Dylan Cope had won the lottery family-wise, girlfriend-wise, band-wise… fucking talent-wise; you name it.
Probably could’ve easily hated him if I didn’t love him so damn much.
I walked Mama Cope out to her car, and said goodbye to the various sisters before I lost my ability to keep it together. Even the unshakable Liv was looking a little watery-eyed, and it was gonna do me in.
I headed back to my truck and got the fuck out of there.
I did cry, a bit, after I left the airport. Not like an ugly cry or anything, but there were definitely tears in my eyes and things got blurry for a minute. There was something fucking heartrending about dropping off someone you loved to catch a plane… and driving away from the airport without them.
I hadn’t been apart from Dylan like this in years. Not until this tour. Was my fault, too. If I could’ve kept my band together, the Penny Pushers would’ve been on the tour, right now.
Fuck.
I probably should’ve pulled over to get my shit together, but instead I put on some music as I drove. Groove Armada’s “Madder.” Music always helped me process my shit. At the chorus, I turned it up—loud.
Yup, I was that asshole playing music so loud it rattled your windows when I pulled up next to you in traffic.
I headed straight north through the city, into downtown, toward my condo in Coal Harbour. But when I hit Pender Street and should’ve turned left, I turned right.
Right into Chinatown.
And yes, as I drove through the streets, I was scanning the sidewalks forher.
Took me a while, actually, to find the grocery store where I’d seen her buying roses. For one, there were a lot of them and they all looked similar. And two, I wasthatdrunk on Saturday night.
As it turned out,thegrocery store was actually on the very edge of Chinatown, in-between a weed dispensary and another grocery store. It was the only store on the block with flowers for sale out front.
I found a parking spot a block away and got out. Plugged the meter and tugged my black ball cap down over my eyes, aware that it was broad daylight. I was alone, and I didn’t really want to be recognized or talk to anyone.
Except maybeher.
I walked by the grocery store, even wandered through. What were the chances of running into her here again? I had no idea.
For all I knew, she lived somewhere else and just happened to be here a couple days ago on business or something, and would never be back. Maybe she was staying at a downtown hotel and took a walk through Chinatown, like tourists do, and bought those roses for, I dunno, her husband?
Maybe she lived right here, in the skeezy apartments above the grocery store.
Unlikely. My luck wasn’t that good, and anyway, she was the last thing from skeezy.
Then, without even thinking about what I was doing, I ended up in the cafe at the end of the block and across the street.
Who was I kidding? I’d plugged the meter for two hours. I’d planned to linger.
I got a coffee and sat at the bar along the window, where I happened to have a perfect view of the faded red-and-yellow awning ofthegrocery store.
I drank my coffee and looked through my phone halfheartedly, all the while keeping an eye on the street. For a while, I managed to convince myself that I was here to work.
I returned a few messages, deleted a bunch of others. They popped up from every app, my social media accounts, my email. I probably never actually read ninety percent of them.
I had a virtual assistant now, this dude who worked for me part-time and I’d never even met, whose job was basically to help filter all the fucking correspondence. My management company had found him for me after suggesting I hire one, like every time I failed to return their messages because I didn’t even see them.
I also had rented muscle now. My first personal bodyguard. Not full-time or anything, just on-call. That was new.
The last few years, I hadn’t exactly realized how famous I’d gotten or that I needed personal security, because when I was on tour, we had security, and when I wasn’t on tour, I was with Dylan and his security covered us. It only became clear to me after he’d left on this tour, almost five months ago, without me, that I was really on my own now. And I probably shouldn’t be anymore.
Jude was the one who found Haz for me. Hayden, or Hazard, as his brothers in the West Coast Kings Motorcycle Club called him, was a biker, like so many of Dirty’s security guys. Jude, also a King, often pulled his MC brothers to work on Dirty’s security crew. Haz had been interested, but Dirty had enough guys for the tour, so Jude had thrown him a bone and sent him to work for me.
Whenever I needed Haz, he was available to me.
