I met Eve at West’s house after work. She rubbed her hands together.
“Let’s do the damn thing,” she said.
“You’re enthusiastic.”
Eve put an arm around my shoulders. “No. I’m sorry about everything that happened. I feel partially responsible since I set you on this path. We agreed that, of course, you wouldn’t have to end up together, but I didn’t plan for what would happen if you did fall for him and he left.”
“That’s not on you. I didn’t really think it through either.”
“All right. Let’s go empty your closet. I brought my secret weapon.” She held up a box of garbage bags.
“Trash bags?”
“You can’t pack a closet without them. Realtor secret. Come on.”
I shook my head and followed her into the house. It was exactly as I’d left it. I’d neglected the plants, and I nearly started crying again when I found one of my babies wilting. I let Eve into my bedroom as I took a watering can around to all the plants. I’d have to figure out what to do with them all. I couldn’t bring a proper garden into my dad’s house. And I didn’t have a new place yet to move them. Which meant I needed to come over more frequently to take care of them.
I sighed. Just one more thing.
“Oh my God, your shoes!” Eve shrieked from the bedroom.
I laughed at her assessment. “Pretty amazing, right?”
“A girl’s dream. You want all of them?”
“Yeah. Let’s just clear everything out.”
I grabbed another garbage bag when my phone began to ring. I glanced down at the number, but I didn’t recognize the area code. Half of my job was answering strange phone calls from people about weddings. The number of people without an 806 area code in Lubbock was sometimes dizzying.
“I’m going to take this,” I told Eve, holding up the phone. She waved me off, and I answered it. “Hello, Nora Abbey speaking.”
“Nora, hi, it’s English. Anna English.”
My feet stilled in the kitchen. English. Oh my God, she’d called. I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart.
“English, hi. It’s so good to hear from you.”
“I’m so sorry it took me this long to get back to you. I’ll admit, partially, I wanted to see how you’d do with an event as big as the Locke-King wedding. I spoke to Gavin and Whitley. They had nothing but rave reviews of the event. They said it was utterly seamless.”
“I’m so pleased to hear that. I’ve been working in weddings for about five years, and it’s where my true passion lies.”
“That’s what I like to hear. Plus, I hate my wedding planner. It was so nice to fire her this morning.”
“How did your mother-in-law take it?”
“Eh,” she said with a laugh. “It was fine. I told her it was fire the wedding planner or we elope, and she came around.”
I chuckled. “I bet she did.”
“So, I’d love to have you on board. You can feel free to send over your contract, or I can share the one that we used with our last planner, which includes a five-thousand-dollar retainer.”
I nearly sank to the floor at those words. A five-thousand-dollar retainer. I didn’t make that much on most of my weddings, period. The Locke-King wedding had paid well, but not like this. Holy shit.
“That would…that would be great. I would be open to either. Whatever you prefer.”
“Excellent. I’m so excited about this. We’ll have to arrange a meeting in the city, so we can discuss everything that’s in the works. You can meet my mother-in-law.”
The mayor of New York City. So casual.
“Thank you for the opportunity.”
“No, thanks for saving my ass,” she said with a laugh.
We said a few more pleasantries, and then I hung up in a state of shock. Then, I screamed and did a twirl.
Eve came hurtling out of the bathroom with a shoe in her hand. “Is it a spider? I’ll kill it!”
I laughed and flopped onto the ground. “I got the job.”
“The job?”
“As a celebrity wedding planner.”
“Oh my God! Nora!” Eve did a little dance and pulled me up into a hug. “That deserves to be celebrated. Ice cream?”
I nodded. “Ice cream.”
And though I was devastatingly happy, the one person I wanted to share the news with was no longer someone I could call. I promised myself it wouldn’t ruin the moment, but I’d lied to myself before.
29
Weston
It wasn’t until the initial rush of excitement over officially joining the band began to wear off that everything hit me with the worst bout of depression I’d had in years. I’d managed it with music, growing up, but the only song I wanted to play now was “Nora’s Melody.”
Even my music had turned against me.
Apparently, I would just suffer for my choice. I’d read Crime and Punishment in high school and never understood Dostoevsky’s point about how guilt could cause such mental anguish that a person would deteriorate. But I certainly understood now, I couldn’t go on like this. I just couldn’t.
So, I’d given up on trying to be okay.
I went to the studio. I still felt strange about walking into a booth this fancy with or without the rest of the band. But it felt necessary. I’d been avoiding the song for long enough.
I sat at the piano and began to work out the full tune to “Nora’s Melody.” It flowed like it had been held captive for weeks. A trickle turning into a stream and then a deluge.
The door creaked open behind me, and my fingers stilled.
“Hey, man.”
I found Campbell in the doorway with his hands in his leather jacket and a look of confusion on his face. “You came.”
“Cryptic message,” he said, entering our sanctum. “After that, how could I not?”
“I need you to do something for me.”
Campbell arched an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“Listen to this song.”
He toed the door closed behind him and nodded. “All right. What you got?”
Nerves bit into me fresh and raw. I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing here. But no matter how many people said that I’d made the right choice, I knew it wasn’t true. Because it wasn’t a choice at all.
It was a theft.
A coward’s way out.
And I’d been a lot of things, but never that.
So, I cleared my throat, prepared for everything that would follow by the end of this. All the consequences to my actions. And I sang.
No one had ever told me that I should be a lead singer. It had always irritated me that I could play ten instruments, but my voice would never match the tunes I could play. But I’d fallen so in love with music that I never really cared. And truthfully, it didn’t matter for this song that I didn’t have Campbell’s crooning voice.
The earnestness to the song made up for the rough vocals. I’d been holding it all back for so long that the song erupted out of me. A volcano pouring lava down a mountainside, flowing freely for the first time in ages.