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“Some of their tracks are nice. They used to…” I cleared my throat. “Some of their songs were my mom’s favorite. Which I always found hilarious seeing as her husband was Gerry Sullivan.
“But, I guess, who the hell knew what she truly liked? Everything could have been an act.”
“You’re right,” he said softly. “It could have been an act. Maybe a lot of it was. But I can’t see all of it being one. Tell me about the last birthday you spent together.”
I knew what he was doing. Humanizing a double agent. Still… “She sneaked me away from our guards and we headed to Chuck E. Cheese.”
He laughed. “Really?”
“Yeah.” I twisted over so I could peer at him through the dim lights. “We stuck around for about twenty minutes, grabbed the food, and left.”
“You didn’t do the whole kids’ party thing?”
My nose crinkled. “I was a teenager. I didn’t want Chuck E. Cheese.”
“So why did she take you there?”
“Because I’d had a tantrum about how being Gerry Sullivan’s daughter was ruining my life and that I never got to do anything normal.”
“And that was her reaction?”
“Yeah. Then she took me to Target and we headed into Bed, Bath and Beyond afterward, and…” My smile was shaky. “I guess she just made us do normal stuff. I never imagined that that wouldn’t have been normal for her. She fit in seamlessly, Conor. You’d never think she was Russian.”
“Her job was literally to fit in, but it wasn’t her job to be a good mom. Was she, Star? Was she a good mom?”
I wanted to say no but I couldn’t. “She loved me.”
Conor seemed to recognize that by saying those three words, I was admitting that she had been a good mother.
Fuck, she’d been the best.
For no other reason would I have gotten myself entangled with this bullshit if not to find the reason she’d been snatched from me too soon.
He reached for my hand and gently squeezed my fingers. “And your dad?”
“He was different when Mom was alive. Back then, he was a good dad. They did what they could when we were growing up in the goldfish bowl that’s life on tour and in the spotlight.
“After, he was lost. I knew he loved me, but he stopped being a ‘recovering’ addict and fell back into bad habits. I was too much to handle, so broken and lost, just as much as he was, and instead of us coming together, it pushed us apart.”
“When you talked about him with me in the past, I never realized…”
“How strained things were between us in the end?” I grimaced. “I don’t focus on those times. They make me sad and I’m sad enough. I was a daddy’s girl. Even after everything went wrong, that never changed.”
“If anything, it probably made you rebel more.”
I hummed in agreement. Sharing him with my mom was normal. But with groupies and roadies? No. Fucking. Way.
“Conor?”
“Hmm?”
“Were your ma and da good parents?”
For the longest time, he said nothing. To the point where, when he pressed his face to my shoulder, I just thought he was going to shrug my question off and go to sleep.
My own eyes were starting to close, beginning to feel heavy with fatigue and the stress from the day by the time he muttered, “Do you know how people do what they can with the best they’re given?”
“Yes?” was my drowsy retort.
