“Youdid nothing wrong. Cruz is known to be handsy. I wish I could have been there for you. Why don’t you come to my office and we can talk and try to strategize on some damage control? I’ll send a car.”
“Can we do that later? I think at this point the damage has been done. Max is angry at me. I’m angry at myself. And I really just need to be alone.”
Amalia sighed. “Alright. But, Sadie? If Cruz McNeil is the only person you can confide in... honey, you have a problem. You can’t stay a lone wolf forever. You do have friends, you know. People who care about you. And one last thing? I know it hurts. I’ve lost people I cared about, too. But let me tell you whatdoesn’twork when you’re dealing with grief: pretending it doesn’t exist. You’re going to need to deal with it. Allow yourself some closure, or you won’t be able to move forward.”
After she hung up, Sadie stood still, thinking about what her manager had just said.Closure.Maybe Amalia was right. Closure was exactly what she needed—and was possibly the only thing in her life she could control right now. Suddenly, she heard her gran’s voice, saying:One bite at a time, dear.This was something Gran would always say to her when Sadie got herself into a pickle with too much overdue schoolwork, or too many gigs booked, or any other mess she’d ever managed to get herself into in life. Now, Sadie decided, shewasgoing to solve one of her problems—and then see what she could do about the rest of them.
Out in the lobby, the studio assistant, a young woman named Yasmin, looked up from her phone with a guilty look, like she had just been looking at the photo of Sadie with Cruz.
“Anything I can help you with, Miss Hunter?”
“Could I get a car service, please?”
“But Mr. McNeil is upstairs waiting. He’s here to work with you and Max. He won’t like it if you—”
“Mr. Brody had to leave,” Sadie said firmly. “If he doesn’t have to be here, neither do I. Now, if you could please get me a car service?”
It worked. Yasmin busied herself on the phone, and Sadie went outside to wait.
A black town car pulled up, and Sadie hopped in the back, collapsing against the cold leather seat in relief as she gave the driver the address of her apartment. As the car moved through Nashville, it seemed every place she passed sparked a memory of Max: the Opryland Hotel, the building that housed theStarmakersoundstage, the restaurant they had taken Gran to, Margot, and the costume shop. This pain wouldn’t last forever, Sadie hoped—but it certainly felt very raw right now.
The car had arrived at her apartment. She asked the driver to wait for her while she went inside to get something she needed.
Upstairs, her gran’s jaunty knit blanket was draped across the couch, and Sadie felt a pang as she looked at it. She headed into her bedroom to find the cookie tin she kept the letters in. The ones she had been writing to Gran all year when she missed her too much, telling her the things she would normally have told her on their frequent FaceTime calls. She lifted the lid of the tin; it was so filled with letters she had written, mostly while on tour, that they spilled over the edge and out onto her bed.
Dear Gran, I can’t believe it, I’m in Prague. I love it so much! You would, too. It feels like it’s haunted, but not in a bad way. I had one day to myself and probably should have rested but instead I went to the State Opera alone andwatched a performance ofTosca. Malin Byström sang the lead. She was incredible.
... We’re in Santa Barbara. We just performed at The Bowl and then after, everyone was planning to go to some after-party, but I said I thought I’d just go back to my hotel. I ran into Tasha and she said she was heading to a friend’s, and that I should join her—and this friend turned out to be OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN. All I could think about was how much you would have loved to be there. Remember we used to listen to her records together? Olivia made us lemon chicken, and about a dozen different salads, and instead of wine there was beet-kale juice, which was more than fine with me.
Hi, Gran, I could really use your advice. Max won’t respond to any of my messages. I’m starting to think he might never reply, and soon, all this is going to be over. What would you say to me? That I don’t need Max Brody to have a successful career? But what if I’m just a flash in the pan without him? I need to finish my album. I need some perspective, and you were always so good at giving it to me.
Sadie stuffed the letters back in the tin, adding a heavy paperweight from her desk and forcing the lid shut. She put on a baseball cap, tucked her hair inside it, found a pair of large, dark sunglasses, and left the apartment with the tin tucked under her arm.
“John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge,” she instructed the driver when she was back inside the vehicle. She held the tinagainst her body, realizing as she clung to it that she might have a hard time letting it go.But you have to do this,she told herself.You have to let this go so you can move on from your grief. You need closure.
The bridge was strung with holiday lights, shining bright green and red even in the afternoon. The bridge was fairly quiet. She walked to the middle and looked down at the navy-green water of the Cumberland River, then out at the buildings of Nashville on the left and the trees and paths of Cumberland Park on the right. Someday soon, she would find the time to process all the things that had happened to her this past year:Starmaker, Max, Gran’s death, touring with Tasha Munroe, Max again...
But now was not that time. Now she just needed to release it. She looked around to make sure no one was watching and felt a pang of guilt about littering (she’d make a donation to the Clean Streams Initiative, she decided), then dropped the tin straight down into the fast-flowing water and watched it get carried away downstream. It sank, and was gone.
Okay. Now all she needed to do was stand here and have a good, long cry. Let it all out. Gran was dead. There was no changing it. When Gran had come to visit Sadie as a surprise last Christmas, she had already been diagnosed with an incurable arrhythmic heart condition. She had told Sadie she had the flu, and Sadie had pretended nothing was wrong. In some ways, Sadie could understand why Gran tried to protect her from the truth. She knew she would have done anything, even forgo her chance to winStarmaker, to be with Gran in her last moments. But how could anyone, Gran or Lynn or anyone else, havebelieved that taking away that choice wasn’t going to cause her a great deal of pain?This sucks, Sadie. It’s terrible. Go ahead, let it all out.
Nothing happened. So Sadie kept thinking about the dark moments she had been avoiding. She remembered fleeing theStarmakerset when her mother finally realized it was getting to be too late. She had stayed in Wisconsin for the funeral and had felt completely numb the entire time. She could barely even look at Lynn, so she shut her out even though she knew she was grieving, too. And then Sadie had returned to Nashville after a few days—but at that point, Max was already gone and wouldn’t take her calls. The only person she told about her gran’s death was Amalia. She knew she couldn’t deal with her feelings about her gran’s death and certainly didn’t want to have to do it through the lens of the media. And then her professional life had started to pick up steam. The Tasha Munroe tour, starting to record with Cruz. She had hoped she could keep herself busy enough to leave behind her pain. That hadn’t worked.
She was finally allowing herself to feel—but she couldn’t cry. Instead, she stood on the bridge, looking down at the water and the path the letters had taken away from her now washed away by endless, flowing water. She felt frozen. Unable to release what she had come here to release.
Sadie looked up at the clouds that had gathered above her, heavy and thick. They were full ofsnow. As she craned her neck up, a few fat, lazy flakes floated down, landing in her hair and on her shoulders. Impulsively she stuck her tongue out and caught a few plump snowflakes. They lingered for seconds, icy, cool, evocative of home, then melted away into nothing.
Shehadfelt something for a moment, hadn’t she? Somechildhood memory, a shadow of the carefree, innocent person she had once been. Someone much more in touch with herself and her emotions than she was now. But the moment was gone.
And suddenly, she had the creeping sensation that she was being watched.
She spun around, but no one was there.
Up ahead, the few pedestrians on the bridge were looking up in wonder, too; it was rare for there to be any snow at all in Nashville in December. But by the time she got back to the car, it had stopped. It was as if the little flurry of festive snowflakes had never happened. The sky was grey, and she felt grey, too.
All she wanted was to talk to her gran, to tell her everything about her difficult day. She opened up her phone’s contacts folder and scrolled through them, hovering over “Gran” but never deleting it. She kept scrolling, thinking about what Amalia had said to her about the fact that she did have friends in Nashville—that there were people here who cared about her. She thought about calling her mom, but she knew how upset Lynn would get when she learned the vile extent of the music industry gossip being directed her daughter’s way. So she clicked on “Tasha Munroe.” She texted:Can we talk?
Tasha replied right away.Absolutely. I’m at home. Come on over.
