Lennon McCartney’s heart pounded in his chest like a man buried alive in a coffin. He scoffed at the analogy, given it was how he felt most of the time, but focused on his breathing anyway. Slower, deeper, kind of how he liked to fuck, but now he just wanted to stop the pending heart attack.

The roar of the crowd filtered through the hallways of the Wells Fargo Center in Philly, through the dressing room, over the chatter of his Preload bandmates, and through the noise-cancelling headphones and foam ear protectors he currently wore.

He couldn’t escape it.

And he certainly couldn’t tell his brothers, the very men he’d grown up with in a Toronto group home, that it was paralyzing stage fright that found him lying flat out on his back for hours before every performance. They’d assumed his insomniac ass needed sleep before their shows, and he’d never been inclined to correct them.

Or give them a reason to find another drummer.

Because drumming was his life.

It was the only thing in his life.

The leather sofa he lay on had seen better days. As had his favorite faded denim jeans. They were worn to within an inch of their life. Ripped across one knee, frayed near the crotch. He wondered how many more concerts he’d get out of them before the fragile fabric became a hole that left him with his dick hanging out on stage.

There went his heart again. Another reason to dread stepping in front of the crowd. Another way he could fuck it up.

He dropped his arm over his eyes and tried to pretend he was anywhere but here. Anywhere other than a couple of hundred feet from the stage he was due to step onto in about twenty minutes.

Then there was the pressure of the latest edition of Rolling Stone naming him one of the greatest drummers of all time, making him the youngest drummer on the list. “All fast hands and flair,” the magazine said. “A steady heartbeat that puts a violent underscore to the Preload sound.”

He knew he was a good drummer, but was he really one of the greatest?

A wave of nausea joined his racing pulse.

The opening act closed out with a crescendo as the crowd screamed.

He was going to puke.

Again.

Fifteen minutes until he walked on that stage.

You suck.

You’re going to fuck it up.

Give them a reason to hate you.

Give them a reason to turn on you.

They always did. It was the reason he’d lived in so many foster homes, it was the reason his adoption had fallen through, and it was the reason the men around him were the only family he’d had since he was thirteen.

And he clung to them desperately, but like a bar of soap squeezed too hard, he was certain they were going to slip out of his grasp too.

Lennon shook his head to clear the voices and breathed, breathed so fucking hard it felt as though he was going to pass out.

What felt like seconds was obviously minutes when he heard the final call to head to the stage.

Someone shook his leg, and he opened his eyes. Bassist, Jordan, was towering above him. “Time to go,” he said, offering his hand.

Lennon took it and stood up before removing his headphones.

Guitarist, Elliott, threw his arm around Lennon’s shoulder. “Ready to do this?” he said, shaking Lennon so hard his teeth shuddered. It was playful, it was fun, it was high energy, but Lennon felt unsteady. Flakey like he always did in the minutes before he stepped on stage.

Lennon removed his foam earbuds and threw them at their lead singer, Dred, as he walked by. “You going to sing in tune tonight?”

Dred grinned and raised his middle finger. “You going to wake up enough to play?”

“Always,” Lennon replied.

Nik, the final part of their family and master of the seven-string, bounded toward the hallway, his energy level increasing with every successive concert, only this tour was different. More amplified. Lennon could only imagine how hyper Nik was going to be when they played their last show in New York tomorrow, wrapping up a tour that had involved more countries and venues then he could count or remember.

Nik would be happy. He was getting his way. A sabbatical for the band. At least eight months of no Preload.

They were taking the rest of the year off to do other things. To “live,” as more than one of his bandmates had put it. But while the others had plans—families, weddings, solo endeavors—he had a fuckload of nothing. Life was beginning to get in the way of their music, yet music was the only thing Lennon had left in his life.

Another reason for his heart to pound.

He dropped his headphones on the sofa and followed the band along the hallway toward their fans.

Elliott and Nik ran up the steps and took their guitars from the roadies. They always bounced onto the fucking stage as if they were made to be there, Nik with his high energy, and Elliott with his indescribable relationship with his guitar. He envied their confidence.

Jordan followed them on at his own pace and resumed his spot further back on the stage.

Lennon looked at Dred as he always did, wishing he had the front man’s charisma and easy stage presence.

And like always, Dred asked him the same question he did every night. “You got our beat, right?”

“You’d be all over the fucking place without me,” Lennon said. He grabbed his sticks from Ted, his drum tech, and raised them as he walked on the stage. The crowd roared in response, a wall of fucking sound he tried to block out.

He just had to get to his stool.

The walk felt like a million miles as he tucked his sticks in his back pocket so he could pull his hair back in an elastic. One of his many one-night stands had once said he had the blond curls of a Botticelli angel, but now it was straight-up surfer waves women seemed to love. He looked to the wings and saw nothing but his bandmates’ growing families. Nik’s girlfriend, Jenny, stood next to Pixie, Dred’s fiancée. Kendalee, Elliott’s girlfriend, blew Elliott a kiss that made him grin. Jordan’s fiancée, Lexi, was in England, and in a little over twenty-four hours, Jordan would be on a plane to join her.

But as soon as he stepped onto his podium, it was if a soundproof wall raised between him and the audience, kind of like the fancy limo they’d used to get to the stadium. A silence washed over him as he ran the tips of his fingers across his Tama signature snare drum, custom made for him. The black finish of the five-ply shell of bubinga wood would provide the fat low-end tone he required. The round peak of the bearing edge would allow vibrations to travel easily. Playing these babies was better than sex . . . well, almost.

He smirked as he pulled his sticks out of his pocket and sat down on his stool.

Nothing would start until he was ready. Until he raised his sticks in the air and gave them the first four beats and set the rhythm for the song, everyone was at his mercy. The rest of the band wouldn’t play a note, Dred wouldn’t sing a word.

He allowed the vibration he felt through his feet, from the anxious stamping and clapping of the audience, to fill him up. To give him the energy he needed to play the drums like they deserved to be played. With a kind of reverence and yet without mercy.

This moment of silence, in the midst of the chaos, was what he lived for. He felt like a fully charged battery without an outlet. Or like Freddie Mercury had once sung, he was like an atom bomb about to explode.

Everything slowed down. Everything had meaning. He had purpose.

When he was ready, he raised his sticks into the air and smacked them into each other four times, giving the band their cue. As quickly as he’d blocked the noise out, it came crashing over him as he brought his sticks down onto his drums.

And as the crowd screamed, and the other instruments kicked in, he recognized once again that he literally did live for this.

* * *

Georgia Starr yawned and checked her reflection in the mirror of the room where surgeons grabbed sleep between shifts and surgeries, a place she privately referred to as the graveyard. Her shoulder-length brown hair was flattened on one side, a sign that she hadn’t moved around much during her power nap. Though she was instantly wide awake, the bags under her brown eyes revealed the truth of how little sleep she’d actually had in the last twenty-four hours. Yesterday she had spent twenty hours on her feet. Undergrad and med school, followed by her neurology residency, had trained her to fall asleep and wake up at will. She stretched her arms into the air and cricked her neck from left to right. She needed to go to the ICU to check on her highest profile patients, twin two-year-olds.

She pulled her hair into the elastic that had been wrapped around her wrist and smoothed it into a ponytail. Georgia pinched her cheeks to add a little color. Some lip gloss would be helpful, but she needed to go check on her patients.

“Great job in there yesterday,” Jim Stein, president and CEO of Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York-Presbyterian, said as he caught up with her in the hallway. “Incredible. I know how much you like to push the boundaries of what is medically possible, but when you take on something like this and nail it, it looks good for all of us.”

“It was a thirty-person-strong team,” she replied. Separating the conjoined craniopagus twins, born with a section of their brains attached, wouldn’t have been possible without the extraordinary specialists in neurosurgery and plastic and reconstructive surgery, plus the anesthesiology staff and all the nurses.

“Of course, of course,” Jim said nodding effusively. “But your role in the planning and execution of this surgery has been noted by many.”

“Thank you, it means a lot to me.” she replied truthfully. The recognition from her peers warmed her but it wasn’t helping her patients. She hurried down the corridor toward the ICU without waiting for a response, already focused on the checks and tests Hope and Faith would need over the coming days. The twins had shared a “bridge”—five centimeters of fused brains that had needed to be divided. Though it was way too soon to tell what limitations they would have to deal with in life, there was a high probability there would be some.

“How are they?” Georgia asked her friend Eve, the head of ICU, minutes later as she entered.

Eve finished documenting something in a folder and looked up. “All things considered, they’re doing well.”

The color in Faith’s cheeks looked great given how pale she’d looked immediately after surgery. After looking at her stats, Georgia breathed a sigh of relief. Her blood pressure was up and stable after having fluctuated during the night.

She’d need to check next on Hope’s heart, which had been the engine for the twins. Before the first of their surgeries, her blood pressure had been three times higher than normal, while Faith’s had been sluggish.

Across the three previous surgeries, Georgia had rerouted about seventy percent of the girls’ shared blood vessels, resulting in Hope’s blood pressure dropping significantly. Ahead of the final surgery, the girls’ plastic surgeon, Dr. Robert Woo, had then placed balloons under their skin to stretch it so their skin could cover the separation.

“I was hoping to see the parents. Do you know where Samantha and Jacques are?” Georgia had spoken to them after the surgery and twice more during the night as the girls’ vitals had shifted, but she hoped to reassure them further that the girls were indeed holding their own.

“We persuaded them to go take a shower, get some food,” Eve replied.

“Really good to hear.” Georgia sighed with relief. Normalcy was nearly impossible for parents when their children were in the hospital. While it was completely understandable for parents to want to be near their children, the horrible truth a doctor could never tell a relative was that sometimes in cases like this they were simply in the way during the critical surgery window. They were really most needed, most useful, in the post-surgery days when their children began to regain consciousness and had to deal with pain and boredom. By which time, parents were often too exhausted to be of real use.

“Thanks so much for doing that,” Georgia said. “I’m leaving soon for my brother’s birthday party, but you know how to reach me.”

“Will do,” Eve said. “Have fun and drive safe. It’s hard to believe it’s the start of freaking April. It was like an ice rink when I came in this morning.”

Georgia glanced at the clock on the wall. Two o’clock. She had time to shower at the hospital, but she was ready to get out of there and breathe some unrecycled air. She’d take her clothes with her and shower at her parents’ four-story place in Midtown, where she’d be celebrating her eldest brother Ezra’s forty-fifth birthday. The guests wouldn’t be showing up for hours, meaning she might have time to blow-dry her hair and get a couple more hours sleep in her old bedroom before she’d have to face all four of her brothers and their perfectly curated families. While the men in her family were all happily married or dating, she was the only one still single.

She pulled a sweater on at her locker, slid her arms into a long thick parka, and changed into snow boots. It was hard to believe it was the first day of April. The weather was one giant April Fools’ joke. If she did take a job at another hospital, it would be in Miami or some other place in the sun.

She grabbed her purse and made her way to her car. Driving was going to take a ridiculous amount of time in this weather, but there was no way she could have taken the subway carrying a custom-made, engraved axe. Nor could she have brought the barbaric hunting knife her brother had been hinting at in a not so subtle way into the hospital so she could grab her usual car service. At the time she’d picked it—with a variety of other outdoorsy tools—as a birthday gift for Ezra, it had seemed like an inspired idea. He’d recently closed on a cottage in the Adirondacks fitted out with solar panels and now fancied himself a weekend lumberjack, claiming he wanted to experience being “off-grid” and “outdoorsy.” His words, not hers.

So, car it was. And she hated driving. It was the only thing she disliked about New York.

“Dumb move, Starr,” she said as she climbed into her Mercedes and started the engine. The Dave Brubeck Quartet burst through her speakers. One of her absolute favorites, “Strange Meadow Lark.” She pressed the button on her phone to take the song back to the beginning. The song brought forth memories of sitting and listening to it in the greenhouse on the roof of the penthouse that had once belonged to her grandfather, the true jazz connoisseur, and had been her home since his death.

As the piano intro played, she listened for the moment that was coming up. “Listen, Georgie,” her grandfather would say. “Listen how seamlessly it moves from the unclear time signature in the solo to four-four time when the others come in.”

She felt her body finally start to relax in a way it hadn’t even when she’d slept. Some of her colleagues were into meditation to calm down, but a burst of jazz had always worked better on her mental state. So did thinking of her grandfather, the man who had loved her unconditionally and cheered for her every success—unlike her father.

Snow hit the windshield as she pulled out of the lot and put on her wipers. The music and rare April snow might have seemed romantic had she been tucked away in her Upper East Side condo with a nice glass of Barolo. But she wasn’t. She was navigating her way through the city to a party she was dreading. But thankfully, the traffic was cooperating. A miracle, given how clogged the main streets usually were.

When her phone rang, she answered it out of habit without looking at the screen.

“Georgia.” Her father always sounded like he’d chewed on gravel when he spoke. “Why did I have to hear from Woo’s father about the surgery you completed yesterday? I just called Stein. Heard it went well.”

It was so like her father to abuse the privileges of his position as the current president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, blurring the lines of professionalism and nepotism. And so typical of him to call someone other than her to validate whether her surgery had truly been a success.

“Yes, it did. I’m on my way to your house as we speak. I’m just south of the park,” she said.

“Very good. Before dinner you can share your findings with your brothers and me, perhaps see if we can’t offer some perspective that might have aided the surgery in a more . . . effective manner. For example, I’d like to review your decision to split the superficial system of veins in the outer layer of the dura mater.”

One day he’d surprise her and simply say “Good job.” After years of effort and determination to exceed his expectations of her, she’d never succeeded. Of course, she could defend herself—she could talk to him about all the case reviews of similar sets of twins. She could tell him all about the experts she’d spoken to. She could share with him how many staff members had been involved in the decision. But after all was said and done, William Starr wouldn’t be satisfied. He had never performed a separation of the one-in-ten-million condition, a procedure she had nailed. Only forty pairs of such conjoined twins had ever been separated—not one of them by her father or any of her neurological surgeon brothers.

Yet he fought a complex internal battle of living vicariously through her success, and hating her because she was better than he was.

“Perhaps another time, Dad. I haven’t showered yet and could do with some sleep before everyone gets there.” In retrospect, staying at the hospital to get ready probably would have been less stressful.

“I’m sure we can work around it, Georgia. It troubles me that you didn’t review this case with us.”

Georgia tried to bite her tongue, but couldn’t. “I’m a fully qualified neurosurgeon. A damn good one who—”

“Because of me,” her father spat out.

She shook her head even though he couldn’t see her. Anger bubbled. He didn’t care about the little girls. Didn’t care that Hope and Faith’s parents were sitting a vigil outside the ICU. He only cared about his reputation and legacy. That he got his share of the credit for her work. Something she didn’t care about. “The girls are fine, thank you for asking,” she said, sarcastically. “And I’m a damn good surgeon because I worked my ass off.” She had sacrificed having real friends, boyfriends, life-changing fun college years. She’d been on this path since her sixth birthday, when her grandfather had bought her a model of a three-part skull with a coordinating eight-part brain that fit perfectly into its cranial cavity. She’d spent the day learning how to pronounce and spell words like “zygomatic,” “maxilla,” and “mandible.” It sat now on a shelf in her office, where she’d use it to help explain to children what their surgeries would entail.

Her grandfather had always been the one to encourage her, to support her.

Now, because she was just full-on mad, she couldn’t help but be defensive. “I asked my peers at the hospital. I consulted with surgeons who had actually done this procedure. I had plenty of advice from people who were legally allowed to review the case.”

“Ah, so now you think you are better than your brothers and me? That our collective decades of experience are worth less than your paltry years.”

Paltry? At thirty-six, she was already recognized as one of the country’s leading pediatric neurosurgeons. Though her brothers had set an exceptionally high bar in the field, she was on a path to best all of their accomplishments. Even her second-oldest brother, Randall, who was already head of neurology at a prestigious children’s hospital in Atlanta, couldn’t compete with what she’d now done.

And while she hated to admit to herself that competition mattered to her, the truth was you couldn’t grow up in—or survive—a family like hers without embracing it. Graduating from high school a year early, getting her undergrad degree and completing med school in three years each, and blowing through her neurology residency in only five years—as her professors realized there was little left to teach her—had all been motivated by her brothers’ assertions that she’d never beat them.

But she would never have been able to do what she did day after day if she hadn’t cared. And her motivation was purely the number of children she could help if she worked hard enough, learned more. In her mind, her reputation wasn’t in the certificates hanging on her walls or the praise she got after surgeries, it was pinned to the notice board in her office. Pictures of children who thrived after they had left her operating table.

“Dad, I just didn’t need your advice on this, a procedure you’ve never done.”

“We’ll discuss this further when you get here.”

And with that, he hung up.

Adrenaline coursed through her. She should just turn the car around and head back home. She was tired of being treated like the less-experienced one, the less-tenured one, the less-smart one.

The traffic began to move, the weather obviously keeping some people home, and a large bus pulled in front of her. It looked high-end, and for a moment she wondered if the Knicks had a game that night before dismissing the idea. Surely the visiting team would arrive sooner.

It seemed to take an age for the lights to change and even Brubeck’s “Kathy’s Waltz” failed to slow down her breathing, which, like her heartbeat, had accelerated during the conversation with her father. Finally, the bus’s brake lights went off as it began to move forward.

In only a few minutes, she’d be at her parents’ place.

Now she had to decide if she was going to step inside.

* * *

Lennon looked down at the blank page of the black notebook that lay open on the table of the tour bus. It was the same kind of hardback Moleskine notebook in which he’d documented his life ever since the day one had first been put into his thirteen-year-old hands. When this book was filled, it would join the hundred and forty-nine others he’d stacked in an old trunk over the last fourteen years. The outside of the notebook was battered, the corners beaten, looking like he felt. The pages were plain—unlined and unstructured like his thoughts.

He flipped back through the pages. Archival ink from his Meisterstück Solitaire Blue Hour Skeleton fountain pen covered the page. The pen was his sword, the only defense he had against the thoughts that constantly crowded his head. Words, ideas, memories—the things he couldn’t possibly express to his fellow band members. Having grown up with him in a group home, they were his brothers in every way that mattered and the only real family he’d ever known. They’d humored him, the youngest of them, as he’d trailed after them. They’d dealt with him. They’d tolerated him—then, and now. He was their second choice after their original drummer, Adam, had committed suicide when the band were still boys in a group home, long before they hit it big. He knew that. He was still waiting for the day that they’d decide to shut the band down.

The sabbatical was the first sign of that. After the tour ended, they were taking the rest of the year off to do other things. Other things. He couldn’t think of any other thing he wanted to do more than play drums.

He tapped a rhythm with the pen on the surface of the page. Drummer’s habit.

In the earliest notebooks, he’d made lists. Boring shit about his day. What he’d had for dinner. Which teacher had pissed him off. Which girl he wanted to make out with. But then at fourteen, he’d seen images of Kurt Cobain’s notebooks and had become inspired by the way he could spew the chaos in his head down onto paper. Lennon flicked back a couple of pages. A sketch he’d drawn of the square in Cleveland, a poem he’d written one morning as the sun had exploded over the Baltimore sky, song lyrics he’d started then scribbled over in Atlanta because they revealed too much.

Through the condensation on the inside of the window, he caught sight of the rare April snow. The sky was the color of freshly poured concrete. It was depressing, especially when spring had appeared to be just around the corner when they’d played Washington a few nights earlier. But New York was it, the final night of a world tour that had started with Europe and Canada the previous year and ended with three straight months across the United States. He was tired, and wanted his own bed. Preferably a bed anywhere there was no fucking chance of snow.

The bus lurched as it hit a series of winter-ravaged potholes. They weren’t supposed to be on this damn bus, but the weather had caused airport problems, and their private jets were still in Philadelphia.

Once upon a time, the band would have just hopped on the crew bus, but what had once been just the five of them was now an entourage of ten.

He looked up as two-year-old Petal, daughter of lead singer, Dred, squealed from her car seat that was fixed to the booth near the front of the coach. Thankfully, the previous occupants had taken young kids on tour and had modified the seats to accommodate them. Nik, and his girlfriend, Jenny, sat opposite her in the booth-style seating, entertaining her using Jenny’s scarf to play peek-a-boo. When Nik dropped the scarf, Jenny shouted “Boo,” making Petal giggle all over again. When the women and kids had flown out to Philly to join them for the last two shows, no one had been planning for a multi-family bus trip to their last show in New York.

Nik’s free hand trailed down Jenny’s back and skimmed the inch of skin between her jeans and shirt. Jenny reached behind her and gripped his fingers to stop him, then linked her fingers with his.

Lennon picked up his pen and wrote.

Envy.

Dred walked out of the washroom holding his two-month-old daughter, Arwen, and a full plastic sack whose baby-powder scent didn’t quite conceal the odor of its contents. “Fuck, it never gets any easier,” he said. He made gagging motions as he dropped the diaper into the garbage. “How did I end up with two girls who poop like grown men? It’s a good thing I love you,” he said as he kissed Arwen on the crown of her head, a head Lennon knew would smell faintly of lavender, like it always did. Lennon’s heart squeezed tightly as he watched one of his best friends with the daughter he’d given a dumb-ass Lord of the Rings name like his own. Dred stared at Pixie with love as he handed their daughter back to her. When Petal lifted her arms up toward her daddy, Dred sat back down next to her to cover her cheek in kisses.

Love, Lennon wrote.

Elliott’s laugh sounded from the back bedroom, where the guitarist was locked away with his girlfriend, Kendalee. It was the first time she’d ever been on a tour bus, and from the sounds coming from there, the quality walnut furniture was not the only thing Elliott was showing her.

Jordan, the band’s bass guitarist, emerged from his bunk where he’d been video-chatting with his fiancée, Lexi, who was in London for a guest appearance with the English National Ballet. His shoulders were no longer up near his ears with stress, and from the satisfied smirk on the big lug’s face and the way he was still tucking his shirt in his jeans, they’d done more than just chat.

Desire.

His pen hovered above the word, ready to cross it out. But he decided to add another word instead.

Lust.

But one was not enough.

Sex.

Fuck.

Envy.

Envy.

Envy.

Lennon bit down a curse and scribbled his pen over the page, blacking the whole thing out, before slamming the notebook closed. He popped his earbuds in, found “Drain You,” and looked out the window again. Fans droned on about the five distorted tracks and Cobain’s dislike of overdubbing, but they missed the heart of the song. Grohl’s fucking clever attention to the eighths. The crash of the first beat carried by the half-open hi-hat on counts two, three, and four was simple, but the combination of the snare on two—the “and” beat—and four with the bass drum filling in on every eighth when there was no snare was fucking genius.

He’d met Grohl, even talked about doing something together while the band was on hiatus. Dave was one of the best drummers of his generation, and while Lennon was good, he didn’t have the swagger of Zeppelin’s John Bonham, the ferocity of The Who’s Keith Moon, or the showmanship of Cream’s Ginger Baker. No matter what Rolling Stone said.

He closed his eyes and leaned back.

The seat jostled. Someone had come to sit on the curved seat with him, but he kept his eyes closed. The thoughts were all too close to the surface.

God, how he wished he could stop the never-ending stream of thoughts that kept him awake and edgy and raw late at night and forced him out of bed early in the morning. The band assumed he was one of the—what the fuck had Dred called them?—sleepless elite. People who could thrive on no sleep. People like tech geeks, according to Dred, who could sleep during the day in their beanbag-filled offices in between building apps that nobody gave a shit about. He’d let Dred believe it rather than explain the truth.

When a foot made contact with his shin under the table, Lennon opened one eye for a moment before closing it again.

Jordan was sitting across the table.

“You okay?” Jordan asked. “You’ve been quiet since Philly.”

Lennon took out his earbuds, but looked over Jordan’s shoulder toward the windshield instead of at his eyes. Eyes told the truth. Lies could fall easily from lips, but the eyes were the most honest thing about a person—that and the way they got off. Orgasms are as honest a reaction as they come. He laughed at his own pun.

“What’s funny?” Jordan asked.

“You walking in here still putting your clothes back together after tugging one off in your bunk.”

Jordan shook his head, sadness etched in his eyes, and Lennon’s chest tightened. Why couldn’t he just tell them the way he felt, the way the thoughts filled his head to the point where he felt he was going to break? He was happy for his friend. Fuck, Jordan deserved every moment he spent with Lexi.

Jordan slapped the table that sat between them. “Okay,” he said as he stood, “you know where I am if you need to . . . you know . . . talk or shit.” Jordan headed back to his seat near Pixie.

I didn’t mean it.

I’m sorry.

Come back.

God, he wanted Jordan to turn around so he could tell him what he meant to Lennon. So he could tell Jordan how much he loved Lexi and the two of them together.

But he couldn’t. The words stuck somewhere between his heart and his brain . . . his head forcing them to remain deep inside.

Because Jordan, like all the rest of them, had everything he wanted.

Everything he could never have.

He was stuck in the spiral.

It’s all over tonight.

Preload won’t get back together after the hiatus.

Which means I won’t have a job.

Which means I should sell the condo.

Because no job equals no money, which equals no home.

No different from being left—

“Fuck, I need sleep,” Nik said as he crashed down next to him.

Lennon looked at his friend out of the corner of his eye. “Stop banging your chick and you might get some.”

Nik laughed and looked across the bus at Jenny, who was in conversation with Dred. “Yeah. Like that’s going to happen.”

Nik leaned forward and placed his elbows on the table. Which meant he was about to get serious. Lennon really couldn’t handle serious Nik. Because when Nik got serious, he became the older sibling Lennon craved. Not that anyone could replace his sister.

“I want to talk to you about Jennifer.”

Lennon’s chest tightened. Of course he did. He wished he’d never mentioned her name. He wished it had never come out that he’d helped out Nik’s girlfriend, Jenny, all those years ago simply because she’d shared a name with his dead sister. Because in some small way, it had felt like he was helping Jennifer. Which was stupid.

They want to know about her.

They’ll blame you for her death.

Just like your mother did.

Just like you do.

They want to help.

You did kill her.

They’ll abandon you like Mom did.

Bile began to rise, stinging his throat as he tried to formulate a sentence. “You don’t know how to take care of your girl? It’d be my pleasure to show her what she’s missing.” He grabbed his crotch for good measure. Distract, dismiss, evade, offend. Anything but talk about the other Jennifer. His Jennifer. The one who’d loved him. The one who’d handed him cheese strings through the bars of his crib when he was starving. The one he’d watched curl up next to that prison, a trail of blood leaking from her ear as she died.

Nik sighed and rubbed his hand along his jaw, but then nodded in understanding. Somehow that burned worse than the bile. “I wanted to know if there was anything we could do during our downtime . . . together . . . you know to go visit her grave if she has one, or maybe—”

“No.” That was all he had. If he said another word, he’d lose his shit.

I can’t.

It’ll break me.

I don’t know where she is.

Nik put his hands up in the universal sign of surrender. “I don’t know what to say to you because you’ve never told us all the details of what happened before you arrived at the group home, but . . .” Nik sighed and looked out of the window at the swirls of snow. “Fuck, Lennon. I just want to help. In some way. Ever since you mentioned a sister, my heart has fucking ached. And I want to do something, anything, so you’ll know I’m here for you.”

Ignore the pain.

You deserve it and worse.

No.

You don’t deserve anyone to be there for you.

“Take your pity somewhere else, Nik.”

One day he’d push them too far. Push them out of his life for good, he knew it.

Just like he knew they’d give anything to have their original drummer, Adam, back. But Adam had committed suicide while at their group home, and when Lennon had inherited Adam’s room and his drum kit, he hadn’t realized he’d just agreed to spending the rest of his life chasing a fucking ghost.

Fuck, his life sucked.

He took a deep breath to slow the racing beat of his heart as anxiety tightened its hold and opened his notebook.

A lifetime of second

The power of first

A choice to replace

A blessing or curse?

Occasionally he wondered what the point was of collecting chains of lyric ideas. Not a single word of any of their songs had been written by him. The guys had asked him if he wanted to collaborate, but he’d refused. If he cowrote, he’d get higher royalties, a bigger share of the profits that he wanted the others to have, but worse, he’d have to expose what he carried around inside himself, something he wasn’t ready for.

He looked up to find Nik craning his neck toward the notebook. Lennon slammed it closed.

“One day, I hope you’ll trust me enough. I wish you felt like you could share shit with me, instead of just blowing us off.” Nik glanced out of the window, and a look of utter horror came over his face. “Holy shit,” he yelled. “Hold on to something! Cover the kids.”

A loud bang echoed through the bus, which began to move sideways, tipping as it went. Lennon’s seat began to crumple as easily as paper as a bright orange dump truck rammed into the side of the bus.

Lennon’s heart lurched, adrenaline surging through him. Screams filled the cabin. Metal creaked and groaned. His seat finally crumpled under the pressure, the window shattering onto him as the truck pulverized the side of the bus. Nik slid to the end of the bench seat, and Lennon tried to follow, holding on to the table to get out of the truck’s path.

Cries sounded all around him.

“Jordan, the baby—”

“No!”

“Kendalee, no—”

“Nik, help me—”

Pixie screamed as she was thrown from her seat, falling forward and hitting her head on the corner of the table. She slumped to the floor.

The bus continued to tip, now at a forty-five-degree angle. There was still a small chance it would stay upright, but if the truck didn’t stop, they were going over, and it still didn’t show any sign of slowing down.

“Fuck!” Lennon reached desperately for something, anything, to hold onto. He tried to get to Pixie but he was thrown from his seat, smashing into Nik.

“Pix! Fuck. Can you get to her, Jordan?” Panic filled Dred’s voice as he tried to cover Petal with his body but couldn’t hold the position.

Jenny sobbed.

“Arwen!”

Elliott yelled out in pain.

“I can’t get to her.”

“We’re going to tip.”

“Fuck, cover the baby.”

Voices blurred together.

The coach gave an ominous groan as it finally gave up fighting the truck and gravity and fell toward the blacktop.

Time slowed as they were thrown from their seats. He felt weightless for a moment, and then a jarring thud to the ribs knocked the breath out of him. Darkness followed.

Seconds, minutes—who the fuck knew?—passed before a burning pain flooded his body. He tried to focus on where he was. His legs were tangled on something, the strap of Nik’s laptop bag. And it felt as though the bus had landed on his chest. It was impossible to draw a breath through the excruciating agony.

He tried to move his arm, but it felt like a thousand knives pressed deep into his skin. He vomited from the pain.

Fuck.

He looked to his arm and could see bone. The spins returned, and he was sick again.

Fuck.

Shudders racked his body.

Voices filtered through.

“Jenny, oh fuck, sweetheart. Stay still.”

Nik.

Lennon couldn’t see him properly. Everything was blurry.

A child cried, but he couldn’t tell which.

He gasped in another breath, wincing as his ribs fought against the movement.

“Elliott’s leg is broken!” he heard Kendalee shout. From his position on the floor he could see Pixie. Her eyes were closed and she was still. Jordan held her hand tenderly.

A cold sweat covered his skin, the bus suddenly frigid as air weaved its way toward him through the broken glass. He moved his gaze to the ceiling. Fuck, he could see the gray sky through the windows. What he wouldn’t give for just a moment of sunshine.

What he wouldn’t give for someone to hold his hand.

What he wouldn’t give to just be released from all of it.

His breathing became harder, his heart rate slowing.

The sun wasn’t going to come.

And he was alone.