“Okay.” Thomas took a long inhale of breath and waved her on encouragingly. “Let’s hear what you’ve got so far.”
A few notes and a couple of big headaches later, Thomas placed his hand on his sister’s arm, halting her playing.
“Right. Let’s start from scratch.”
She shook her head. “There’s something else, too. Something that I have to do. But I’m going to need your help.”
“What’s that?”
In a rush, she described her plan, her voice only wavering once. And when she was done, Thomas looked as horrified as she’d expected.
“You know Dad’s going to… He’d never look at you the same way again, Sam.”
“I know. But I think it’s time for the Animos Society to end. Don’t you?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The season dissolved into winter, and Daniel felt it in every strum of his guitar and whisper on the wind. It sank into his skin, settling deep beneath him in a chill he could never quite shake. To make matters worse, he now refused to wear the coat he’d once handed over to Sam. His coat had been returned, very neatly and obviously freshly cleaned and pressed. When it arrived, he fully intended to bring it home and wear it out of spite. But when he opened the box carrying it, a wave of tuberose and fireplace perfume smacked him. The coat might have been washed, but after sitting in her house for so long, her scent wove itself into the very fabric. He could endure the cold if it meant not getting wrapped up in her scent.
And today, he’d have to. Because today, he was in London… And today, he was going to sing for Alanis and her staff.
In the top of one of Bank’s most exclusive buildings, the lobby of Icon Records hung over London like a precariously hung Christmas ornament, a collection of modern furniture and glass walls that made Daniel nervous to touch most of anything.
When Nan offered him the business card from Sam, he’d held onto it for a few weeks, frantically writing new music. He let the pain—the pain that had been so numbing at first—rush through him, working through it with every chord and every strum, until finally he had a collection of six songs that sang in time with his soul.
There was also another song, a seventh song, that he’d probably never have the courage to perform in public. A song he wasn’t ready to sing yet. A song about love and forgiveness. He kept it in his notebook, a scribbled-out melody waiting for the day he decided he was ready, but today wasn’t that day.
Not that he was especially thinking of Sam right now. His mind was too full of terror. In just a few moments, they would call him back and judge his dreams based on a collection of six songs written in the middle of heartbreak… Was he going to be good enough?
Most of his life, he hadn’t been good enough. Or, rather, people assumed he wouldn’t be good enough. Now that he had a chance to actually prove them wrong…he could only hope he didn’t blow it.
“Mr. Best?” the soft voice of the receptionist called him out of his cloud of nerves and back to reality.
“Mm-hmm?”
“They’ll see you now. Studio A.”
Collecting his guitar case, he followed her polite directions toward the back of the office, past the posters of current and past acts and past cubicles filled with head-phoned staff. When he pressed into Studio A, it wasn’t the same kind of glass-walled suite he’d seen in the front of the office space, but a dense, soundproofed block in the back.
He’d never seen the inside of arealstudio—recording or otherwise—but this audition suite matched most of his expectations. The walls were padded with gray and livened up only by a few rugs pinned to them and a TV playing the BBC on one wall, and at the far end, a table of assorted suits sat in wait, with Alanis in her place at the center. In the middle of the room, a microphone rig waited for him. He stepped toward it, his boots making no sound on the carpeted floor.
“Daniel!” Alanis said, rising to shake his hand. “It’s so good to see you again.”
She made quick work of introducing the rest of their team; all of them gave him brilliant smiles and their names, which he instantly forgot.
“Thank you for having me back,” he said, too embarrassed to apologize for blowing off their last meeting.
“Nonsense. We’re happy to do it. Sam told us you were being poached by Atlantic and we weren’t sure we’d see you again. Getting your call was quite a relief, in fact.”
“She said that?”
“Oh, don’t worry. There are no secrets in this industry. And no hard feelings, either. If you missed our last meeting because Atlantic had come courting, I can only say that I’m glad you saw the light and decided to join up with a much better label.”
She winked, eliciting a sea of tittering laughs from her assembled executives. Daniel, for his part, managed a small laugh, but behind his laugh, his mind was racing. Sam had covered for him. She’d gotten him back in this room—a feat that probably burned a ton of her social capital and favors—and shecoveredfor him. His heart hammered even harder.
“We heard you put on quite a show in Oxford this Autumn,” a woman with a blue-dyed afro said, glancing up from her notes.
“It was just an open mic at a bookstore.”
