Damn!”

Mal Colten tried to contain his anger as one of the strings on his beloved Gibson Hummingbird acoustic snapped as he began his warm up. There would be barely any time before the gig started to change it. He wouldn’t be able to swap to one of his other guitars because of the content of the set list which was too late to change. Part of him wanted to throw the damn instrument across the room and cancel the gig.

But that wasn’t what Mal Colten did.

He went on stage whatever, whenever, however.

He was sick of it.

“Everything okay?” Boyd Ross, Mal’s manager, waltzed into the backstage area.

“Broke a string.”

“Can’t you get one of the guitar techs to sort it out?”

“If you think I’m letting some knucklehead tech touch this baby, you’re crazier than I thought.” Mal shook his head. Even after all these years, Boyd didn’t understand how he felt about other people putting their grubby hands on his collection of guitars. Each of them had a history, a story to tell, memories—some of them better than others.

Boyd held his hands up. “Sorry, I forgot how precious you were about these things.” He paused. “Thought you should know that Therese has found you a house sitter. She put out a post on Craigslist, interviewed, and the woman’s going to start tomorrow.”

Mal frowned. His regular housekeeper, Alena, had to go and look after her sick mother in Oregon for a while. A woman in her mid-fifties, Alena was no temptation to Mal and looked after him as if he was one of her own children. She oversaw the running of his house when he was on tour and catered for him when he was there. Alena kept him grounded, reminding him regularly that he wasn’t a superstar everywhere. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of someone he didn’t know being in the house. He’d been comfortable with Alena, and the thought of a stranger there made him feel troubled. “Who is she?”

“Someone called Piper. A local, apparently, who knows the area and was immediately available. Therese said there were a lot of crazies who responded to the ad and this one seemed the best.”

The best of the crazy? thought Mal. Sounds like a song title. “Right, so that’s all sorted then.” He knew he sounded less than grateful.

As he re-strung the Gibson, his view from his kitchen in Bayview House briefly flitted through his mind and a pang of homesickness hit him in the chest. The calmness of the ocean, the other islands, the sea birds, the relative quiet—God, he missed Fortune’s Bay. There were still a good number of dates left on his current tour and he was beginning to tire of it. A concert hall, a radio studio, a record store, a bus, a hotel room. And repeat.

He needed a break. Life on the road was beginning to get mundane, the days merging into each other and repetitive. He wished he was the type of artist who did a few massive stadium gigs in a short space of time, or rather the one who chose to play smaller venues on longer tours, thus giving more people the opportunity to see him. But he wasn’t.

“Twenty minutes to show time!” The stage manager called into the room.

For the first time in a long time, Mal didn’t feel ready. He didn’t want to go on stage. He didn’t want to sing in front of a fifteen-hundred-capacity crowd in a small venue in Carolina. He wanted to go home and sleep in his own bed.

It showed. He stood in front of the mic and stared out, unseeing, at the audience.

“This is, um, Believe In Your Destiny,” he stumbled over the title of one of his lesser-known tracks. It was one of his first releases and he ought to know it inside out. Suddenly his mind was a total blank, panic gripping him. He started playing the chords and the support band joined in. The words wouldn’t come; he couldn’t think of a single lyric. The crowd, almost as if sensing his unease, started to sing for him, thinking it was part of the act. Relief flooded through him as the lines came back to him and he joined in. He didn’t notice the quizzical looks between the rest of the band members as he limped through the rest of the set with less enthusiasm than he usually would. At the end of the show, where there would usually be wild cheers and whistles, there was subdued clapping. The crowd cleared out quickly, not even wanting an encore.

Back in the dressing room, Mal braced himself for the inevitable showdown with Boyd. He wasn’t disappointed.

“What the hell was that all about?” Boyd’s face was tomato red, a combination of the backstage temperature and his anger. “You want to explain?”

Mal shrugged. “What? So I forget the words to a song once? I’d like to see you try it.” He reached for a bottle of water and swigged greedily from it.

“No encore. No begging you for more. You realize this is going to get a damaging review?”

Mal shook his head. He wasn’t stupid; he knew it hadn’t been his best show and he thought he could pinpoint the reasons why. The feelings of homesickness bubbled up again. Maybe it was time to quit and go back to Fortune’s Bay.

A smile crossed his features at the thought.