have her career back. I’d have my daughter.
“Sure, yeah, sounds good,” I said.
Addie narrowed her eyes at me, trying to puzzle out where I’d just gone, but Skye was already celebrating by arranging sugar packs into architectural blanket fort plans.
My phone screen lit up with my lawyer’s name, and I excused myself and took a couple steps away from the table before accepting the call.
“Give me one second,” I said before ducking into the back and the employee bathroom.
Skye was peripherally aware of something happening with her grandparents wanting her to spend more time with them, but I’d shielded her from the ugly worst cases of it all. “Okay. I can talk.”
“This won’t take long,” Mason promised on the other end of the line. He didn’t sound annoyed, which was usually a good sign. “Just fulfilling my legal duty of letting you know the Greens put forward a new co-parenting plan.”
“Because it was such a shocker that I didn’t agree to visiting my daughter once a month?” I scoffed.
The co-parenting plans were just negotiations between lawyers.
They submitted a horrible one. We submitted a horrible one back.
All it did was show the court that we were open to negotiations in the best interest of the child.
Nobody actually expected us to agree to anything before the judge decided.
“They have acknowledged that Skye enjoys the park and have offered to let her come visit you in Wild Fields two weekends every month. Other than that, all their stipulations are the same. Every other Christmas, two weeks in summer, and so on.”
I put the phone on speaker and set it down on the counter as I white-knuckled the sink, desperate for something to keep me grounded when I wanted to scream.
“We’re not taking the offer,” Mason said after I’d been quiet for too long.
“I know,” I grunted.
“This is good for us, Brooks. They’ve put it in writing that they visited you and have witnessed Skye enjoy herself. The judge wants what’s best for the kid. Joy is good.”
It didn’t feel good. It felt like confirmation that they didn’t realize what this place was for Skye, beyond a fun weekend trip to an amusement park. They didn’t know her like I did. They didn’t appreciate her interests.
“I hate this,” I said.
“We’re going to tell them to shove it. Well, we’re not going to do that, but we’re drafting up another co-parenting plan that’s going to convey the sentiment.”
“Hold on.” I stared at my reflection, waiting for doubt to cross my features over what I was about to propose.
My reflection held steady. Because I knew my daughter.
I understood her better than they ever would.
“Extend the same offer. They get two weekends every month. With the addition that I will take Skye to Nashville to visit them whenever she wants, and her schoolwork allows.”
“Uh…I don’t think that’s a good idea. This could lead to more issues down the line, with everyone claiming they know what Skye might or might not want.”
“That’s not the point. The point is that my daughter doesn’t want to leave this place.
She’s said herself that at the very most, she would leave Bravetown for a few weeks if she was invited to see an archeological dig site—which is like…
her version of going on a world tour. Phrase it however it needs to be phrased, but the point is, if Skye gets to choose, she’ll choose Bravetown. ”
“All right. We’ll whip something up.”
“Thank you.”
“Listen,” Mason sighed on the other end, “it’s going to get more uncomfortable every day over the next few weeks. Try to spend that time focusing on your family, not on the fight ahead of you. For your own good, and because bitter and angry is not a great look on a prospective full-custody parent.”
“Thanks, Mason. Send me the new plan when you’ve got it.”
I hung up and pocketed the phone again, washed my hands for good measure, and headed back out to the family I was supposed to focus on—even if its existence seemed temporary.