RAJI lay in the hospital bed, recovering.
Dr. Nyima had winked when she had injected something into Raji’s I.V. that ran into the back of her hand, whispering, “This is the good stuff we don’t let the civilians have.”
Within minutes, the pain receded.
A pleasant narcotic glow had risen up around her.
Peyton and the baby and the nurses were all so pretty.
Raji held their baby girl in her arms while the baby slept. Their baby girl was beautiful, with her pale caramel skin and light brown eyes. Black hair topped her head, and she had the most lush eyelashes that Raji had ever seen on a baby.
The baby didn’t have a name yet. Raji hadn’t thought about names at all.
Raji also had no crib, no car seat, no diapers, no baby clothes, and no bottles or whatever, but the very nice stuff that Tashi Nyima had injected into her I.V. kept Raji from panicking or worrying or even thinking about it too much.
It would all work out.
Everything would be fine.
The nurse who checked on Raji and cooed over the sleeping baby for a minute was pretty, too.
Even Peyton was pretty, there with his thick, blond hair bound back in a bun and his neat beard trimmed and handsome, but he was behaving like a daddy Viking. He snarled at the nurses and doctors until Raji told him to let them do their jobs. He hovered over Raji, pacing around her bed, until she finally suggested they turn on the television for a few minutes.
Peyton shook his head. “Screen time is bad for children.”
Raji laughed. “They aren’t talking about watching a TV around an infant who is just a few hours old, Peys. They’re talking about plunking toddlers in front of the computer to play first-person-shooter games for hours at a time. It’s fine.”
“No good can come of it.”
“The lactation consultant said that I need to relax and take my mind off the birth and the breastfeeding thing. Let’s turn on the news or something.”
“Not the news,” Peyton said. “The news is the worst.”
Raji narrowed her eyes at him as much as she was able. “Why?”
“Let’s just not watch the news for a day or two.”
“Why?”
Peyton sat on the side of her bed and leaned over to peek at their baby again. “At least not the entertainment news.”
Light dawned through the narcotic haze. Something else was published? “I will kill Beth.”
“She didn’t do anything. Xan Valentine gave an interview. He’s obsessive about publicity. He had to control the narrative. It’s why Killer Valentine has done so well. Xan has micro-managed every drip to the media for years.”
“So they’re concentrating on him now? That’s good, right? They’ll leave us alone.”
Peyton shook his head. “He said some things. I’m surprised Georgie didn’t talk him out of doing it, but she’s his wife, not a miracle worker. When Xan gets locked onto something, it’s hard to pry him loose.”
Raji tightened her arms around the baby. She lied, “I knew I never liked that guy.”
Peyton shook his head. “A lot of it was directed at me, thankfully. We have a few options.”
The baby in Raji’s arms wiggled a little in her swaddle but went back to sleep. “Like what?”
“It depends on what I will do next,” Peyton said, “since I quit Killer Valentine.”
Tears rose in Raji’s eyes. She wiped them on her shoulders. Dammit. Pregnancy hormones are supposed to go the hell away after the pregnancy is over with, right? “You shouldn’t have quit.”
“It was time. It was past time. If I had been thinking long-term about my career, I should have quit after a year or two with them.”
“You didn’t want to quit being a rock star,” Raji said.
“For years, I didn’t quit because you liked that I was a rock star. We had hammered out an odd lifestyle of me touring and us meeting each other. The busyness was so crazy that I didn’t stop and analyze what I should have been doing. I’ve been ready to go my own way for a long time.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have met up so much.”
“You were on track. You were thinking strategically. I should have followed your example.”
“But you quit the band.”
Peyton said, “When the article came out, Xan was blustering. He sees things as threats. If you consider his childhood, it makes sense. The problem is that most of the time, he’s right. If he were wrong even a quarter of the time, it would be a lot easier to talk sense into him. He saw the Fame This Week article as a broadside shot. Not even a shot across our bow, but a direct hit.”
“It sounded like a pretty horrible piece,” Raji said. “I haven’t actually read it.”
Peyton grimaced. “It was brutal. The main problem is that Killer Valentine has been on top for so long, so the reporters wanted to tear KV apart. With celebrities, there is a narrative that news outlets and gossip sites perpetuate. A band rises and is the new, golden thing. Then stories come out. Then they fall from grace. Then they climb back up. Just being a working band isn’t interesting to the gossip sites. They have to make it more dramatic.”
“Ugh. I’m glad I’m just a surgeon. Surgery’s easier.”
“The dramatic narrative of the rise and fall doesn’t even correlate with sales. Killer Valentine’s sales have steadily risen, plateaued, and are climbing again.”
“That’s weird.”
“This article and the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching around this one have gotten particularly vicious.”
Raji held the baby more closely to her chest. “Oh, no.”
Peyton said, “Here’s my problem: if I want to have a performing career, I need to get out there and hit back. If I just want to teach at Colburn or Juilliard or something, it doesn’t matter and I should let Xan have his story. But if I want to get back out on stage in whatever capacity, as a classical musician or contemporary, I have to manage the publicity for this one.”
She swallowed hard. Even the nifty stuff that Tashi had loaded into her I.V. couldn’t blunt her worry about Peyton. “What are you going to do?”
He sighed. “I’m going to need to call a press conference or do an interview. I’ve had two and a half years to learn from the master. I have to control my own narrative now.”