“Gotta say, you know how to pull off casual rich boy.”
“That’s because I am rich, and I’m pretending to be casual,” I joked, then immediately felt awkward about it.
Hendrix snorted. “I’m glad to see you finally relax. I was starting to feel like you were my concierge.”
“I kind of am, I suppose.”
“Agnes,” he said with a sigh. Angling the guitar toward me, he said, “Thanks for this. I’d forgotten I had a guitar at my mom’s house. I’ve been too heartbroken about my stage guitar to think of anything else.”
“Mary Ann?”
He stopped strumming. “Wait, you know the name of my guitar? Are you the guy who keeps mailing me his underwear?”
I laughed. “No. My underwear is far too expensive to send to some punk god who can well afford his own. Though, do we need to worry about people like that?”
“Nah, my fans are pretty cool. I just didn’t realize you were paying such close attention.”
I shrugged. “I’ve always had good taste.”
Color appeared on his cheeks, and suddenly I didn’t mind if he’d shocked my parents. Ducking his head, he went back to hisnotebook, this time plucking out the tune he’d been humming. I hadn’t quite heard where he was going before, but now, with the guitar, it made more sense. I watched for a while, and though I admired his concentration, I hated the sadness that clung to him like a heavy blanket.
When he sat back to stretch, I had to ask. “Is something wrong?”
He opened his mouth, looking like he was about to let yet another snarky comment fly, then clamped it shut.
“Hen, you can tell me.”
He thinned his lips, staring out over the fast-moving river, swollen after overnight showers.
Just as I thought he wasn’t going to answer, he spoke, his voice rough. “On my way from the coffee shop, Dick DeWitt stopped me. It wasn’t a fun conversation.”
“That motherfucker,” I snarled. “What the hell did he want?”
Hendrix’s eyes widened. I didn’t raise my voice that often. He went silent again, absentmindedly strumming his guitar.
“Hendrix?”
“Did you know that my contract was sold a few years ago?”
I shook my head, feeling guilty for having missed something so huge. “I didn’t get any alerts about that.”
“Fucking Google alerts,” he muttered. “You wouldn’t have because it was meant to fly under the radar. The information is out there, it’s available, but it wasn’t widely advertised,” he said, running his thumb along the strings.
“Who bought the contract?” I asked, sitting forward. As I asked the question, though, the answer was obvious. “Dick DeWitt? He owns your contract now?”
Hendrix flushed, like maybe he was embarrassed. When he didn’t reply, I opened my mouth to repeat the question, but he cut me off. “I was so happy to get a better contract, I didn’t care about the clause that allowed them to sell it. I thought that was ajust in casething. Turns out, they’d been actively shopping me the whole time.”
“So they redid it knowing they were going to sell.”
He strummed a few more chords, scraping his teeth across his upper lip. “Yep.”
“Did they know your history with the DeWitt family?”
He shook his head. “I doubt they’d ever heard of him. They sold the contract to a holding company. You’d have to look really hard to find his name on anything, but he’s the big money guy.”
“Don’t the DeWitts own big-box stores? What does that have to do with the music industry?”
Hendrix kept plucking at the strings.
