When her parents found her, she was out in the parking lot waiting for the taxi she had called for from the lobby. She shivered from the cold and clutched her wallet to her chest as she stared at the streetlights glowing in the dark. They blurred into a mess.
“Oh, darlin’, there you are!” Sandy rushed to Maggie and pulled her into her arms. Maggie’s guitar case was strapped across her back, so she tried not to move much as her mom hugged her tighter.
“I want to be alone, Mom.” She looked over her mom’s shoulder at her dad. He hung back with his hands shoved into his pockets.
“You were wonderful,” Sandy said, smiling as she let go and put her hands on each side of Maggie’s face.
Maggie narrowed her eyes. “Were we in the same building? You saw what happened. That wasn’t wonderful.”
“She means your voice, Mags,” Todd said, stepping closer. “And you’re always wonderful because you’re my girl.”
Oh, shut up!
His wink and sloppy smile made her boil inside. “Don’t try to joke about something like this. This will be all over the Internet by morning,” she snapped at him. “It’s going to reflect badly on you guys—your talentless daughter embarrassing herself on stage. It’s what you’ve tried to stop me from doing my whole life. Too bad you couldn’t produce a little star, huh? It would’ve been better if you’d never had me.”
She couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. She mashed her lips together, guilt pushing down on top of her until it felt like her knees might give way.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking away. She wiped her tears off her face as her mom took a step back and folded her arms. Then Maggie noticed people inside the front doors of the hotel, trying to catch a glimpse of her and her parents. Word must have spread that Down Sugar Road was here. It looked like some hotel staff was keeping people away, though.
“It’s not what happened on stage that disappoints me,” Sandy said, still assuming her don’t mess with me stance. “It’s this.” She gestured at Maggie. “I thought you were stronger than this. You messed up, hon, but we’re not upset with you. Don’t run and hide.”
She gripped the strap of her guitar case on her shoulder. “How are you not upset? What happened to the whole ‘just write lyrics’ thing? Why are you okay with this now?”
Her parents looked at each other, an unspoken conversation passing between them. And she understood. They weren’t okay with this. They wanted her to accept what had happened—accept her failure—but that was as far as it went. A fresh set of tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away. Right now she really, really hated her parents.
“Why can’t I sing?” she yelled, her voice cracking. “Why can’t I have what you have? Why don’t you want that for me?”
Her dad’s expression turned more serious than she had ever seen it. He took off his hat and rubbed a hand across his forehead. He looked so tired all of a sudden. Both her parents were so perfect on the outside, but that was as transparent as a sheet of thin ice now. She could see their frustration, their faults, and their fears for her future plain as day.
“At first it was your voice,” Todd said, his tone dropping, “but then we realized you’d probably be happier writing instead. You can try for the stage, of course. I already told you I’m fine with that. It’s your life, Mags.”
Sandy looked at him and then at Maggie.
“You mean I’m not good enough for the stage,” Maggie answered slowly. She was so confused. Her life had been all kinds of wonderful. She didn’t understand why they didn’t want her to have something they had worked so hard for. She could work hard too . . . if she could get over the bumps in the road. Like tonight.
Her dad put his hat back on. “You could be good enough, but—”
“You don’t want me to be!” she hissed. “That’s the point here. That has always been the real reason I’ve been too afraid to try. Can’t you see that’s what matters most to me?”
They knew it was true. She could see it in their eyes, and it made her so angry she wanted to pick up her guitar and slam it over their heads. Two cones of light swept over them as a taxi pulled into the parking lot. Maggie let out a sigh of relief and started toward it. Her mother grabbed her shoulder, making her stop.
“Hon, please don’t leave yet. We need to—”
“Just let me go, Mom.”
A man jogged up to them from the front doors. He was wearing a maroon shirt with a gold nametag that said Hotel Manager.
“Todd and Sandy?” he asked, out of breath as he held out his hand.
Todd turned to face him, a smile on his face. Maggie could see it was forced, but only because she knew him so well. The manager had no clue. “Why, hello, yes. I’m sorry—have we caused a stir with some of your guests?”
The man laughed and glanced over his shoulder. “It wasn’t announced anywhere that you’d be here, and with the event tonight, we have more than our usual number of guests who would love to meet you.” He took a deep breath and practically blushed. “I’m one of them, I’ll admit. Is there any way I can get your autograph?” He held out a piece of hotel stationery, his eyes filled with hope. He winced and shifted his feet. “Is that too much to ask?”
Sandy stepped forward and shook the man’s hand. She was all poise and grace. How they could flip on the professional switch so easily was way beyond Maggie. All she could do was glare. “Of course, we’d be happy to.” She glanced at Maggie before turning back to him. Maggie spun on her heel and rushed to the taxi. She was inside and riding away before Todd and Sandy noticed she’d gone. She folded her arms and focused on the road ahead.
* * *
As the cab driver pulled out of Cole’s driveway, she marched up to the keypad by the garage door and punched in the code. Something deep inside her was raging out of control—a fire she’d been building for years now. Her parents didn’t want her to have their kind of life, even if one day she could prove she could sing. If her own parents couldn’t believe in her, then who could? What was the point of her even trying? She was done. She was so done.
She stomped through the house, straight back to her room, where she threw her guitar on the bed and grabbed her lyric notebook and Cole’s diary. He had read through the letter that morning, but he hadn’t said anything to her about it afterward. He’d just returned the diary to her desk and helped her with breakfast, as if nothing had ever happened. He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, so she’d dropped the whole thing and focused on tonight instead.
Searching her room, she found sheet music from her lessons, another lyric notebook buried in one of her suitcases, her favorite pen, and more music. Her phone, which she hadn’t picked up for days, beeped. It was probably her parents wondering where she was. She leaned over to look at the blinking message and her heart did a little leap.
Text message from Nathan Hayes.
Huh. At her second voice lesson, they had exchanged phone numbers as a professional courtesy, but he had never called or texted her before.
Dropping all her stuff on the bed, she grabbed the phone and opened the text message.
How did tonight go? Again, I’m sorry I had to miss it.
The glowing letters stared back at her, as if they were Nathan’s beautiful eyes staring into her, waiting for an answer.
Gee, how did it go? Worse than you could possibly imagine. Not that she’d text that to him.
She dropped the phone onto her pile of stuff, gathered everything into her arms again, and stormed down the hallway and out the back door. It led to a deck, which led down to a nice quarter acre of grass surrounded by a chain link fence dividing Cole’s yard from the Christmas tree farm. The smell of pine was thick in the air. The trees by Cole’s house were half her size, perfectly shaped. They probably wouldn’t be cut for years.
She dumped her armful of stuff on the snow-covered picnic table, checked to see if the wood pile under the deck was fully stocked, and went back inside for a coat and a box of matches. In less than thirty minutes she had a roaring blaze going in Cole’s rustic fire pit. A few split log benches and some boulders surrounded it. She leaned against a boulder and was reminded of the campfire party they’d had back here one summer with the band. No. She wouldn’t remember that. She wouldn’t remember how she’d started falling for Cole back then, how a year later they had kissed and began that whole crazy business. Right now she had to focus on the task at hand.
Looking at her palms in the firelight, she noticed they were covered in dirt from handling the wood. She probably had dirt on her dress too, but she couldn’t see it in the dark. She got her stuff from the picnic table and marched it over to the fire, throwing sheet after sheet of music into the flames. A part of her warmed at seeing each page shrivel before her eyes. Every note gone, every expectation she’d ever had for herself burning away in a glorious blaze. Then she opened her first lyric notebook and ripped out page after page, feeding them to the fire one after the other. Birds twirling to their deaths.
When she finished ripping out the last of the pages she threw the cover into the fire too. She did the same with the next lyric notebook. As the flames licked the last of it up, she sat down on a log and reached for Cole’s diary. Her hands trembled when she touched it and remembered what was inside. She couldn’t burn it like the notebooks, but she could burn the first page. She ripped it out and tossed it into the fire, never taking her eyes off the letter on the second page. In the flickering light, the handwriting looked even shakier than it had before. That poor man. He’d lived his life never telling his son how he really felt. Was that what failure was? It wasn’t going out of tune on a stage, or bursting into tears in front of three hundred people. Maybe it wasn’t even wasting the first twenty years of your life wishing for something you couldn’t have.
Wiping away a few tears, she got up from the log and walked into the house, heading straight for her bedroom. She grabbed her guitar and took it outside to the fire. The flames were close enough she could feel their warmth as she unzipped the padded canvas case and pulled out her ten thousand dollar guitar. Why would they buy her this if they didn’t want her to sing? Who played the guitar and didn’t sing? Not anyone she knew.
She wanted to get rid of everything music in her life. She wanted it gone so there would be nothing left for them to be ashamed of. She wanted to start over, move away from Colorado, be entirely on her own and away from everything she’d ever known, but as she raised her guitar in the air, intending to smash it on one of the boulders, she knew she couldn’t do it. She could imagine it in her mind—what it might sound like to hear the wood split and splinter, the steel strings twang as they twist and break—what it might feel like to see the last of what made her Maggie Roads, Down Sugar Road’s daughter, die a tragic death.
But she just couldn’t do it. All she could see was that look in Nathan’s eyes, the way he held her guitar like it was his whole world.
Her arms were still raised in the air as she looked out across the pine trees, their straight rows, the stars glittering in the sky above as snowflakes started drifting down like ash from the scattered clouds. A laugh built up in her throat and she didn’t even know why.