Adele had only tilted her head, her eyes softly narrowed. “Are you?”
Brighton had opened her mouth, closed it. It was true, of course, that Brighton had done the physical leaving five years ago in Grand Haven, but maybe Adele was right too—Brighton had spent her entire life chasing Charlotte Donovan.
Who the hell was chasing her?
Brighton released a soft groan and sat up in bed. The room was quiet but for the soft sound of ambient rain emanating from Adele’s phone. A full moon silvered through the curtains, making the space glow. After checking her phone—4:43 a.m.—Brighton gently lifted Adele’s leg off her own and pushed the covers back. She put on her cardigan, then slipped out the door.
She walked down the hall, stopping in front of Sloane’s closed door. There wasn’t a sound, no movement, but Lola was a heavy sleeper. Brighton closed her hand around the doorknob, weighing her options. The last time she had invaded Lola’s room in the middle of the night…well, good things had followed. Still, this was different.
Brighton had put everything on the line for Lola.
She’d gotten on a stage, played Lola a song—theirsong. And Lola had simply…gotten up and walked away.
Anger surged through Brighton’s veins, sudden and cleansing. It felt good to feel rage instead of guilt and pain and longing. She was so fucking tired of this—the ways she bent herself for others, the ways no one,no one, seemed to really see her.
She gritted her teeth, ready to tell Lola all of this, to finally layit all out instead of constantly racking her brain over Lola’s needs, years of guilt driving her every action and thought.
She gripped the doorknob and twisted, then flung the door open, not giving two shits if she woke Lola up with the noise.Sheneeded to talk, so that’s what they were going to do.
Brighton stepped into the room, opened her mouth to say Lola’s name—she even planned on usingCharlotte—but everything died on her tongue at the scene in front of her.
A too-still silence.
A perfectly made bed.
A completely empty room.
No suitcase other than Sloane’s, no violin, no black clothes hanging in the open closet.
Brighton felt her shoulders drop, realization settling over her like a heavy winter coat—Lola was gone.
The next couple of dayswere a blur of everyone treating Brighton like she was going to break, feeling like she might actually break, and wanting to punch a hole through Nina’s wall.
Several holes, in fact. Several walls.
She couldn’t really settle on an emotion—anger, sadness, heartbreak, disappointment, sheer white-hot rage. Adele tried to get her to talk about it, but Brighton didn’t want to talk. The day after Lola left, Brighton’s parents finally arrived back in the States, and Brighton spent two hours on the phone with them recounting the shit show of the past week of her life. Her mother wanted her to come home, to take sometime.
But she was so goddamn tired of taking time. She was tired of thinking and wondering and regretting. Plus, if she went home to Grand Haven, she’d land on the living-room couch, watchevery Pixar movie ever made while guzzling her mother’s extensive supply of French wine, and quite possibly never leave the house again.
No.
She wasn’t going to wallow, and she wasn’t going totalkabout how she wasn’t going to wallow. There was nothing to talk about, really. Lola was right—they’d reconciled and had fun, but they had different lives.
Now Brighton wanted to live hers.
Unfortunately, living her life meant dealing with her Katies problem, as well as once again jumping on the Nash-Vegas hamster wheel of finding gigs and, you know, putting her entire heart and soul in the hands of strangers and booking agents.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said to Adele a few days after they’d gotten back to Nashville. It was New Year’s Eve, and she was sitting at the bar with her laptop in Ampersand after her afternoon shift, clicking on one venue after another, reading up on their booking processes.
“You can,” Adele said as she sifted through receipts. “You have to.”
“I don’thaveto.”
Adele lifted a brow. “You do if you don’t want to be a sad sack nursing gin and tonics by yourself on New Year’s Eve, mourning your dashed hopes and forsaken dreams.”
“Jesus, dramatic much?”
Adele grinned. “Just putting it all into perspective, baby girl.” She arranged the receipts in her hand, tapped their edges against the bar. “You talked to her yet?”
