Page 12 of Chasin’s Surrender

Nothing else. Heavy block letters, black ink, white paper.

Staring at that note, something struck me. Something I’d known my whole life, but right then, I felt the cold hard slap of reality.

I had the shittiest luck known to mankind.

Of all the men in Kent County to be kayaking past my dock at the exact moment I’d lost my balance and fell in the river. Of all the men in the entire world for me to lock eyes with and think, oh, yeah, I’m inviting him in and then go so far as hoping he’d want to stay awhile, it had to be Chasin Murray.

But he didn’t stay awhile. He left, thinking I was a cheat.

As if.

Now here he was. My shitty luck continued—he worked for the security company my manager wanted to hire to protect me.

I was almost too afraid to ask if it could get any worse because, in my personal experience, it could. Which meant it would, and I was not at a place in my life where I could take much more. I was on the verge of throwing in the towel, moving to an island by myself, and living the life of a hermit prepper.

The last thing that hit me was Bobby had obviously stopped in Tennessee after leaving Los Angeles before coming to Maryland.

“Why did you go back to Oak Hill?” I asked.

Bobby’s head tilted, the movement so dramatic her ear nearly touched her shoulder.

“What?”

“I thought you were flying straight here from LA?”

“Vivi, I told you on Monday I had to go back to Oak Hill.”

She was looking at me like I’d lost my mind. Monday hadn’t been a good day for me. It was the day after Sunday. The day after Chasin had left me and I’d been up all night writing, crashing for a few hours, then waking up and going straight back to my guitar. I’d been lost in my head all week, but Monday had been the worst of it.

“I was writing,” I told her.

She’d been with me long enough to know what that meant. When I was in the groove, I lost time, sometimes hours, sometimes days. It depended on my mood and what I was feeling.

But even knowing me well, Bobby still looked concerned.

“Right,” she muttered.

Bobby wasn’t stupid. Even without Chasin’s outburst, she would’ve put two and two together and come up with me and Chasin having a wild fuck-fest. But, she wouldn’t put two and two together and come up with me being heartbroken because Chasin had bailed after calling me a cheating bitch.

“Will you tell us about the first time this person made contact?” Alec asked.

“That’s hard to know. But the first time it hit our radar was when gifts started being delivered to Vivi’s house,” Bobby told him.

“How is that difficult to know?” Alec continued.

“Because fan mail gets sent to a PO box and then someone at the label goes through it.”

Alec nodded and scribbled something on a notepad in front of him. “And no one at the label picked up on anything out of the ordinary? Threats? Romantic overtures? The same fan sending an excessive number of letters?”

“Romantic overtures? Sure, Vivi gets marriage proposals all the time. Men and women both send letters saying they’re soul mates, or the sender says that Vivi looked at them from the stage and when their eyes met they knew they were meant to be. Stuff like that happens all the time. Threats are less frequent but they happen. If someone doesn’t like a song or they think some of the lyrics are too suggestive, or they didn’t like what she wore during a concert or in a video, they think they have the right to tell her to stop making that kind of music or change her clothes. But most of the time, those letters are simply telling her she’s going to burn in hell.”

Burn in hell.

How many times have I heard that? Tons. Some people were outrageously unkind. Some people were straight-up mean. After years of reading and hearing things about how horrible I was, one would think I could let it roll off me—not care and move on. But the truth was, it hurt.

My gaze slid from the creepy note I was staring at to Chasin. He wasn’t looking at the note, or Bobby; his attention was on me.

All of it.