Because if I think about what might happen in the next few hours I’ll burst with the cocktail of anxiety and hope inside me.
She snaps a rubber band around the cards and leaves them on the seat. Ethan hops up, grabs the cards, and slips them into his pocket.
“You’re bringing baseball cards with you?” I ask.
He rolls his eyes. “Mom, it’s three hours. I can’t sit that long.”
“Fine,” I say, waving him along. “Bring the cards.”
I grab my purse, patting it once for luck, thinking of Harrigan’s review tucked safely inside. Natalie cocks her head and looks at me. “Are you finally ready now, Jane?”
Ready. I turn the word over a few times—ready or not, here I come. People get ready—because words could become lyrics someday, and my record company has already been banging on my door, begging for a follow-up that I haven’t even started but desperately need to.
I feel a lump rising in my throat. My emotions live close to the edge. All I need is a trigger and the tears that dwell near the surface are ready to roll—I can cry at any uplifting moment in a book, any slightly sappy scene in a movie, any heartwarming newspaper article.
Natalie reaches for a tissue and holds it toward me, knowing me too well. “Don’t be a sap yet. Wait till you have that golden gramophone in your hand.”
“Don’t jinx me.” I wave a hand in the air and suck back the feeling of overwhelmingness that threatens me right now. I’m not going to let a tear fall out.
“I am hallucinating, right?” I ask, looking at my sister and brother.
“Yes, you’re going to wake up any minute from this dream as soon as you get out of the car,” Owen directs playfully, his brown eyes sparkling with the same disbelief that infects us all, as he shoos me out.
Then the second the chauffeur opens the door, it starts.
The four of us step onto the red carpet and immediately we are mobbed. Throngs of photographers shout at me to look this way, look that way and a hundred cameras go off in my face. Ethan grips my hand tighter, and I squeeze back as I smile for the camera—not the trained smile I could easily flash from having been on and off stage for the last seven years since I graduated college, but a real smile. The one that comes from knowing this time, on my fourth album, heartbreak in hand, pain in every pore of my body, I did it right. After three completely middling records, a trio of mediocre music, I finally pulled out all the stops and did what critics like Harrigan said I should have always done—stopped skirting the edges and reached deep down inside to write. I didn’t sell too many copies of those first three albums. But then Aidan left me, and man, did my next record fly up the digital charts.
Her man did her wrong, so she went to the studio for closure.
It’s been a year now since Aidan sat down on the couch, confessed, briefly hung his head in his hands, and left for good. I stood there shocked, staring at the cold, heavy gray door of what was our apartment feeling like what had just happened couldn’t possibly have happened. There was a mistake, an error. Hit the rewind button and do this over.
That next morning, I promptly began writing “I Don’t Believe It,” which became track one on Crushed.
Right from the very start, she grabs the listener by the shirt collar. Her gutsy voice, her throaty, Adele-esque style so similar to “Someone Like You” yet so uniquely her own, can do nothing but pull you back to that moment of disbelief after your most painful breakup.
Our quartet makes our way down the red carpet, as countless more camera crews shout directions and snap shots, capturing the parade of musicians for E!, Entertainment Tonight, MTV, and numerous other outlets. Then we enter the vast air-conditioned expanse of the Staples Center.
I see Matthew Harrigan in the lobby, because it’s impossible to miss him.
He’s so good-looking that my friend Kelly once called him eminently lickable when she was checking out a picture of him online before Crushed came out. I begrudgingly agreed—because even though he’d ripped my first three albums to shreds, I also couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen, either. He could make or break a musician, but he could probably make or break a heart, too, given the way he smiles with the most inviting grin and the way he’s a very eligible bachelor in New York City. Not just because of his post atop music criticism, but because of his pedigree. He’s scanning the crowd, always alert, dressed for the occasion in a tuxedo. He probably owns the tux, considering how it fits his tall and trim frame. Then again, he’s the sort of man tuxes were made for. The sort of man who has the means to own tuxes, and not simply because he’d been dubbed the most powerful tastemaker in rock music.
His dark hair falls deliciously on his forehead, and he has the most mesmerizing blue eyes. I swear they twinkle, and he can probably even use them to hypnotize any gal to do his bidding. And while I was 100 percent faithful to my husband when we were married, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed Matthew’s looks every single time I ran into him at an event. Because you just can’t look away from that kind of a face—that jawline, those dimples, that devilish f**king smile.
But breakups are never linear. You ache and mourn and then you hate and rage and then you ponder and mope and smash things and drink some more Macallan. And then you miss again.
“Hi, Matthew,” I say as we walk past him. He flashes me his patented grin that sends a quick rush of shivers through me.
“You look absolutely stunning, Jane. Will you give me the first sit-down interview when you win?” he asks in that delicious British accent of his. Yeah, if he wasn’t already winning on looks and job alone, he has the trump card in that accent that makes me want to swoon and say yes to anything he asks. And while I’m sure he’s only saying I look stunning so I’ll agree to the interview, I still feel pretty damn good about myself tonight in my knee-length dark blue dress, with its sapphire-and-aqua pattern of swirls. Barely there straps hug my shoulders. My impossibly curly hair has been straightened into submission tonight, courtesy of Natalie, an expert with a flat iron. It falls long tonight, to the middle of my back.