“The paramedics are here. You’ve gotta move.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t move my hand. I was too afraid to see what was underneath it.
Frank growled and rushed over to me with his broad shoulders and unusually large hands and pulled me backwards at the same time the paramedics came barreling in with black bags strapped to their backs and a gurney in tow.
“Holy fuck,” one of them said, their eyes on me being held back by an annoyingly strong Frank. “Are you Rei—”
“It’d be best if you kept your fucking mouth shut and do your job, or you’ll regret it,” Frank urged, his grip on me tightening.
The young paramedic’s face turned a bright red as he dove down to Angelina’s body, feeling for a pulse. The pair quickly got to work and placed her body onto the gurney, her black hair flinging upward as they pulled her up and onto it.
My body relaxed a smidge due to the relief that washed over me knowing she still had a pulse. Frank let go of my body, and I rushed over to the one paramedic as the other talked rapidly into his walkie-talkie. “Do you know what happened?” he asked, his face now a normal shade of peach. They began to roll the gurney through the doors and down the hallway.
I could barely get the words out. It felt like my throat was being crushed between two jack stands. My nostrils flared as the words left my mouth. “She said…” I clenched my eyes, bringing my hand up to the bridge of my nose. “She said she was cutting our baby out and that Lori tol
d her to do it.”
The men paused their rushing for a split second out of shock. “Who is Lori?”
I shook my head. “I—I don’t know.”
They each gave a curt nod before climbing into the elevator with a few of my other bodyguards and Rod, my tour manager. When the hell did they show up? I heard Rod yelling to anyone in sight to keep this situation out of the media, as if that truly mattered at a time like this.
Me, on the other hand? I stayed in the same spot on that red-and-gold swirled carpet, staring after her lifeless body, even after the elevator doors shut. A wicked vine of both guilt and fear wrapped its thorny fingers around my entire body and all but strangled me.
A heavy hand came and rested on my shoulder. “Did you know she was pregnant?” Frank asked, his voice softer than I’d ever heard before.
My jaw was as hard as it could possibly get. “No.” I shook my head, my eyes still trained on the closed elevator doors. “I didn’t know.”
Chapter One
Brooklyn
My desk was piled high with music sheets and papers I desperately needed to grade. The picture that a student drew for me in their art class had a coffee stain on it from my morning cup, and a strange-looking, coiled mess of pottery that had every color of the rainbow sat perched in the corner, holding my stack of permanent markers. I knew very well that I should have been grading those papers, or creating a lesson plan for the last week of school, or hell, maybe even cleaning off my desk and dumping out my five-hour-old coffee. But instead, YouTube was pulled up on my computer, and I sat back to admire all the amazing up-and-coming artists—the ones that didn’t hold back. The ones that put their entire soul on the line, the ones that took their mind and heart and interweaved them together and formed something so beautiful.
I almost envied them. Especially as I sat at my desk, sitting in a fifty-year-old swivel chair that had most of its springs missing, in the middle of a sweltering classroom (because why would the school pay for air conditioning?). Of course, the introverted side of me knew that I would rather chop my arm off than record myself on my phone, singing one of the songs I’d written, and upload it to some social media outlet to get “likes.” Because you know what the problem with likes is? You also get dislikes. Likes and dislikes went together like peanut butter and jelly, especially on the internet. What was it with people gaining so much confidence on the internet? Like the screen of their smart phone or Macbook hid their face, so all of a sudden, it didn’t matter that they were throwing the Golden Rule behind their shoulder and completely demolishing someone’s work.
To be honest, I was more afraid of getting a dislike from someone out in the real world (and by that, I mean on the internet) regarding my music than if there happened to be another lice outbreak in my classroom. (Like, seriously. Bugs in hair or someone saying my songwriting sucked? I choose the former.) If I were an extrovert, someone who didn’t care what people thought, someone who had the confidence of say… Beyoncé, I’d gladly put myself out there. I mean, look at all those brand-new pop artists who were scoring Grammys left and right. They started at the bottom. They put their video up on social media, and BOOM, they were famous.
Okay, fine. I knew it didn’t really work like that. But it usually started with said person somehow gaining followers or a second look online, and then they were climbing the rails to the top.
I’ll admit, I was a little resentful.
Instead of uploading a video of myself with my thrift shop guitar in my shabby, poorly lit apartment, cooing the words of some heartwrenching song that I’d written—one that I’d fully formed from my own head—I was making a mediocre income as an elementary school music teacher.
I mean, I was fine with it. Sure, the loose spring in my chair was digging into my butt so hard it was beginning to ache, and my classroom smelled like rotting cheese due to my last set of students coming straight from gym class, but I was being paid to teach music all day to little smiling faces, and I got to wear cute dresses with pockets. What could be better than wearing a dress with pockets?
Sympathy washed over me as I took my gaze away from my computer and slid it over to the photo collage I had on my desk. I loved my students, along with dresses with pockets, and I had a pretty good life, but writing songs was something that fed my soul. It always had, even from a young age. A ghost of a smile covered my face as my eyes roamed the photo of me when I was a child, a guitar in one hand and a crumpled-up piece of paper in the other, a pencil tucked behind my ear with my auburn hair a curly mess. Freckles dotted my chubby cheeks as a toothless smile took up over half of my face. I shook my head and put my eyes back on the computer.
Songwriting was a childhood dream, one that I never sought out to reach. Now, writing songs was an outlet for me. It was profoundly personal, and I had basically kept it locked inside all my life. Once I went to high school and realized that burying my head in a notebook while tapping my foot obnoxiously to a tune that only I knew wasn’t considered cool and was kind of… odd, I’d stopped being transparent with it.
I knew it was too late for me to be discovered. My dreams burned up in flames the second Jacob Keller, my first real crush, told me I was a weird freshman for always singing songs and scribbling jumbled words down on a piece of paper. He snatched my notebook out of my hand one day and read the muddled mess, embarrassing me to no end. Honestly, I wanted to melt into the lockers I was cowering against.
The memory still made me sweat. Heat blasted my cheeks any time I thought of his taunting laugh.
I couldn’t blame it all on Jacob, though. It was me, too. The doubts, the embarrassment, the shyness that I could never really get over. I wasn’t destined to put myself on the line like that, to put my heart on the line. So instead, I lived vicariously through all the rock stars and pop artists that Jane, my best friend, wrote articles on, all while eating Ramen noodles in my holey sleep shirt, listening to my upstairs neighbor have kinky sex every Thursday.
“Watching YouTube again?”