She gripped my hand. “Tell me, Van.”
“I found her journal. She was always scribbling in it. A throwback to her journalist days, I suppose. It never occurred to me to look at it—it was private—but when I saw it, I thought being able to see her thoughts would bring me some closure.” The pain that had hit me when I read her words flowed into my chest.
“She didn’t love me. She didn’t want a family. She’d secretly still been using birth control. All the times she’d told me she wanted a family as much as I did were a lie. She’d been screwing Brett for months.” I felt the intensity of their betrayal race through me as if it were only yesterday, and I gripped the back of the chair. “My best friend and the woman he knew I was in love with. Both of them deliberately hurting me.”
“Oh, Van,” Liv murmured. “What a shock for you.”
“Between her journal, putting together bits of the puzzle on my own, and talking to some other people, I found out a lot of things I had been blind to. Brett wasn’t happy about my plans to leave. He was working behind the scenes to cut me out of the group entirely. Tonya didn’t want to be involved in a humdrum life with a carpenter. She loved the road. The life. The attention being with a celebrity gave her. She had been stealing my songs behind my back and getting them to Brett. He was recording them and planning on fighting me, saying I stole them from him so I wouldn’t get any of the credit or the royalties.” I rubbed my chest, feeling the depth of their deception once again. “I realized I didn’t even know the woman who wrote the words I read. She was a stranger, and I had fallen for her act. Reading the shit about the two of them made me ill. The deception. The wild sex behind my back.” I shook my head. “I was so stupid. So caught up in my dreams and what I thought was going to happen that I never saw it. I thought they were great friends and I had the best of both worlds.” I sighed. “I was an idiot.”
“You trusted people you loved. It doesn’t make you an idiot.” She hesitated. “Why would she write all those personal details down in a book?”
“One of her entries was about a meeting with a publisher. She was going to write an expose. I guess she wanted to keep the details fresh.” I shook my head in sorrow. “Reading them was humiliating and made me ill.” I flexed my hand, feeling the ache in my bones, which was a constant in my life. A reminder.
“All the lies she told me. The disappointment I would feel when she would tell me she wasn’t pregnant that month. She even made me think it was my fault. I went and had testing done to make sure it wasn’t me. She told me she had done the same, and her doctor said we simply needed to relax. I believed her, of course.”
“There was no reason for you not to, Van. It made sense. It happens to a lot of couples, especially when they’re under stress.”
I barked out a laugh, the sound loud and bitter. “Stress is one word for it. She was busy setting up her new life, with plans on dumping me and my sorry un-achieving ass. She had a long list of names for me in her precious journal—none of them very flattering. I was simply a means to an end. Use me to get to Brett since he was harder to get close to. I was an easy target.”
A tear ran down her cheek.
“I went from grieving to furious instantly. The trouble was, the people I was angry with were dead. I had no one to take it out on. I went through a bad few months. I drank and raged. I wrote some music that would shred your heart. I was on a downward spiral until my parents and my manager stepped in. They did an intervention and made me see I had to stop. No one else could do it—it had to be me.”
I sat down, too tired to stay standing. “I went for counseling. Stopped using alcohol to hide from my feelings. I met with my ex-bandmates. They suspected what was going on between Tonya and Brett but didn’t have any proof. They had no idea what Brett was up to behind the scenes. We agreed to retire as The Back Roads, and we let the lawyers work it out,” I stated grimly. “The royalties show up in the bank every month, and I let them sit there.”
“When did you start playing music again?”
“About six months later. I was doing my therapy, but my hand was still pretty useless. I was standing in my closet one day, and in the corner was my old guitar. The one my parents had given me that I had never let go. I picked it up and tried to play. It was awful. Worse than the first time I had tried when I was a kid. Something inside me clicked, though. I had missed it. The sounds of the guitar. The way the strings felt under my fingers—the steel biting into my skin. How the wood felt resting on my leg and the vibrations I felt when I strummed.” I paused, remembering the feeling of rightness that had settled over me. “I started practicing—the same way I did as a kid. Every day, for hours on end. It took a long time, and I will never have the same stamina or fluidity I did before the accident, but I got the music back. I started writing again. Sold some songs. Then the Notes found me, and they asked me to be part of their group. I made them a deal. I would play and be part of the group, but I wasn’t interested in a career or chasing the dream again. It almost destroyed me the first time.”
For a moment, silence hung between us.
“Is that enough for you?” Liv asked.
“Yes, it is. None of them were interested in a career in music either. We play when we want to. They simply want to play for the love of music. I still sell songs to a lot of artists. On occasion, I go into the studio and lay down tracks for them. I hear my music on the radio. I get to play with a great bunch of guys. We play a few of my old tunes and some songs I wrote for them, but I keep all the rights myself. I will never put myself out there with another person the way I did with Brett. No one gets my music except me.”
“I can understand that.”
I sat beside her, lifting her hand to my mouth and pressing a kiss to her skin. “That’s my story, Liv. It’s not pretty, and it doesn’t have a happy ending. I’m broken and I have trust issues.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yeah, I do. You make me feel differently than Tonya did, Liv. She would wind me up, and I was always on edge around her—something I didn’t realize until she was gone. With you, I feel easy and content. I don’t have to work all the time to prove myself.”
“There is nothing to prove. I like Van. Carpenter, planner, friend, coworker, musician—” she grinned, the dimples in her cheeks appearing "—man who has a tea party with my daughter when she asks, Prince Van.”
“Hey,” I chuckled. “She makes a great cup of tea. And there were cookies. How am I supposed to resist?”
She kissed me, her lips full and sweet against mine.
“You’re wonderful with her. She adores you.”
“She is easy to adore back,” I mused. I met her gaze. “Rather like her mother.”
She smiled, her gaze focused down. I tilted her chin.
“I meant that.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I still have trouble believing it.”
“I’m not the men in your past, Liv.”
She grabbed my hand, kissing the rough knuckles. “I know. God, I know that.”
“We’ve both been burned.”
“Yes.” She paused. “The accident—that’s the reason for your discomfort?”