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Prologue

My wife has maybe an hour left, if I’m lucky.

Could be less.

Either way, I’m not going to survive without her.

I’ve sat in this chair for weeks, holding her hand, praying to every god I’ve ever heard of for more time.

Then I hate myself for being so selfish. She’s in so much pain. If there’s someplace better waiting for her, where the cancer is gone forever, who am I to expect her to stay?

Last month, the home care team moved her to a hospital bed in the living room. Yolanda wanted to look out at the lake with the sliding doors wide open so she could feel the breeze on her face.

It gave her peace for a while.

She hasn’t opened her eyes since yesterday.

Our daughter Billie is asleep in the chair, a legal pad teeters on her knee where she’s written down every instruction on how to make her mom more comfortable. Our son Theo is out on the deck with his hands locked on the rail. He can’t handle seeing his mother in this condition so he slips out when he can’t stand another minute. Thinks I can’t see him.

I can.

As for me, I’m counting Yolanda’s breaths so the last one doesn’t catch me off guard.

I swear to fuck, I’d trade every ounce of fame and success if it meant she’d be healthy again. I’ve fronted a band called Limelight for thirty years. Sold out stadiums on six continents. Have Grammys and more money than I could ever spend. Hell, I’ve made grown men cry when they shook my hand.

None of it is worth a damn in this room.

The best of me is the part she built, and it’ll all evaporate when she goes.

She found me at twenty-nine, and I was already dying, taking the slow way out. The band had gotten bigger than any of us knew what to do with, and I’d disappeared inside it with a drug habit I kept calling a bad stretch. Most of my bandmates were in the same hell of addiction and our reputation was in the shitter.

Even my own mother stopped answering my calls.

Yolanda was a reporter some music rag sent to spend three days with the band and write a hit piece. When she walked into the dressing room, all icy-blonde coolness, I wanted to fuck her. We all did.

Ignoring my band mates, she sat down across from me in a room full of hangers-on. Took my hands in hers and told me I looked terrible. Asked me if I was proud of the man I’d become. I was like, WTF?

Still, I told her the truth.

Of course I was proud. Defiantly claimed it was better to be rockstar enjoying the fuck out of my life than a drunk hanging drywall in Tacoma, where I’d be dead by forty same as my father. She wrote it down and somehow we continued talking till the sun came up.

To say we hit it off immediately would be an understatement. She delivered the story, quit her job, and joined me on the road. Spent every waking moment I wasn’t with the band together. Fucking her was transcendent. I was on top of the world.

She and I were each other’s destiny.

Until Yolanda realized my casual drug use was actually a full-blown heroin addiction. Confronted, mid shoot-up, I tried to explain it away. She quit believing in me and us right in the middle of my sentence.

There was no yelling or crying. She laid her hand on the side of my face like she was saying goodbye forever to a dead man. Caught the next flight home to New York. Wouldn’t pick up when I called.

I’d tried to get sober for my mother, the band, even a doctor who showed me bloodwork. I failed every single time.

I finally succeeded when I realized the one person who ever made me feel worthy was gone forever. I fucked things up with the woman I envisioned marrying and starting a family. With the hope she’d take me back if I got my shit together, somehow I got sober.

A year later, when I’d been clean long enough to trust myself, I tracked her down during a tour hiatus. Took the redeye and stood on her stoop with nothing rehearsed. Essentially begged her to give me another chance. Promised I’d walk the straight and narrow for the rest of my life if she’d come back.

Yolanda studied my face for a long, long while. Told me I looked terrible and stepped back and let me in.

Took the biggest risk of her life. I’ve never taken it for granted.