“I don’t know,” I admitted quietly.
“Well,” Ava said, gathering her things to leave, “maybe it’s time to figure that out.”
After she left, Liam and I sat in silence for a while, both of us staring at the baby in my arms. She’d fallen asleep, her tiny fists curled against my chest, completely trusting and peaceful.
“You know what’s really fucked up?” I said finally.
“What?”
“Yesterday, when Harper was holding her, I thought…” I paused, trying to find the right words. “I thought they looked right together. Like Harper belonged here.”
Liam was quiet for a moment. “And that scares the shit out of you.”
“Terrifies me,” I admitted.
“Because of the feud?”
“Because of everything.” I looked down at my daughter’s sleeping face. “Because I don’t know how to be anything other than Harper Tinsley’s enemy. And because I don’t know who I am if I’m not fighting with her.”
“Maybe like Ava said,” Liam said softly, “it’s time to find out.”
EIGHTEEN
For the third time in twenty minutes, I stopped midphrase and lowered my violin with a frustrated sigh.
I couldn’t focus.
The practice room in the music building felt smaller than usual, the walls seeming to close in as I tried and failed to concentrate on the piece I’d been working on.
Every time I raised my bow to the strings, my mind wandered. Not to the technical challenges of the Bach Chaconne or the upcoming Montana Philharmonic summer fellowship audition that should have been consuming my thoughts. Nope, instead I kept thinking about yesterday. About Drew’s face when I’d been holding his daughter. About the way he’d looked at me when I was singing.
There had been something different in his eyes. Something softer than the usual cocky smirk or irritated scowl I was used to seeing. And thinking about it was slowly driving me crazy.
I shook my head and tried again, positioning my violinunder my chin. The opening notes filled the small space, but my heart wasn’t in it.
All I could think about was Drew. The way the expression on his face had made my heart beat faster the same way it had when we were younger. I’d thought for just a moment that maybe we wouldn’t be enemies forever.
It had always been my secret shame that my first real crush was on Drew Dumontier. My bow snagged on the string, sending out a scratchy, off-key whine that made me wince.
“Shit,” I muttered, setting the violin down again.
This was ridiculous.
The last person in the world I should be thinking about right now was Drew. One moment of…whatever that was…didn’t change anything.
Except it did feel like something had changed. And that was the problem.
I packed up my violin with more force than necessary and headed for the door. If I couldn’t focus here, there was no point in pretending to practice.
The walk back to the music house was short—just across the quad and down the street that separated campus from the residential area where most of the upperclassmen lived. March in Montana was unpredictable, and today carried the promise of spring even though patches of dirty snow still clung to the shadows. The music house sat on a beautiful tree-lined street right off campus. It was perfect, except for its proximity to the hockey house. When Rachel had asked if I wanted to move in, I’d almost said no because being on the same campus with Drew was bad enough, but being next door sounded like torture. But once I met my roommates, I knew I wouldn’t let his stupidly handsome face stop me from living with them.
Our house was a two-story Craftsman that had been rented out to students for decades, like most of the other houses on this street. It became the music house nearly ten years ago and had consistently only housed music majors since then. It wasn’t fancy, but it was warm and comfortable, with big windows that let in plenty of natural light and enough space for all four of us to practice without driving each other completely insane. Although, more often than not, if we really needed to focus, we’d go to the practice rooms. The front porch was covered in Talia’s collection of mismatched outdoor furniture—a couple of wicker chairs she’d found at a thrift store and a small table that wobbled if you looked at it wrong—and an assortment of fake plants that always made me smile. She’d insisted that the porch needed greenery, but we were all too busy to attempt to keep plants alive.
The living room was the heart of the house. We’d covered the walls with posters from various music festivals and concerts we’d attended, and there was usually at least one music stand set up in the corner with someone’s sheet music scattered around it.
I loved living here and being surrounded by people who understood that music wasn’t just a hobby or a major—it was a calling. My roommates got why I needed to practice at weird hours, why I got emotional about certain pieces, and why the Montana Philharmonic fellowship meant everything to me. They understood the pressure and the passion in ways my family never had. In a lot of ways, the women in this house had become more family to me than my blood relatives.
Rachel was curled up on the couch with her laptop when I walked in. She was the most grounded of all of us—practical and steady, with a dry sense of humor that keptthe rest of us from taking ourselves too seriously. We’d bonded immediately freshman year over our shared major and our mutual exhaustion with the intensity of the program.
