But sometimes he would walk past a cobblestone street or a quiet, hedged garden. Sometimes he would see an elegant bridge or a particular frame of airplane. Sometimes he would see a messy blond bob in the crowd. And those thoughts would return to his mind.
She would return.
He coped the only way he knew how: by writing. For the past half year, he’d written music like a boy possessed, gotten out some of the best songs of his life, filled an entire stack of little notebooks that sat teetering on his work desk at home. It felt like a guiding light had switched on in his mind, and all he had to do was follow it and the notes would come pouring out of him.
He snapped back to the present, waving at the crowd by way of answering the reporter’s question. Cheers momentarily drowned out anything and everything.
He smiled at them again before turning back to the reporter. “I’ve just been grateful lately,” he said. “Any romance in my new lyrics is inspired by that, by gratitude for what my fans have given me. That’s it.”
Evelyn’s jaw tightened slightly, a flicker of annoyance crossing her face. Winter’s eyes darted for a moment to Claire, who was standingat the edge of the stage with her arms crossed, her lips flattened into a line. Their eyes met, and she gave him a near-imperceptible shake of her head.
Hang in there,she seemed to say.Time’s almost up.
“That’s a lovely statement,” Evelyn said, her gentle smile so professional that it grated on Winter’s nerves. “There’s been a real sense of joy in your recent music, nevertheless. Perhaps you’ve been able to put aside some of the tragedies in your past. Would you say that’s true?”
Winter stiffened, holding back a sigh of frustration. She was really going there. “What do you mean?” he said.
“Tell me about your brother,” she said. “It’s common knowledge that his death has always loomed large in your life, yes?”
Artie.
Off in the corner, Winter could hear the unmistakable hiss of Claire taking a sharp breath. He didn’t need to look at her to know she was furious at this question.
“Yes,” he answered curtly. “Of course.”
“Have you found a way to move on from that loss?”
Had he? For a moment, Winter imagined that he wasn’t sitting in this interminable interview, but wandering along the edge of the ocean in Santa Monica beside his older brother, twelve years apart in age, fathered by different men but united by the same mother.
Look,Artie had said on that misty morning.An unbroken shell.
He leaned down to pick up a pristine, pink-tinted clamshell, then washed it in the tide before handing it to Winter.Toss it back in the ocean and make a wish,he’d said.
Is that a thing?Winter had replied.
Artie had laughed and mussed up Winter’s hair.You can make it a thing.
So Winter had tossed it into the sea and wished to be famous, to be loved by his mother, to be remembered by somebody.
He should have wished instead for Artie to stay alive.
The memory faded. “You don’t ever move on from a death,” Winter answered calmly. “You just find better ways of coping.”
“You’ve managed to replace the grief in your past with love, then.”
“Griefislove. It’s the price we pay for the gift of someone meaningful in our lives.” They should be nearly at the hour mark. Almost done.
The reporter seemed to hear something in her earpiece. She paused, listening.
Then her eyes darted to Winter, and a look of what Winter could only describe as gleeful anticipation came across her face. She nodded. “Now, my sources say that a major publisher has just announced a tell-all book about you, to be released in the fall of this year. Any comment?”
Winter’s polite smile faltered at the same time the crowd let out a chorus of confused murmurs, then gasps. He must have heard her wrong. Behind Evelyn, he saw Claire staring down at her phone with an expression of growing horror. The news must have broken right in the middle of his interview.
Evelyn seemed to catch the crack in his façade, because a gleam came into her eyes. “This is a surprise to you, I see.”
A tell-all. Who would write an unauthorized tell-all about him?
Say something,he told himself harshly. “That rumor’s new to me,” he answered out loud.
