For the next few days I laid low.

I didn’t go back to the church, even though my brother kept asking me to come; even though I knew the whole band was there and they wanted me to be. Because no matter how offended I wanted to try to be over what Brody had said to me, I couldn’t deny that he was right.

If I was going to leave… the best thing to do would be to leave now.

But I’d promised my brother ten days. And he’d postponed his honeymoon for me. Which meant that I should suck it up and get my ass back down to the church to spend time with him. Jam with the band. Hang out.

Just be there, if nothing else.

But I couldn’t bring myself to go back down there. For now, I’d told Jesse I needed a little time for other things. It wasn’t a lie, but it was a bit of an excuse. And instead of visiting old friends like I told him I’d be doing with a good chunk of my time, I barely left Roni’s place.

I did call my agent, to tell her I’d be staying in Vancouver until the day before the shoot, when I’d fly down to L.A..

But I barely spoke to anyone else, and I barely got out of my sweats.

I wasn’t going to sit around and feel sorry for myself, though. I’d done enough of that for a lifetime as a teenager. So I got Paulie’s address down in L.A. from Maggie and sent flowers. I called and spoke with his wife, and his nine-year-old daughter on the phone. Then I arranged to have two weeks’ worth of healthy meals delivered to them by a concierge service, including some fun stuff for the kids, to try to help. I didn’t know what else I could really do.

I’d never really believed God would answer my prayers. But I prayed for Paulie and his wife and their family.

Then I re-organized Roni’s condo.

By the end of day two of my self-imposed sabbatical, I’d labeled and color-coded everything in her cupboards. When Roni came home that night, she took one look at what I’d done, raised her eyebrows, and walked straight into her bedroom without a word.

* * *

The next day, people started dropping by unannounced.

It started with Maggie, then Zane, then Elle. Dylan and Ash showed up with takeout. Everyone and their dog suddenly happened to find themselves in Roni’s neighborhood with nothing better to do than check up on me.

Because rock stars weren’t busy or anything.

And not that I didn’t appreciate it, but it was also kind of annoying, since it was interrupting my funk.

It was also necessary, because by the morning of day four, I’d started to slip. I’d run out of shit to organize, I still hadn’t figured out how to deal with Brody, and the inevitable brooding had set in.

I’d taken to sitting around in my sweats and Yankees cap, idly playing the guitar Jesse had given me but really playing nothing at all, listening to stuff like Lera Lynn’s slow, sultry cover of “Ring of Fire,” which was either a brilliant or totally horrendous song to listen to when you were deep in the throes of a screwed-up, lovelorn, scared-shitless sort of funk.

Then I binge-watched a bunch of heart-rending movies, making it through The Notebook, The English Patient, and half of The Age of Innocence before my new sister-in-law managed to drag me out of the house.

I was still wearing my sweats and ball cap, but I went with her when she asked me to come to her art studio—Dirty’s old rehearsal space.

I had been here before. It was a clean, spacious studio with an open loft above and big skylight windows. Perfect for an art studio. As Katie and I stepped inside with her black lab, Max, I could see, though, why the band wanted something bigger, something a little more raw, with a few more stories to tell, for their rehearsal space.

“I’ve set up a little studio in the sunroom at Jesse’s place, too,” Katie said as she deactivated the alarm. “You know, facing the water?” I smiled at how she still called it Jesse’s place. “I like to paint at weird times, sometimes. And I don’t always want to have to haul my ass over here in the middle of the night.” She looked around the room at her stuff as she turned up the lights, frowning. “Jesse’s been really gracious. Making room for me, and, you know… everything that comes with me.”

I just smiled, rubbing Max’s head. “Well, that’s what you do when you love someone, right?”

“Right.” She sighed, squinting at her stuff, like the room was a mess. It totally wasn’t. Her art supplies were all neatly arranged in shelving units along a side wall. There were canvases, both clean and painted, filed into a custom storage unit with tall, narrow compartments. But what caught my eye were the paintings that had been left out—leaned against the walls, there was a giant portrait on canvas of each member of Dirty. The one of Dylan stood on an easel; it was the only one that wasn’t yet complete.

As I approached, I could make out the seemingly millions of brush strokes, the texture of the thick, layered paint, the hundreds of colors that seemed to have been used to capture the myriad shades of his auburn hair.

“Katie… these are freaking amazing.”

“They’re for the tenth anniversary album. For the tour and everything. And thank you.” She smiled. “They want it to be kind of a retrospective as well as the beginning of a new era. All the new stuff, and the old stuff. They… um… really want you to be a part of that.”

I looked over at her. Damn… now they had Katie doing their dirty work?

“So as you can see,” she went on, her cheeks pinking a little, “this is a business visit as much as a pleasure visit.” She indicated the blank canvas standing on a giant easel in the middle of the room. “Maybe you’ve figured out my agenda here?”

“Yeah. I’m kind of getting the picture.”

She smiled even bigger. “Then you’ll sit for me? While you’re in town? I can sketch you out, it won’t take too long. I’ll take a few photos too, for reference, so I can get the details right.”

“Sure,” I said, because it was Katie. She’d put off her honeymoon for me; how could I refuse? And it was just my image. If Dirty wanted my picture on the album, as part of their tenth anniversary, I could give them that.

I took off my ball cap and shook out my hair. “Maybe… you could just let me brush my hair first?”

“Of course.” Katie beamed at me. “There’s a washroom in back…”

But I wasn’t listening. My eyes had caught on a painting, partly tucked in behind one of Elle.

“You painted… Seth?”

It was him; no doubt in my mind. I recognized his eyes above all things, and my stomach turned over. A pale, grayish-green with a burst of gold around the pupils. She’d captured them perfectly. There were more lines to his face than I remembered, and his hair was longer. In the portrait, he had a beard.

But it was Seth.

“Oh. Yeah,” Katie said, distracted, as she sorted through tubes of paint. “He came to sit for me the other day.”

He came to…

Seth Brothers was in town?

At Katie’s studio?

“The band wants him in the album artwork,” she said. “They want him involved. At least, his image, since he co-wrote some of the most successful songs. The band wants to pay tribute to that history, to his contribution. Just like they’re doing with you. Cool, right?” She smiled at me again. “For a bunch of people with such giant egos, they’re pretty humble, huh?”

“Right,” I said. “Cool.” But there was a lump in my throat as I turned away from that painting, from those eyes that seemed to look right through me.