PRESENT DAY
I flip to the next part of the story, but there’s only those seven envelopes and the lyrics that grace them.
“No no no.” I turn the paper over like there will be words within the lines, hidden in the margins, but there’s nothing left but her hunt.
This story, her history, shows her just as I envisioned, just as everyone alluded: bold and true and determined—everything I’m not. She knew what she wanted. She knew where she was going and why. The surety of her words, the things she tells me here—behind the cameras when no one’s watching—fill the spot in my rib cage where the guilt usually makes its home.
While I have this, in some way, I have her here with me.
This is how she started. This is her real story, from her. I knew Patrick existed; I knew that their careers, and possibly love lives, were speculated by the media to have been intertwined. But no one knows how they ended . . . and I’d never seen David Summers mentioned in the press at all. Is one of them my dad? What is she trying to say? Why spread it out?
I take the first envelope from the stack as Amy launches into a drum solo onstage, Lost Girls’ music wrapping around me like a warm blanket, like it always does. The envelope is scarlet, and my mom’s loopy cursive forms my name just above the lyrics and the Open Here, more intricately written than any of the other words, with a heart dotting the i.
The lyrics of its clue are from the first and only album—named after their hit single—by her once-band, Fate’s Travelers, full of longing and bittersweet, unapologetic remorse in all its juxtaposition.
In a trail of careless maybes, I find myself undone,
Photos tinted at corners, nostalgia bleached by the sun,
Still staring at the places we marked our names,
Here and all around towns.
And they always did say I’m the one you couldn’t bring home,
Ship cast out to sea, grave of regrets all my own,
But every ending I go through, I begin once again,
With the taste of each sea, and your hand in my hand.
The song is “Wayward Lanes” and has subtle references to different small-town locations including an actual structure at the very edge of Sunset Cove. Beyond all the artificial recollections of Tori Rose—on a jagged outcropping of rock, near the practically retired theater that turns out one show about every five years—there’s a house.
Britt and I found it last year.
I was in math class, halfway through a quadratic equation, when Britt called my name from the door. She told my teacher they wanted me at the office, and we raced outside to her car and took off. She drove so far, so fast in our anticipation—we became one with the salty breeze.
She pulled up at the edge of Sunset Cove, where there’s nothing much but rocks and sky and sea—and that house. It was small and leaning, abandoned, with a street sign hidden by twisting vines. We found a key under the mat, but it didn’t work. It’s now the second key I wear around my neck alongside the one for the western wing of the inn. Every once in a while, I’ll pass an odd door and I’ll try it just to see if it fits.
Cheers echo from the crowd beyond the stage, pulling me away from my thoughts, and Lost Girls takes a bow. Britt leads the way offstage beneath the spotlight that always lingers, flushed and grinning, and Amy and Sophie hurry down the side steps to join the party.
“Hey.” I shut the book, shoving it back into my purse, turning over the image of that house as I meet Britt’s eyes.
“What was that?” She leans next to me against the speaker, nodding toward my bag, never missing a thing.
“What did you want to tell me?” I ask right back.
Gazes locked, we stare each other down. She tilts her head to the side, a small challenge, and I almost smile at the gesture, folding my hands in my lap. My cheeks heat under her stare, but I refuse to break. As the ocean air stings my eyes, she blinks first and sighs.
Our mutual stubbornness got to the point where staring contests have become our only decision-making method. She usually beats me—something’s off.
“Fine,” she says, taking a deep breath, and my chest tightens as she plays with the silver charm bracelet her cousin mailed her from Colombia for her eighteenth birthday. There are three charms on it: a guitar from her parents, a heart from her cousin, and a star from me.
“Britt? What’s wrong?” I stop myself from scooting closer.
“We got a gig,” she says, tucking a stray curl behind her ear.
The chords of the set she just finished pound against my rib cage, and there’s a hesitant excitement beneath her nerves that she sends away in an exhale until her assuredness is all that’s left.
“That’s great.” I swat her arm. “When? Where? Can I come watch?”
“It’s in Nashville. We’re leaving in a week. And yeah, I want you to come.” She angles toward me, and now that the words are out, her eyes hold elusive possibilities, brighter than the sequins dotting her skirt and the lights she just left.
Another shout rises from the crowd in my silence, and she doesn’t look away, but I do.
“Mia,” Britt says, and she’s so close. Her voice is a whisper, but I can hear it as well as every scream from our grad class. “Come with us. We’ve always written the songs together. You know the set by heart. Your . . . your voice is . . .” She trails off and it’s so uncharacteristic, her not pushing on to get to her point like the student body president she spent our entire high-school experience as. That’s what tells me how badly she wants me to say yes.
A week.
For just this tiny millisecond, I close my eyes tight to hold in the tears and imagine it. The first time I ever sang for someone was with Britt, beneath her willow tree. She looked right at me and said, “your voice is like the sunrise.” She’s always been the poet of the two of us.
“A week?” is what comes out, aloud this time. The speaker vibrates against the backs of our legs, and we shift over so we’re sandwiched by curtains and abandoned grad gowns just like the one I threw out. “Britt that’s . . . that’s . . . amazing.”
And it is. This is everything she’s ever wanted. In a town built on music, she made her own and has always planned to go to Nashville.
“Are you . . .” I hesitate. “Are you coming back after?” Or is this it? I want to ask too.
She drops her gaze, and it’s my answer. She’s not just going to Nashville. She’s leaving Sunset Cove.
We were supposed to have summer. Two months of helping her pack, searching all the thrift stores in town to bargain hunt for her cross-country journey, soaking it all in and prolonging this. I thought maybe by then I’d learn how to say goodbye to her, of all people, that maybe it’d be easier with those memories. I push away how eerily her journey follows the tune of my mother’s.
She continues, “We’re running out of next times. You can’t keep just putting it off. It’s now. We’re doing this now, and we’d love for you to come and really join, but we can’t wait.”
“I—”
“Mia, I know you love it. I know you want it.”
“I can’t.” I shake my head slowly at first and then faster and take a step back. The music tangles up inside of me, twisted with each vein and artery and my stupid, careless heart.
Her eyes shout Keep telling yourself that, but she only says, “Think about it. Really think about it without the fear and the lies and the telling yourself you can’t have it.”
“No.” I keep shaking my head. “No. Britt, I can’t do what she did. My grandmas and the inn and the story and her end and she’s this town and last time we performed and I don’t know but I don’t want to wreck and . . .” I press a fist to my lips. I will not cry I will not cry I will not cry. “I don’t want to wreck it.”
I can’t be trusted with a piece of her dreams.
Her arms are around me before the last word is out of my mouth, and she pulls me close. “Mi.” It’s all she says, but I wrap my arms around her too, and everything feels a little more right with the universe.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and she doesn’t say It’s okay, because it’s not. She doesn’t say Forget it, because neither of us will. She doesn’t say any of the empty words people say in response to apologies, and I don’t want them. I add, “You’re going to do amazing. So, a week. A week before you’re on your way to becoming a star.” A week left of her, here, in Sunset Cove. A week left before she leaves.
A week.
The diary in my purse feels heavier somehow.
She laughs. “You’d better believe it.” She turns to leave, motioning for me to join her. “Think about it,” she says.
And I blame it on her freckles and smile and the music she just sang, but I whisper, “Okay,” even though I can’t, and it’s the first time I’ve ever really lied to her.
Now more than ever, I need my mother to help me find the truth.
“So what was it?” Britt rests on her back, curls splayed around her and knees raised to the starry sky. “When are you going to tell me what your mom gave you?”
I sit crisscross in front of her, looking out at Sunset Cove from the inn’s roof. The peaks of cottages are illuminated by streetlights, and the red glow of our sign, blinking in the dark, sends a sheen across our spot on the roof and everything below.
Once Grams and Nana figured out the chocolate debacle, they invited Britt’s family to share it. My grandmothers are close with her parents, and we’ve been stuck together since we were infants, the music between us being what shifted our relationship from proximity to choice. The music that’s fading out in just a week, when she leaves and I stay behind.
In her first entry, my mom called her Sunset Cove best friend—David—the past. Is that all I’ll be when I’m no longer in Britt’s present, much less her future?
Downstairs in the lobby, sitting near the piano but never on the bench, Nana and Grams chat with Mrs. and Mx. Garcia as guests returning from the party ask for fresh towels and everyone calls it a night. Britt and I slipped up here half an hour ago, but the scents of the campfire still slip across the parking lot from our house.
The part of me that wants to share it with her wars with the part of me that wants to convince her I’ll be fine.
“It’s a diary.” I shift so I’m facing her. “It’s her diary.”
She sits up now. “Did you read it?”
“It’s not all there. It’s . . . it’s a hunt.” I pull it out, having not parted with my purse since I found the book, and I hand it to her.
A silent agreement passes between us as she takes it in her hands, thumbing through the pages, mouth gaping a little more with each sentence she skims. My pulse leaps, seeing that wonder on her features, that endless curiosity, seeing that the real story, my mom’s story, is something that she thinks matters more than the legends and attractions Tori Rose has become too.
When she’s finished, the resounding snap of the book closing fills the night.
She gives it back to me. “Why didn’t you say something sooner? This is huge.”
You told me you’re leaving before I could. “I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what this means, but it’s her. It’s her. I read those first pages, and that first song, it references the house we found.”
“I know.” Britt studies my expression so intently.
“She’s got something to tell me.”
“Maybe she’s trying to tell you to chase the music,” Britt breathes, and I shake my head.
“I . . . she . . . You know where it left her.” I press my fingers to my temples, lying back again when she does.
No one really knows how Tori Rose died. Not the news, not the people here. It’s another mystery—along with her life story, her chosen partner, and the final whereabouts of her treasured guitar. All the things that make a life, not just a celebrity. I always assumed it was a car crash when my grandmas said—in one of those times growing up they’d accidentally reveal something about her—that she never made it back from her Regret You tour. I always assumed she went too far. After all, even in this small piece of her truth, she called the music illicit. But the theory of a large accident seemed unlikely. It wasn’t something that would’ve remained so well hidden. Not with how bright she shone, not with how mysteriously she fell.
All I know is that the music is what took her back to the open road, the music is what caused her to keep running, keep flying, and die away from her own family. The music took her from us. The music kept my mom, not me.
“I do know,” Britt says. “But here’s your answer. Here you go. It’s what you’ve been waiting for. So stop thinking about it. Let’s do it. Let’s solve it.”
“You want to help?” I shift toward her too fast and almost crash into her. She steadies me with a hand on my arm, and we’re only a breath apart.
I’m not sure who moves back first.
We’ve listened to every Tori Rose track together, used to sing the songs into random household items, back when the music didn’t scare me. If Britt wants to do this together, we can finish it before she leaves. I can figure out where to go from here, and through my mother’s message, how to tell her everything I need to say.
“I’m here as much as I can be,” Britt adds. “As long as I can be.”
I let that sink in. Britt is offering to discover my mother with me, and I want to share this with her. I want her to be here for this.
“Play the song,” Britt says, knowing my answer to this offer already. “Maybe it’ll spark something.”
I open Spotify and place the phone on my stomach, and we listen, both of us on our backs, studying the sky, not feeling so alone knowing we’re going to do this together. The intro music is soft, careful, wrapped around the slight creaking of a swing. The piano crescendos right before it stops, everything stops, and her voice comes through, open and raw.
They say count your blessings. I don’t listen.
Listen close, but I never learn.
They say remember those words, so I forget them.
He says come see this, and I went to him.
Our footsteps found each other’s paths.
Before the ocean even knew our names,
I lingered when you looked my way.
Didn’t know this was our last day.
I sit on the swing and brush over our lines,
Try to remember when you were all mine.
In a trail of careless maybes, I find myself undone,
Photos tinted at corners, nostalgia bleached by sun,
Still staring at the places we marked our names,
Here and all around towns.
And they always did say I’m the one you couldn’t
bring home,
Ship cast out to sea, grave of regrets all my own,
But every ending I go through, I begin once again,
With the taste of each sea, and your hand in my hand.
I restart the song, replay it until it reaches that part again. The second verse goes into the swing and tale behind it, but that’s not the focus of what she penned as my first clue.
“Do you think it actually is that house?” I take another turn looking at this envelope and rub my thumb along the key that rests over my collarbone. Maybe we missed something.
Britt shakes her head. “I don’t think so. We looked around that whole place when we went. There’s something else. It’s at the beach, though. Somewhere there.”
“There’s got to be more here.” I close Spotify and open YouTube, pausing only to note the video Britt posted—timestamped last night—on her channel. She’s been constructing a platform with original music since she was thirteen, a way to get a foot in the door of an industry where white-bro country takes up more than its fair share of airtime; where female singers aren’t played back-to-back; where tracks about girls kissing can be removed from rotation. There, she sings songs with English and Spanish tied together about girls who love girls and people who challenge the standards set before them.
“What is it?” She leans over my shoulder, and I scroll past it.
“Just looking at something,” I whisper, saving it to watch later.
I enter the song’s name in the search bar and select the music video for “Wayward Lanes.”
Under a sepia filter, it begins on the beach, just like we remember. The band—all five members—walks along the shore, heads down the coastline, their summer attire wrinkling in the breeze. Footprints trail behind them and five other sets—without people to make them—walk beside them. The tide comes to cover the prints with each step, erasing the path they take as they move on and apart.
The whole first verse flickers between small towns, friends laughing, a couple dancing on a deck overlooking the sea. I know one of these five places is Sunset Cove, and I catch glimpses of it fading in and out. A Fate’s Travelers wiki likes to claim this song is about the band being homesick, but it’s the one track the band themselves never even hinted at the meaning behind.
As the chorus starts, the focus returns to the couple again, and there’s a light behind them, gleaming. It’s a lighthouse, and it has to be Sunset Cove’s, with its old fishing nets hung on the walls, fading pink paint, crates against the right side to hide a hole in the wall that someone made on Cove High School’s senior beach day in the eighties and which was never repaired. No one knows exactly how it happened.
The light is on like it hasn’t been in years. Once a port, Sunset Cove no longer needs the sea to be its guide, not when it holds on so tightly to its star.
But as the video reaches the end of the verse my mom wrote on the envelope, it zooms out all the way, looking at a skyline. I pause it, staring out at where the beach sits and the lighthouse looms over the far-off ocean in real time, when something catches my eye.
I glance at Britt, and her gaze widens as her fingertips graze my elbow. I keep my eyes on the view, away from where her hand rests—because we’re best friends and touched like this before we ever touched like that. Together, we guide my phone up at the same time. All thoughts disappear as the skyline from the screen matches perfectly with the view of town from the inn’s roof.
In the video, those two figures dance—sure enough, on the lighthouse’s deck.