The Girl in the Love Song (Lost Boys 1)

“And so did you.”

A warm moment passed between us, the two people who loved Miller best.

A social worker entered, carrying a bouquet of flowers. “From someone named Brenda at Helping Hands. I’ll just put them by the window.”

She set the bright yellow daisies mixed with white roses on the windowsill, offered to bring us both coffee, and left.

“Helping Hands?” Lois asked, both of us talking in hushed voices. “Is that the charity Miller’s going to give all that money to?”

I nodded. “For homeless families.”

She smiled sadly. “Of course. He was adamant about doing something to give back. But even before he got famous, he had a compassionate streak in him. Injustice made him sad. And angry. Even as a child.”

“There’s nothing sadder than a birthday cake with only one piece cut out.”

“I can think of a hundred things sadder,” Miller said.

I smiled to myself. “He was like that when we met.”

“He was born with it, I think. Certainly, Ray and I didn’t teach it to him. We were so young when we had him. Hardly more than twenty years old, like you both are now.”

With a soft smile, Lois brushed a lock of hair off Miller’s brow, a reflexive action she’d probably done a thousand times when he was little.

“Once, he and another boy were playing in the sandbox,” she said. “Miller must’ve been three years old; the other boy was a little bit older. This older boy reached out and snatched the plastic shovel out of Miller’s hand and snapped it in two. I hurried over and scolded him, expecting to have to comfort Miller over his broken shovel. Instead, he just looked bewildered. It’s hard to imagine such a look on the face of a three-year-old. He didn’t cry. He only wanted to know why. ‘Why did he do that, Mama?’ He couldn’t comprehend it, the cruelty of it.”

Lois smiled fondly at her son.

“He was that way for a long time. Open. Curious about life. I think that’s where he got his talent for writing songs. He had observations about life, and he wrote them down with music from that guitar Ray gave him. His most prized possession.” She sighed heavily. “But everything changed when Ray left. Miller shut down. Turned guarded. He didn’t want to love anything anymore. If he played music, I never heard it. That broke my heart.”

Lois looked up at me over Miller’s sleeping form.

“And then you came along. You opened his heart, Violet. I know that Evelyn woman gets a lot of credit for discovering Miller, but he sang for you first. You are the reason he has the career that he has. Because he loves you so much, he couldn’t contain it. Even when he pushed you away, I knew. I always knew you were his girl.”

His girl. I’ve always been his girl.

“I think I did, too,” I said, smiling through tears. “Even when I didn’t.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

I opened my eyes to see sunlight streaming in from the window at the end of the small room. My body felt welded to the bed, heavy and weak. Violet was there, her head pillowed on my mattress, her hand clasped in mine.

She hadn’t left my side in the two days since I’d been moved out of the ICU. Two days in which Dr. Monroe and his team performed every test under the sun and gave me the solemn news that my kidneys, like my pancreas, had quit on me. A dialysis machine had been added to the bank of machines in the room, and my name had been added to the miles-long donor waitlist. And because my diabetes would only destroy whatever kidneys might become available, I could only be approved for a simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplantation.

“A whole do-over in my guts,” I’d said to Violet to try to make her laugh when she’d wanted to cry. She’d held my hand through it all, and that old guilt found me, too, that I put her through this again.

That morning, she sensed my waking and ra

ised her head and smiled tiredly at me. “Hey, you.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“She went down to the cafeteria to grab a coffee. How are you feeling?”

“Ready to get out of here.”

“They said it could be soon. Tomorrow maybe.”

Because there’s no donor match.