Jazz is right behind me. Her hand finds my elbow, but it's too late now.
The driver's door opens.
The crowd that has gathered on the sidewalk, Mrs. Kowalski and the Knitters Club women and half of my dad's employees and three people I have genuinely never seen before in my life, all of them gasp at the same time when Demetrius Thornwood unfolds himself out of that car.
He is enormous. He is always enormous but somehow the scale of him lands differently in the golden afternoon light, all seven feet of him, the horns, the breadth of his shoulders. The entire neighborhood appears to have grown smaller just by his being there.
People are pointing. Someone behind me whispers his name. Mrs. Kowalski grabs the arm of the woman next to her with an expression of such excitement on her tiny, pointy face that I'm afraid I'll have to call an ambulance for her.
Jazz leans in close and her grip on my elbow tightens.
"You do not have to talk to him if you don't want to." Her voice is quiet and tight in my ear. "We can go back inside right now. I will personally build a human wall to keep him out."
The words reach me. They just don't mean anything.
Because the man who shattered my heart is looking straight at me.
Only me. Like everyone else on this street is furniture.
Then I blink when I notice what he's carrying. Under his arm, cradled against his ribs with the total incongruity of a man who has lost his mind, is a speaker.
Not a tasteful speaker, either. A big black plastic portable thing, the kind teenagers used to haul to the beach when we were young. Huge, obnoxious and certain to cause a small earthquake at full volume.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Jazz shouts, then starts across the grass with murder in her stride.
He doesn't even look at her. He has eyes only for me. Then he lifts the speaker over his head with both hands, holds it up there like an offering to a god who has very clearly stopped taking his calls, and presses a button with his thumb.
The music hits like a weather event.
It is loud. It is so unreasonably loud. It is also the single cheesiest power ballad ever committed to tape by human, beast, or anything in between.
Just when I think my mind is about to explode, he starts singing.
Out loud. To me. With his entire chest.
And so badly, it's a miracle the windshield of his car doesn't shatter. Then again, the damned thing could be bomb and bullet-proof for all I know.
In all the years I have known him, I never once heard the man sing. There's a very good reason for that. He could not carry a tune in a reinforced steel bucket.
He goes for the high note, the one that stretches the word looooove forever and ever. He doesn't even flinch when his voice cracks heroically, fully committed, swaying side to side on his hooves with the speaker hoisted over his horns.
His eyes do not leave my face for a single second of it.
And I just stand there.
The song crashes toward its finale and he holds the last note longer than any sane person would, longer than the original artist, longer than physics is strictly comfortable with, and then it cuts off.
The backyard goes dead silent except for the sizzle of forgotten burgers on the grill. All I hear is the small sound of my own shallow, fast breathing.
He lowers the speaker. Sets it down on the grass, then he straightens to his full ridiculous height, and the joke drains out of his face. When he looks at me, every version of my life I have ever imagined lines up behind my eyes at once, waiting to see which one wins.
"Maddie," he says, then stops, and I watch as his throat works up and down. "I'm not going to ask you to forgive me."
His voice comes out rough, like the singing scraped something out of it, or maybe that's just the rest of him.
"I haven't earned it, and you would see straight through me if I tried, because you have always seen straight through me."
This is the point where the old me, the one who got left on a pier, wants to cross her arms and say lovely speech, because words are the cheapest thing a billionaire owns. For some reason, I keep listening.
