CHAPTER 21

Jane hadn’t slept well. Rhea’s house, a safe and welcoming refuge during the day, had become a shelter for monsters in the night. Every creak and groan became an imagined footstep, an invasion force just moments away from breaking down the door. Her anxiety, fueled by lack of sleep, made it difficult to express excitement as she and Daniel drove through the gates of the movie studio that owned Steve’s Poseidon franchise. They drove through what felt like miles of unending rows of warehouses, then parked in a side lot just to the left of the intersection of four buildings. Straight ahead was a one-story pink brick holdover from another era. It had one door and one window, the glass tinted to conceal the interior. To Jane’s right was the cavernous open mouth of a sound stage. Behind them was a warehouse.

“Want to guess what we’re doing here?” asked Daniel.

“You’re signing your contract for Steve’s movie?”

He grinned as he led her towards the warehouse. Inside was a labyrinth of desolate dimly-lit hallways with walls that didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling where Jane saw a dizzying mix of beams and pipes, bound electrical wires, and tracks for pulleys. Jane stared at their ordered chaos in wonder. “Are we going to watch a movie being made?”

“You’ll see.”

Jane followed Daniel up a short set of stairs. They came to a stop in front of three unmarked doors. He opened one, a closet. “It’s around here somewhere,” he muttered, as he opened the door to the far right, obviously bypassing the second door. He went back to the door on the left. “Still a closet, hmmm.” Jane rolled her eyes. She stepped forward and opened the door in the middle. She found herself on a balcony looking onto a room below. To her right was a plate window. Behind it, a man and a woman wearing giant earphones bent over a soundboard. They didn’t notice her.

An orchestra filled the floor below the balcony. More than a hundred violins, violas, cellos, and basses plus a full brass section were seated in a half circle. The musicians and their instruments were overshadowed by a giant projection screen playing raw footage of a movie Jane didn’t recognize. A movie that hadn’t been released yet, she realized. The musicians were in the process of recording its soundtrack.

Jane sank to the floor and pressed her face between the bars of the railing. The music picked up tempo. A rising crescendo of urgent circling violins propelled the onscreen action forward as an actress ran through a field. The circling upper strings collided with the lumbering lower strings bowing sharp tones of dissonance, a contrapuntal warning that, even as the hero pursued her goal, her way was not without danger.

Standing on a raised platform in the center of the half-circle of first chair musicians, the conductor cued the trumpets for their upcoming entrance. Jane turned to Daniel, who sat beside her, but with his back against the railing. He barely glanced at the orchestra; he was watching her.

“That’s James Horner,” he whispered.

Tears burned her eyes. She’d stopped breathing.

This was what it had looked like when music was added to Titanic. And before that to Braveheart. And before that to Legends of the Fall. And before that, after that, so many others. Jane imagined throwing herself over the railing. She would land on her feet and run up to him and interrupt the recording to tell him—tell him what? That her life had turned upside down when she’d met his music. That she’d left her husband in order to experience every day the way his music had made her feel for a few hours one weekend five years ago.

Of course, Jane wasn’t actually going to do that. She’d probably say something he’d heard a million times. Mr. Horner, I’m a huge fan of your work. It was enough to be there and see the creation with her own eyes. She dug Alma’s phone out of her purse and took a picture.

Daniel reached for her hand and laced his fingers through hers. “You look so happy.”

“I am.” Jane smiled through the tears that slowly blurred her vision and overflowed to roll down her cheeks. “It’s a good thing I’m leaving because if we were going to try and make this work, my expectations would be so high after this that you’d never meet them.”

He used his thumb to wipe the tears before they dripped off her chin. “I would’ve liked the chance to try.”

He leaned forward and sank his lips into hers. Her hands reached out and clutched the front of his shirt, pulling him closer. She expanded her awareness of every nerve ending her senses could access, pushing them to absorb everything they could of that moment.

Other kisses followed the first kiss as the orchestra transitioned into a section of music that sounded remarkably like the section of the Titanic score that brought the sinking of the doomed ocean liner to its tragic finale.