‘I have to go back to the beginning.’
‘I told you I am a patient man.’
‘I know.’ And now all there was left to do was begin. At the beginning. ‘You remember I told you I was discovered at that karaoke night in Kansas?’
‘Yes.’
‘The man who discovered me was named Pete.’
‘Pete Myers,’ Luke clarified, and Aurelie realised that he’d heard of him, of course he’d heard of him. Pete was famous. He’d managed several major bands, had judged a couple of TV talent shows. He was practically a household name.
‘Right,’ she said, and continued. ‘Well, Pete was amazing back then. He came up to me, told me he could make me a star. He took my mom and me to dinner, told us his whole plan. How I’d become Aurelie.’
‘So he was the one behind your image.’ Luke spoke tonelessly, but Aurelie still felt the censure. She stiffened.
‘I went along with it. Innocent siren, those were his words.’
‘You were only fifteen.’
‘Almost sixteen. And I thought it all sounded incredibly cool.’ She sighed, hating that already she was having to explain, to justify. Luke’s arm tightened around her.
‘I’m sorry. Continue.’
‘Those first few months were a whirlwind. Pete took us all over, to LA, New York, Nashville. I met with agents and songwriters and publicity people and, before I knew what was happening, I was recording and releasing a single, and it was huge. I felt like I was at the centre of a storm.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘She disappeared a couple of months after Pete discovered me. I think she realised people didn’t really want her around, that she was just getting in the way. When she left, Pete offered to have me stay with him. I was still a minor, and he had to make some kind of legal guardian arrangement with my grandmother—’ She stopped then, because her throat had become so tight. That had been the last time she’d seen her grandmother alive. She’d given her the guitar, begged her to stay the same. And she hadn’t.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, trying desperately for briskness, ‘Pete was great about it all. He gave me my own floor in his house, treated me like—’ the word stuck in her throat ‘—a daughter. At least, he felt like a father to me. The dad I’d never had. He gave me a lot of good advice in the early days, how not to take any of the criticism to heart, how to stay sane amidst all the craziness. He even remembered my birthday—he got me a cake for my seventeenth.’
‘A paragon,’ Luke said flatly, and she squirmed in his arms to face him.
‘I told you not to make judgements.’
‘I’m not. I’m just wondering where this is going.’
‘I’ll tell you.’ She took another breath, let it out slowly. ‘I’d been living with Pete for a little over a year. He’d seen me through some tough times—my grandmother dying, being diagnosed with diabetes. He was the one who found me, you know. I’d passed out in the bathroom, and he took me to ER. Stayed with me the whole time, made sure I got the proper treatment and counselling once I was diagnosed.’ She felt Luke’s tension; his shoulder was iron-hard under her cheek. ‘I’m telling you all this just to...to explain the relationship. How close we were.’
‘I get it.’ His tone was even, expressionless, and yet Aurelie sensed the darkness underneath. And she hadn’t really told him anything yet.
‘So fast forward to my eighteenth birthday. He took me out to dinner at The Ivy, told me how happy he was that I’d made it, how much he cared about me.’ She paused, tried to choose her words carefully. She needed the right ones. ‘I look back on that as one of the happiest nights of my life.’ Before it had all changed.
She fell silent, the only sound in the bedroom the draw and sigh of their breathing. ‘And then?’ Luke asked eventually. ‘What happened?’
‘Pete took me home. I went to bed. I was just changing into my pyjamas when he...he came into the room.’ He hadn’t, she remembered now, asked to come in. Not like Luke. She still remembered that ripple of shocked confusion at seeing Pete standing in the doorway. Staring at her.