No fucking way.
I opened the search browser on my phone. The first link that came up with her name was the bi-annual Apple Jam Music Fest website. The second announced she’d died in her sleep in January. In fucking January! It was the end of February.
Guilt and nausea twisted through my stomach along with the pain and anger.
Anger that Mom wrote the words on a sticky note instead of calling me. Harsh black and white ink that she knew would wound me when she knew Elana had been the most important influence in my life. I could almost taste the bitterness filling me. Goddamn it.
I hadn’t gotten to go to her funeral. I hadn’t been allowed to say goodbye.
Heat blossomed through me as the rage consumed me. Anger that Elana would have been the first one to force out of me. I’d been full of it as a teen, fuming over every perceived slight: my parents missing a recital, their lack of acknowledgment when I made lead chair, their nonchalance at my mastering my fourth instrument. Elana had told me to let go of the rage before it infused itself into my soul and turned my music to rotgut.
And now she was gone.
And no one had told me one damn thing.
I wasn’t sure I could forgive them for that. I couldn’t turn a blind eye, look the other way, and ignore the fury inside me.
I took off for the bathroom, splashing my face and catching sight of my reflection in the mirror. I looked like Brady O’Neil, famous country singer, and very little like the scrawny Cormac O’Neil who’d learned everything he knew about music and forgiveness from a woman who was now dead.
I had to do things today that would require me to be both Brady and Cormac.
The scruff on my face was starting to shape itself into a beard much darker than my hair coloring and could help with a disguise, but I still very much looked like the man on the cover of my third album. My floppy blond hair was a signature Brady look that my stylist would growl at me for touching. I suddenly didn’t care. I needed to uncover the me who’d given everything up for a dream.
I found a pair of scissors in the drawer and started hacking at the long waves. It was a disaster by the time it was done, uneven and badly angled, but it was shorter and off my face, bringing the focus back to my plain brown eyes.
In my room, I abandoned my normal Brady wardrobe for something Cormac would have worn to attend a lesson with Elana. Chucks, torn jeans, and a worn Soundgarden T-shirt. No flannel. No cowboy boots or cowboy hat.
I grabbed a beanie and shoved it on over the bad haircut. The advantage of the cut was that it allowed me to pull the knit fabric all the way to my eyebrows. Looking in the mirror one more time, I realized it was one of my better disguises. With my sunglasses, I was pretty sure no one would ever mistake me for the man whose face was on a bulletin board in Times Square, advertising the next season ofFighting for the Stars.
I grabbed my keys and wallet and headed out. The sky was a deep gray, fitting my mood but not my need for the sunglasses I slid on. I crossed the tree-lined street to the college that had been named after two black women authors, Harriet E. Wilson and Harriet Jacobs, from the 1800s. Two women who’d fought for their family and humanity.
All I could see when I looked at the school were my parents and the disappointments that filled the space between us. My telling them that I didn’t want to go to Wilson-Jacobs had just been one of the many I’d handed them.While the college did have a music program, it wasn’t at the level I’d wanted. I’d wanted the best. I’d wanted Juilliard. They’d wanted the free education I would have received as their son.
We loved each other but couldn’t stop letting each other down.
This was one of the worst things they’d done to me. Elana was dead, and they hadn’t told me.
In the mood I was in, I wasn’t sure I should have been going to the university. I probably should have postponed it, but the anger was fueling me enough to continue. I found the asshat’s name in the directory and walked up the stairs of the business building to his office.Professor Clayton Harding was sitting at his desk, typing on a laptop. He had brown hair and brown eyes that would put him in the running for a young Harrison Ford look-alike contest.
He glanced up as I appeared in the doorway but then went right back to his computer.
“Office hours aren’t until three today,” he said.
“Not here for your office hours,” I said, taking a seat in the chair across from him. His walls were lined with awards displaying his name. A huge crystal prize that was bigger than my Grammy stood on a shelf behind him.
He looked up at me with a glare. “I don’t recognize you from any of my classes. Who are you, and what do you want? I’m in the middle of something important.”
“More important than your child?”
His eyes narrowed, taking in my beanie and the sunglasses sitting on top of my head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said quietly, with a warning in his tone.
“You know, the one my sister, Cassidy, is about to have,” I continued, keeping my tone casual.
He got up and shut the door before coming back to sit on the edge of the desk. “Look. I told Cassidy I’d help her out with that. I offered to pay for the abortion, which was more than I needed to when I didn’t even know if the baby was mine.”
I stood, closing the space between us, anger surging back through me. “I hope you aren’t insinuating Cassidy would lie about something like this.”
