Through my tears, I heard a knock on my hotel door. I didn’t know why Lola hadn’t booked me on a flight until five. That seemed like an impossibly long time to wait to leave, and now I had company. It had to be Ash. Who else could it be? But I didn’t think I could handle seeing him again.

He’d looked so devastated when I’d ended things at the park. Of course, that was the whole plan. If he’d laughed it off and said “no problem, sweetheart” the whole thing would have been a waste. The world would have learned what it already knew: Ash Black was an asshole. I’d been the only one out of the loop on that.

A knock again. Keeping the deadbolt chain on the door, I opened it a crack. Connor.

I sighed deeply. “What do you want?”

“Hey, now. Is that any way to greet your old friend Connor?” He leered at me.

“How did you find out where I was staying?” Only Lola knew, and I’d only told her about an hour ago. She’d arranged for a car to come pick me up at three.

“Lola knew you might need a shoulder to cry on.” There was that grin again. It gave me the creeps.

“I’m not really in the mood, Connor. Sorry.” I moved to shut the door right in his face. Such rude behavior from the librarian! But I was long past worrying about offending Connor.

His foot jammed into the door quick and fast, stopping me. The chain still held it closed, though. Suddenly, I felt glad I’d left it on.

“Come on now. Ash is out of the picture. We can pick up where we left off.”

“What are you talking about?” This man was disgusting. And why was he so relentless with me? It couldn’t be because he found me irresistibly sexy. He surrounded himself with far more X-rated eye candy than me. No, he must get off on going after something that belonged to Ash. Ick.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember, luv?” Now he laid on the Irish brogue thick. “That night at the party. You were all over me.”

“I was not.”

“Let me help you remember. Unlock this door and let me in.” He gave me what I figured he thought was a charming smile. He was a rich and famous guy, so I guess it worked on lots of people. Not on me, though.

On me, it had the opposite effect. I got a cold chill down my spine and I remembered, clearly, when I’d seen that exact smile before. He’d been handing me a strange-tasting glass of punch at the New Year’s Eve party. It all came together.

“You drugged me,” I realized, out loud. “Didn’t you?”

“That’s quite an accusation.” He stepped back, hands up in surrender, feigning hurt.

“That night at the party,” I insisted. “You did, didn’t you?”

“Sometimes a girl needs help loosening up. It was for your own good.” He gave me a wink. “Am I right?”

I’d show him loosening up. In a move I later recognized could have gone very badly, I unfastened the chain on that deadbolt and stepped right into the hallway with him.

I looked him straight in the eye. “Connor? Fuck you.” And I kneed him hard in the groin. Thanks to the YMCA self-defense class my mother made me take before moving to the city, I got him right where it counted. He hunched down, cupping his balls with a sad yelp.

“You don’t drug women,” I told him, summoning my stern inner librarian.

He made a soft sound like a “meep.”

“And stay the hell away from me.” I took one last look at him, recognizing he posed no threat. None at all. And I headed back into my hotel room. Where were the cameras when you needed them? I would have liked them to have captured that shot.

A couple hours later, I found out where all the cameras were. The airport. Somehow they’d found out when I’d be leaving town. Thanks, Lola. Guys with cameras swarmed around me, asking for a quote. I was the heartbreaker now. Why had I done it? Had I left Ash for Connor? Inquiring minds wanted to know!

I kept my head down. I just needed to get past security. But then, I saw Ash. In a baseball cap pulled down low, he’d had the bad idea of meeting me there, too. He stood looking impossibly gorgeous and rumpled and distraught with his hands in his pockets. He hadn’t shaved and his stubble gave him a rakish edge. I knew how good it felt to kiss him with that rough scrape.

Click! About a thousand cameras went off, realizing they were getting two for the price of one. This couldn’t be happening. Was Ash’s appearance staged, too? I shook my head as he approached, trying to warn him off.

“Ana, just give me a second,” he pleaded.

“Why are you here?” I hissed, continuing to try to push my way through the throng. I didn’t have any bodyguards to help me. I did have my YMCA knee-to-the-groin trick, though, and I’d use it again if I had to.

“You won’t answer my calls. And Lola wouldn’t tell me where you were staying.”

“Great, she told Connor but not you?”

“She told Connor?”

“Yes, she told Connor. Your best friend. The date-rape king.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ask him.”

“Ash! Over here! Ana! Are you giving him a second chance?” Voices called out to us, making it nearly impossible to speak ourselves.

“Just give me a second?” he asked urgently. Pulling me over into a corner, he shielded me with his body. The way he had in Paris. I shouldn’t be thinking about Paris. I needed to think about the conversation I’d overheard at the cabin.

“Ash, you don’t need to pretend anymore.” I spoke as loudly as I dared while photographers still swarmed around us.

“But I don’t want you to go!” He spoke loudly, clear enough for them to get every word.

In frustration, I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him down so I could speak in complete privacy. I tried to ignore how good he felt against me, the way his smell made my knees go weak. “I heard you in the kitchen talking with Connor. About how rough these weeks have been with me. How much it’s sucked and how you can’t wait for it to be over so you can go back to how things used to be. So you can stop pretending. I know.”

I pulled away and he looked at me with a perfect expression of hurt confusion across his handsome features. “What? It’s not like that.”

“Cut it out, Ash.” This was getting cruel now. I knew he was supposed to play the part of the heartbroken, jilted lover but he had to know when to stop.

“Listen, I don’t know what you think you heard but—”

“What I think I heard?” I shook my head. “Ash, I know what I heard.” A man with a huge zoom lens on his camera even though he stood just a foot away jostled me with his elbow.

“You two gonna kiss and make up?” he asked, snapping away.

I turned my head and started pushing my way past him. Ash grasped onto my arm, trying to slow me down, but I’d had enough of manhandling and scenes.

“Let me go.” I had to yell it so he could hear. It came out sounding angrier than I felt, but maybe it was better that way. If I let myself sound too sad it would open up the floodgates. I just needed to make it a few more steps.

Ash dropped my elbow. A TSA agent took his place, ushering me in past the cordoned-off section for passengers with boarding passes. I shouldn’t have, but I let myself take one last look behind me. It was almost like watching something sink into the ocean as Ash got surrounded, flooded, covered by fans and paparazzi. In seconds, I couldn’t even see him anymore.

I told myself that was for the best.

I blocked Ash’s number on my phone. There wasn’t any point in dragging it out. And it turned out, he seemed to agree. I heard absolutely nothing from him. Sure, calling and texting were off the menu. But there had been a time, not that long ago, when people had still managed to make contact with one another even without cell phones. Ash did not make that effort.

I heard from his attorney, Nelson, refreshing my memory about all the details in the NDA I’d signed. I couldn’t breathe a word to anyone about anything that had happened.

That was fine by me. The last thing I wanted to do was talk about Ash. And once it was clear that I wasn’t going to say a thing, and I wasn’t in Ash’s life any more, the paparazzi left me alone. Within a week back in New York my status officially returned to Not Interesting.

I wish I could say that I didn’t cry. Or maybe that I didn’t cry a lot. Or at least that I never ugly cried, with big fat tears and making the kind of face even your mother thought twice about loving. But I did all of that. For the most part I managed to save it for nighttime. But the walls in our tiny Brooklyn apartment weren’t exactly thick. My roommates knew, more than anyone, how torn up I felt.

At work, thankfully, I kept busy. Little kids kept you on the hop and I was grateful for all the distractions. January was the height of flu season. I had more than one kid throw up on me. It was hard to remember your heartache when you were cleaning up vomit. I may have been the only person in the world grateful for stomach bugs, but there you had it. That’s how low I felt.

We got word that our library branch wasn’t going to be shut down. That was all. No news about 20 years of funding or grand plans to start a whole-scale remodel. I didn’t know if Ash had kept his side of the bargain or not and, sadly, I didn’t have it in me to find out. I knew I could call his attorney and he might verify whether the fund had been established, but I just couldn’t handle it. I needed to move on.

And to move on, I needed to stay busy. I took on more piano clients, devoting Saturday afternoons to lessons. The few times one of my teenage students asked if it was true that I’d dated Ash Black, I was able to answer with complete honesty that it had all been a publicity stunt. There’d never really been anything between us.

Most Sundays, I spent up at my parent’s house. They had my back, as always. My father grumbled about rock and rollers and my mother muttered and threw salt over her shoulder, cursing the past and praying for the future. They assured me that Ash wasn’t worthy of me. This was good riddance, that’s what this was, and I was off to bigger and better things, preferably in the form of a nice, churchgoing Russian engineer ready to settle down and start a family.

My Aunt Irina took it the worst. She got mad, really mad, and if it wasn’t for her deathly fear of flying I think she might have hopped on the next flight out to L.A. and given Ash a piece of her mind. I feared for him the next time he did a show in New York. I had no doubt Irina could work her way past security if she set her mind to it.

I was grateful when the Super Bowl finally arrived. I didn’t watch much TV, but you never knew when a pop-up ad would make its way into a streaming service and announce The Blacklist, halftime spectacular! The few times I hadn’t managed to avoid seeing Ash’s image, it had felt like a slap across the face. Even though I knew every shot was staged, every photo the result of wardrobe and stylists and makeup artists and lighting crews, he still looked so goddamned hot. It wasn’t fair.

Apparently the show went well. Everyone loved them. I avoided the whole thing, declining the couple of invites I got to attend Super Bowl parties. On the day of the big game, I’d never been more grateful for my oddball roommates. Liv rejected everything about football, from the male archetype it propagated—whatever that meant—to the corporate branding across every frame. Jillian just wasn’t much of a sports fan. What she most liked was cooking up apps, and Liv and I were more than happy to eat her tasty concoctions while binge-watching Game of Thrones. Jillian declared the series too violent for her tastes, but I still caught her craning her neck to watch the naughty bits. Liv celebrated the death of every main character. And me? It kept my mind off of Ash Black, and that was saying something.

After the Super Bowl, I didn’t hear a word about The Blacklist. I certainly wasn’t doing internet searches, but I was 24. I had friends. I heard about shows, bands passing through. Nothing.

It was almost eerie how everything returned to normal. It was like those three and a half weeks with Ash had never happened. Everything returned to exactly the way it had been.

Until March. I was in our tiny kitchenette when I heard the song for the first time. In Ash’s unmistakable deep, growling voice, the haunting melody I knew so well gave me chills. It was the song he and I had played together so many times, first in Santa Clara, then in Paris, then in his mountain cabin, each time morphing it, growing it into what it was now.

The song was a complete departure from his previous work. Everything in the past had been straight-up RAWK. The kind of music that made you want to head bang and stick out your tongue KISS-style and quit your job just for the hell of it.

This was a love song. Heartbroken, stripped down, bare and raw. Critics went wild over his new sound. It was his first solo release, just Ash Black on piano with what sounded like percussion and maybe cello in the background.

The song was called “Undone.” His voice ached like he was bleeding into the music. In the refrain, deep and tortured, Ash sang, “I’ve come undone.” The longing need in his vocals gripped you fierce as he described the love he’d found and lost. How he’d had everything he’d ever wanted and then it fell apart, slipping through his fingers.

I tried to tell myself that I didn’t really know if the song was about me. He’d admitted he’d used ghostwriters in the past. Maybe this was all an engineered stunt by Lola to capitalize on his public heartbreak, just like Mandy Monroe had done back in December.

But deep down, I knew. And every time I heard it, it felt like Ash was calling out directly to me. Because the entire song was about us.

I heard the song a lot. The second Ash released it, it went straight to number one. The song was a bonafide, runaway, gobsmackingly huge mega hit. I heard it everywhere, at the deli where I went for a sandwich. From the earbuds of the person sitting next to me on the subway who was clearly going deaf from the volume of her music. Even in my own apartment, where Jillian set her iPad to Pandora. Sometimes none of us could get to it in time to stop the song from starting to play. Once the song started up while I was in the shower. Running out with soap in my eyes, I knocked straight into a stool. It slowed me down so much the song played all the way into the chorus.

“I’ve come undone,” Ash sang, playing the notes we’d created together, describing how he felt in such heartbreakingly raw terms. Expressing exactly how I felt going on two months without him.

Jillian met me breathless in the kitchen, finding me standing there in a towel with shampoo in my hair and a wet puddle at my feet.

“Maybe we should stop listening to music?” she offered, clearly not sure what to do with me.

“Or we could play a different station,” I suggested.

“It comes on every station I have!” she cried out, taking the iPad out of my dripping wet hands. “It’s a huge crossover hit!”

“I know.” The song was off, but I could still hear it, echoing in my soul.

“Do you think you should, you know, get in touch? He sounds, kind of, upset.”

I shook my head. The way I saw it, it was at least a 50 percent chance the whole thing was just a publicity stunt. I’d spent enough time in Ash’s world to understand how it worked. Everyone used everyone else to get ahead. Chances were good that Lola and the rest of the team behind the Ash Black brand had orchestrated the entire release.

But what if it were more than that? What if that was how he really felt? I sometimes felt that it was, late at night as I lay awake and stared at the ceiling. And, yes, once or twice in the darkness I allowed myself to listen to the song. Pure and gritty, his voice hitting every note with growling intensity, he spoke directly to me.

At times like that, in the dark with just me and Ash telling me how deeply he felt for me, how devastated he was to lose me, I thought it had to be the most romantic thing I’d ever heard. If I allowed myself to slip into the fantasy, that song just about killed me. Word-for-word, it was literally everything I’d always dreamed he’d say, singing it out from his heart straight to me.

But that was just it, wasn’t it? If that was how he felt, wouldn’t he speak directly to me? He would get in touch. He could send me a letter or email or phone the library or deliver a dozen roses to my apartment or, hell, he could probably land a private helicopter on top of a nearby building and offer to whisk me off to any destination of my choosing if only I’d say yes.

Each day I heard nothing from him was another day I knew he didn’t really want to be with me. I told myself this, too, would pass. Even mega smash hit songs went away, eventually. Sure, they made their way into your DNA. Just as you knew you’d always be able to sing along with “Don’t Stop Believing” you knew you’d always remember that song. But it wouldn’t be so bad once it finally made its way off the airwaves.

In April, the song was nominated for the Billboard Music Awards. For a lot of things: Top Artist & Top Male Artist, Top Digital Song, Top Hot 100 Song, Top Streaming Song, Top Rock Song. That wasn’t surprising.

What was surprising was how I found out that the song had been nominated. On the first Saturday of April, I got a big, thick package in the mail. Inside was an invitation to attend the Billboard Music Award show in Vegas in May. And a letter congratulating me on my song’s nomination. Not Ash’s song. My Song.

Because I was the songwriter. Ash had given me full songwriting credit. For his smash mega hit song “Undone.”

I stood there sporting a giant sweatshirt and jeans, package at my feet, letter in my shaking hands, mouth open in shock. There were a whole bunch of things I couldn’t process. First, what? Ash had made me the songwriter? He’d come up with the original melody. Sure, I’d helped it along, but I really thought he’d written that song.

Second, what? I was the songwriter of a smash song? And I was only finding out about it now? Didn’t there have to be lawyers involved? Documents signed, that type of thing? I remembered the NDA Ash’s attorney Nelson had given me in multiple forms. How had this managed to escape my notice over the past month?

I dug back into the package and that’s when I saw the note. A blank card in an envelope with my name scrawled across it. I knew in an instant, it was from Ash. I didn’t even know when I’d seen his handwriting in our time together, or how I remembered it from when I had, but there it was. My hands trembling, I opened it up.

I stood there trembling, staring at the note. Thankfully, my roommate Liv was home. I’m not sure how long I would have stood there otherwise.

“What’s that?” Liv asked, coming to take the note out of my hands. “Are you all right?”

I managed to explain what was happening, or what I thought was happening. Liv could read better than I could at the moment and verified that, yes, I had received an invitation to the BMA show in Vegas in May because, yes, I was identified as the songwriter to the current number one international hit “Undone.”

The passing of days didn’t make the news any less shocking. If anything, my surprise grew as I started receiving paperwork and tax forms and all sorts of legal documents explaining royalty rates. Apparently, I was going to start earning quite a nice chunk of money off of the song. A song I’d co-written at best, but Ash had chosen to give me full credit.

I thought of calling him a million times. I held my phone in my hand and imagined pressing call. I still had his number in it, even though I’d blocked any calls I may or may not have received from him. But I didn’t do it.

If his note had been warmer, I would have. If he’d said he missed me, or if he’d sounded less businesslike, or even if he’d signed it ‘sincerely’ instead of just using a dash, I would have. But he’d spoken only of the song. And he seemed to assume that the next time we spoke would be at the awards show.

Which I decided I would attend. Why not? How many chances in life did you get to attend a huge, celebrity-studded awards show? And to attend it as one of the nominees? Not often.

Which was why I invited my parents to come with me. At first they were not overly enthusiastic about heading to Vegas, or Sin City as my mother insisted on calling it. But then my father pointed out that if they didn’t come, I’d be there on my own. They bought plane tickets the next day, and I booked us rooms in the reserved block at the MGM where the show would be held. I hadn’t become a classical pianist, but I had been nominated for a songwriting award. That was something!

Days before the show, I was still deliberating over the right dress to wear. Without a full team of stylists, I was finding it a bit more challenging to clothe myself. I’d rented a couple of gowns from an online service, the kind where if I returned them in good condition within the week I only had to pay $50. But I couldn’t decide what look I wanted to go with.

Time to enlist Jillian and Liv. I’d choose whichever dress neither of them liked. I came upon them whispering to each other in our kitchenette.

“We have to tell her,” Jillian insisted.

“Do we? I’m not sure.” Liv looked grim.

“Tell me what?”

They startled like two kids cheating on a test in school. After sharing a resigned look, Jillian started in.

“We have something to tell you.” She cleared her throat and tapped her fingers together nervously. “There was a letter.”

“A letter?”

“A letter from Ash,” she continued, looking ashen.

“Where is it?” I exploded.

“I, um, I burned it.” Now Liv spoke, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant.

“You what?” I couldn’t have heard that right.

“Burned it.”

“Like set fire to it?” Who did that? Then again, my roommate had also sewn herself a shirt out of raw meat. She did out-of-the ordinary things.

She nodded. Apparently burning my mail was one of those things.

“What the hell?” I slammed my palm down on the countertop. I didn’t have much of a temper, but this sure flared what I did have right up.

“You were so depressed!” Jillian interjected. “It just seemed like—”

“Seemed like what? It was a good idea to steal my property and burn it?”

“Do you remember the ugly crying?” Liv asked.

Hmm. That gave me a moment of pause. I did remember the ugly crying. But, wait, the letter had come that long ago? “When did I get it?”

“Oh, like, late sheme-dmn.” Jillian mumbled her response.

“What was that now?”

“January.” Liv confirmed. “You got the letter in January.”

“January!” I could feel cartoon steam coming out of my ears.

“Seriously, Ana, that was back when you couldn’t stop crying.”

“But—” I spluttered.

“You were such a mess!” Jillian added. “I’m sorry we did it, but we were just worried about you.”

“I wasn’t that bad,” I protested.

“You wore your pants backwards one day,” Liv corrected me.

“I did?”

“Yeah. But I made you turn them around.”

She had? When had that happened? “I don’t even remember that.”

“It happened,” Jillian confirmed.

“You were really far gone,” Liv agreed.

“He seems like such bad news,” Jillian added. “And we thought a letter from him might really send you over the edge.”

“So you burned it?” I still couldn’t get on board with their logic.

“We burned it. And that might not have been the best idea, so I’m sorry,” Jillian apologized.

“I’m sorry,” Liv added.

I exhaled, fuming. “I’m still mad,” I insisted.

“We know,” they both agreed.

Surveying them in disbelief, I asked, “At least, did either of you read it before you burned it?”

They both shook their heads no.

“But it was thick. It was a long letter,” Jillian said, looking awfully pale.

“Oh God.” I sank my head into my hands. Whew. They were certifiably insane, that was clear, but I guess I’d known that already. “You’re both crazy, you know that?” I had to tell them.

“OK, but promise me you won’t wear that dress to the awards show,” Liv exclaimed. “It has sleeves! You might as well wrap yourself in a blanket!”

“You can’t wear that,” Jillian agreed. “It’s way too short and tight. What if you drop something? How would you bend over and pick it up?”

“OK, thanks, guys.” At least I knew what I was wearing to the awards show. Now if only I knew what had been in that freaking letter.

Because apparently Ash had written me a letter. Four months ago. It had been a long four months. I supposed I should feel like I was getting over him by now, like I didn’t remember exactly how it felt when he held me or kissed me. By now I should have completely forgotten about the way he laughed over something silly I said or made me spaghetti or marveled over my playing piano or made love to me like I was the most sexy, amazing woman in the world.

I hadn’t been getting over him. And it wasn’t just the fact that I heard his voice yearning for me from every street corner. That didn’t help, of course, but it was more than that. My attachment to Ash was like one of those tricky weeds that drove my dad crazy in our lawn. You’d think you’d removed it all, but somehow it kept springing up, robust and new, withstanding any and all attempts at eradication. The roots were deep and stubborn.

And now I was about to see him again. My parents and I flew out to L.A. tomorrow. I knew back when Ash and I had been together, I’d been full of doubts. We lived in different worlds, he ran with a fast crowd, I liked to knit, etc. etc. It all seemed stupid now. My heart felt like it had been broken in two. If he felt the same way, if we were two parts of a matching whole, then what the hell were we doing apart from each other?

I didn’t know what the future had in store for us. But I did know I was going to plunge headlong into it, fly there and find him and get to the bottom of this. Wearing a gorgeous, glittering dress—yes short and tight, Jillian, and yes with sleeves, Liv—to a live, televised awards show where I would get all the answers I desperately needed.