Page 1 of Hard Heart

CHAPTER 1

SERAFINA

Flora

OMG! Have you seen this?

Seven a.m., and I was still in bed. I had no reason to get up early anymore.

The message came from my seventeen-year-old sister, and “this” was a screenshot of a video showing my ex-fiancé with Zara freaking Michaels. The problem—well, the problem besides my ex having traded me in for a third-rate rock star—was that my family didn’t yet know about the breakup, and that was the way it had to stay.

I had to do damage control, fast. Even though the last thing I wanted to do was update my little sister on the failures of the past week, I scrolled to her number and dialled.

Flora began speaking before I could get a word in. “Did you see it? I swear that looks like Zara Michaels and Rudd at her concert last night, but didn’t he say it was just a work thing? His hand is on her arse. I bet he says it’s totally platonic, but a guy doesn’t grope a girl like that unless he’s interested, and… Uh, I actually know nothing about that. Nope. Not a thing. No hands on my backside, never.”

“It’s me you’re talking to. Serafina. I’m not going to dob you in.”

She giggled. “Right.”

As the youngest child, the apple of our parents’ eye, Flora could do no wrong. Neither could our older sister, Margaret, the overachiever, named after our formidable paternal grandma and determined to live up to expectations. Me? I was the middle child, the screwup, and yes, I’d done it again.

Yay. Go me.

“Has anyone else seen this?” I asked Flora, my chest tight. “And by ‘anyone,’ I mean Margaret.”

She snorted. “Mags doesn’t use BuzzHub. She’s too busy terrifying audit clients and learning International Financial Reporting Standards by heart.”

Thank goodness. Breathe, Sera. Our mother thought social media was the work of the devil, so she wouldn’t be stumbling across Zara Michaels’s post any time soon, and Dad was too busy dishing out words of corporate wisdom on LinkedIn to venture over to the fun side of the internet. My secret was safe for now.

“Well, don’t tell her.”

“Tell her what, exactly? What happened?”

“I broke up with Rudd.” Technically, that wasn’t quite right, and as a lawyer, I was a stickler for getting words in precisely the correct order. “Okay, he broke up with me.”

“Ohmigosh. Why would he do that?”

“He wanted to—and I quote—take his career in a new direction.”

“And that direction took him to Zara Michaels’s tour bus?”

Never date a used-car salesman, an artist, or a musician, Dad had always warned me. Their income was patchy at best, and they really didn’t earn as much as people thought. Of course, love didn’t come into the equation. Bank balance and job stability, those were the important attributes in a man.

I thought I’d played it safe with Rudd Bester. Yes, he was a musician, but a cellist, for Pete’s sake. He wasn’t going wild on the drums. His father was a founding partner in a law firm, and his mother sat on the boards of several nonprofits. I was hardly going to be jumping around in a mosh pit and snorting cocaine. Then Zara Michaels happened, and the next thing I knew, Rudd was wearing ripped jeans and learning to play the guitar.

“Rudd landed a job playing cello on Zara Michaels’s new single, and I guess he thought the world of rock offered better prospects than classical.”

When he was invited to join her world tour, we’d celebrated with champagne, and I’d been genuinely happy for him. Both of our careers were going places. But then he’d begun experimenting with eyeliner, and I’d quickly seen the writing on the wall. And also on the letter informing me that I was fired. As I was reading in shock, a flustered HR lady had taken me aside to say that, upon reflection, I wasn’t quite the right fit for an associate position at Bester & Block, so sadly, they’d have to let me go. Thanks to the at-will employment doctrine in New York, I had no comeback.

“Yikes,” Flora said. “Rudd won’t last a month on a tour bus.”

“Not even a week. He freaks out if the apartment gets one degree too hot, he hates sharing a bathroom, and he can’t sleep without either total silence or a fan.”

“What are you going to do about the apartment? Did he move out?”

“He packed his stuff and left, but the lease is in his name, so…” So technically, it wasn’t my problem. “I’ll need to find somewhere else to live.”

“In New York? You’re not coming home?”