Chapter Three
Before Kid, Claire was never late, never behind, never what she would now describe as a Complete Disorganized Mess.
After Kid was a totally different story. The night of the concert, she barely made it out the door. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking hiring a sixteen-year-old stranger. Maya, clutching her favorite stuffed T. rex and howling, clearly had her doubts, too.
She ran through the emergency contacts twice, plus the list of Maya’s food allergies, how to use the EpiPen, where the first aid kit, flashlights, and fire extinguisher were kept, and probably would have given up on the whole thing altogether if Mack hadn’t texted saying, Fun, Claire—I’m going to make you have it even if it kills me.
The house lights were starting to dim when Claire finally found her friends at the bar, clustered around a group of tables at the front.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she whispered, juggling her jacket, purse, and the random tissues and toys still in her pockets as she slid into a seat between Abbi and Sam. She reached across the table to squeeze Mack’s hand with an extra apology. Too late, she realized she still had blue Play-Doh underneath her fingernails. If anyone thought a night at a concert would help Claire find a date, they were sorely mistaken.
But it wasn’t like she’d gotten there early enough to mingle. In a matter of seconds, the house and the stage lights went down completely, and everything plunged into darkness.
A familiar tightness gripped her chest, a mix of anticipation and nerves. It reminded her of all those times she’d sat in the dark before Ryan walked on stage. Every time it was the same. The waiting. The hope. Wanting this to be the show where the right person saw him, heard him, signed him. The show that blew everything open and let their lives begin.
For a moment, nothing happened on the stage. Then she sensed rather than saw the singer walk out and pick up his guitar. She heard the quiet shuffle of footsteps, the click of an amp turning on.
Someone behind her cleared his throat. The audience stirred, waiting.
Then the first chord played in the dark.
That was all it took for Claire to forget about blue Play-Doh, the toys in her purse, the fact that these days she had to be home well before ten because she was responsible for a lot more than midterms.
The guitar reverberated through the darkness, and she was twenty again, kissing the lead singer of Little White Lie in an alleyway behind the bar, knowing no amount of studying, and no alarm on her phone, was going to keep her a virgin for long.
Six months later, she dropped out of the University of Washington and moved to New York with him. His band had signed with a manager. All they needed was a label—a big one—to make the sacrifice worthwhile.
She knew he drank too much, even then. But she was twenty in New York—everybody drank too much. And she believed in him—in his goodness, his talent, his heart. It took her way too long to accept that the late nights and constant partying weren’t small annoyances he was going to grow out of, or stuff that would change as soon as he got his big break, the offer he swore was just one more show, one more party, one more night away. She wondered what might have happened if she hadn’t had Maya, that little pulse kicking inside her, telling her it was time to go.
They couldn’t have raised a child together. He’d made that more than clear when she finally worked up the courage to tell him she was pregnant and he proceeded to get so obliterated he could barely remember his own name.
No. She slammed the brakes down hard on that line of thought.
How could just a few chords take her all the way back to that night?
She hated thinking about those times, the broken promises and broken beer bottles and the nights she cried herself to sleep alone on the futon, too broke to afford a real bed.
This is completely different. I’m completely different.
She was Good Claire again, even more responsible than her twenty-year-old self could have imagined. One night hanging out with her friends listening to music wasn’t going to change that.
The chord swelled as a single spotlight came up on the man on stage. He was sitting on a stool, the rest of the band still shrouded in darkness behind him. She saw black leather boots, dark jeans, those two dark bands tattooed around a forearm roped with muscle and covered in dark hair. His chest was broad, filled out across the shoulders. And there were his hands, as large and strong as she’d hoped.
He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and his head was down, brown hair falling just below the scruff of his jaw. The effect kept the audience on edge, waiting for the next chord, the first rush of his voice. It kept Claire on edge, too, wanting to know if the whole package was going to look as good as the glimpses so far.
Fun, Mack had told her. Yeah, she could sort of remember what that was.
The music grew, and lights flooded the stage at the exact instant the man on the stool looked up.
Claire gasped.
The audience went wild with applause as they started to play, but she couldn’t hear a thing. Her hands flew to her mouth. She realized she’d let out a cry.
The lead singer of Square One wasn’t just some random piece of eye candy. She knew him.
She knew every inch of his hands, the bend of his knuckles, the warmth of his skin, even if she hadn’t recognized him in the photograph or known the name of his new band.
He might be older, more muscular, tattooed, with longer hair. But his eyes were still the color of the ocean reflecting a cloudy, changing sky. As much as she tried to forget about Ryan, she couldn’t forget those eyes. She saw them in the face of her daughter every single day.
And now, after years of no contact, they were staring right at her.
His hands wavered, and his voice caught, but Claire couldn’t stay to find out what was going to happen. In a panic, thinking only of Maya, she pushed back her chair and ran out.