Elana would want me to help. She’d expect it. I wasn’t going to let her down on top of my family.
Marco joined me outside the bank. Silent as usual.
I texted Lee.
ME: I’m going to be flinging some cash around. Don’t panic when you see some chunks missing from my accounts.
GHOST TEAM LEADER: My panic radar just went up a thousand percent. Explain chunks and cash and why.
ME: Not that I have to defend myself to you, but I’m going to be funding a local music festival.
GHOST TEAM LEADER: Will your name be tied to it?
ME: No.
GHOST TEAM LEADER: Why not?
ME: This isn’t about me. This is about someone important to me who died, and now I’m helping them from their grave.
GHOST TEAM LEADER: What? Who died?
This was the problem with living two separate lives. My Brady O’Neil life had relatively little to do with my Cormac O’Neil life. They hadn’t had to merge. I hadn’t hidden one from the other, but there’d been no reason for them to be joined. Lee knew about Elana in the sense that he knew my biography. He knew how I’d learned to play and who my teachers had been. He didn’t know what she meant to me.
ME: Elana Johnson. The woman who taught me everything I know about music.
GHOST TEAM LEADER: I’ll be sure to tell the Juilliard regents that you spent four years there learning nothing.
ME: Don’t make me eye-roll emoji you.
GHOST TEAM LEADER: Let me know what I can do to help from here.
ME: Are you narrowing down the list of PR candidates?
GHOST TEAM LEADER: I should have a few folks for you to interview soon.
ME: I might need their help with some of this.
GHOST TEAM LEADER: Dani will help in a pinch.
ME: She has her hands full with her new foundation. She doesn’t need to be bothered with me.
GHOST TEAM LEADER: You’re not a bother, Brady.
I put the phone back in my pocket and stopped outside of the boarded-up Kincaid’s building. The sign inside the window gave the number to call if interested in the space: William’s sister’s real estate business. I pulled at my leather bands on my wrist. My brain was trying to fit something together, but it was alluding me. It would get there. I just wasn’t sure when.
I’d spent the better portion of the week trying to convince my mother she could get back on the plane to Ireland because I would be there for Cass. I’d barely left the house in order to prove my point, jumping up whenever Cass needed something, giving her a break from Chevelle when she needed that, too. It hadn’t been a burden. Chevelle was the cutest damn thing I’d ever seen, and his tiny cry had wound its way into my heart.
But in sticking so close to home, I’d frustrated Cassidy. She’d finally growled at me this morning to stop being our mother and to get the hell out of the house before she burned me alive. I couldn’t make them both happy at the same time.
I’d turned from my difficulties with them to the difficulties facing Tristan and the Apple Jam Music Fest. Which was the reason I’d shown up at the bank and requested to see William. He was probably regretting the decision to let me in without an appointment now because it meant we were on opposite sides of the field. My formerbest friendmight have been a tough adversary, but I had one thing on my side: the love this town had for Elana.
My eyes shifted from Kincaid’s to the music store. I was drawn to it, as I had been for the majority of my life—since I was eight years old and had heard Elana playing the piano and asked her to teach me. The overwhelming sense of loss that spread through my stomach at the thought of her being gone was hard to contain. I’d never walk in and hear her voice calling me again, and that was too hard to fathom. Adoloroso diminuendoreverberated through my brain, accentuating the feelings with notes I’d never played.
The sadness turned to a dazed kind of longing the moment my eyes landed on Tristan through the windows. She was sitting on the steps in an outfit much like the day I’d met her a week ago. Paint-spotted Chucks, jeans, and a T-shirt that seemed four sizes too big that hid everything instead of showing off the body she’d rocked in the wrap dress on Friday night.
She was talking to a young boy with black hair and skin so dark it was like the depths of the ocean. He had a guitar case flung over his shoulder that was almost as tall as him. Standing behind him was someone whom I assumed was the boy’s mother because her black hair and dark skin matched his. Plus, she was wringing her hands in a distraught, motherly kind of way as the boy seemed to sniffle.
When I walked into the store, the boy's voice rang out full of disappointment.
