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“Yes. She really is.” Ella sighed. “But Brooks, I was wondering. Do you think Aurora’s been acting strange lately? I mean, I know you haven’t known her very long. Nor have I.”
Brooks gave Ella a pained look. “When we were out on the boat, it was like her mood completely shifted from one moment to the next, and then she said a few strange things on the drive back to The Copperfield House. I wanted to chalk it up to her nerves for today, but I don’t know. It’s like, one minute she’s here with me, and the next minute, she’s miles away.”
Ella nodded. “My mother and I have noticed that, too. And we’re worried.” She paused. “My mother thinks that Aurora’s mother was at the residency back in the eighties and that she may have had some mental health problems that were passed down to Aurora. Aurora also just mentioned that her mother died recently— and I have to think that everything is related.”
Brooks nodded, worry echoing from his face.
“But maybe you just considered her a fling?” Ella hurried to add. “If so, do you mind just stepping out of the way so we can get her some real care? I mean, she’s a tourist, and you’re an islander. I know how these things go.”
At this, Brooks gave her a look of understanding, one that dissolved Ella’s worries about him. Whatever he felt for Aurora, no matter how new it was, it was real for him.
“Even if she can’t love me, even if she’s too sick, I want to make sure she’s all right,” Brooks finally answered, his face calming.
Up on stage, Aurora’s song had climbed to new heights, her voice vibrant and fierce, her face moving in a million different ways. But as Ella gazed up at her, both petrified and amazed by her, Aurora’s eyes dropped, and she saw Ella next to Brooks. And at that moment, her face twisted with rage.
Ella’s heart dropped into her stomach. Something was very wrong.
Suddenly, Aurora strummed a heinous chord, one that didn’t fit in with the rest of the song, and her voice stalled and sputtered out. She gasped into the microphone as her eyes filled with tears. “How could you,” she muttered, just loud enough for it to reach the microphone and be blasted out across the audience. “How could you do this to me? How could you be in on it?”
And suddenly, Aurora ran off stage with her guitar pulled around to her back. Ella and Brooks hurried through the crowd, then rushed up the backstage steps to find Aurora on the ground with Ella’s band all around her. Audrey was bent down with her hand on Aurora’s back, trying to talk her down, but Aurora’s breath was too quick, and her words were incoherent. When Ella appeared, Aurora pointed at her and said, “Get away from me! I know what you want.”
Ella closed her eyes, her head swirling. But before she could bend down to speak to Aurora, to try to talk some sense into her, Brooks tapped Ella on the shoulder and said, “Let me. Please.”
Ella and the rest of her band stepped back to allow Brooks to kneel before Aurora and whisper something in her ear.
“You were in on it the entire time,” Aurora growled at him. “No coincidence that you were at the docks that night. You wanted to destroy me. You wanted to take everything! But I won’t let you.”
Again, Brooks spoke gently, words that Ella couldn’t hear. Twice more, Aurora scowled and yelled at him, but each time, her voice was softer, more childlike. It was clear that whatever Brooks said to her, it was bringing her back to planet Earth, at least for now.
Eventually, Brooks coaxed her back to her feet, took one of her hands in his, and made eye contact with Ella, who nodded. In his eyes, she saw he planned to take her to the hospital and that he had no qualms with sitting there with her all night until a doctor could help her.
For some reason— perhaps only luck— Aurora had met one of the kindest and most patient men in the world. She needed his love so deeply, yet she didn’t need the romantic, head-over-heels, take-my-breath-away love. She needed the kind of love that made you breakfast. She needed the kind of love that didn’t care when things got messy.
“I have Will’s number,” Brooks said quietly as they passed. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
Ella pressed her hand over her heart, unable to translate how much this meant to her. And then, Brooks led Aurora carefully down the steps, away from the crowd and toward the parking lot near the harbor. Soon, he would take her away.
The crowd roared with hundreds of confused conversations. They’d never seen an artist fall apart on stage like that. Ella, of course, had, in fact. It always broke her heart.
“Why don’t we go on a little early?” Ella suggested to her band, trying to swim her way out of her own sorrows. “We can play a few extra hits to add extra time to the set.”
“Sounds good,” Nate said with a nod.
“Just like old times,” Henry added.
As Ella and the rest of her band prepared to head out stage, Will leaned over to kiss her gently, then breathed, “She’s going to be okay. I promise you that.”
But Ella was frightened that she’d pushed Aurora too far, that the pressure had brought out the horrors in her mind.
Out on stage, Ella did her best to give herself over to the music, to belt out song after song in a way that honored herself at twenty-five, herself now, and everything that Aurora represented, as well. To her surprise, the crowd still remembered many of her lyrics, and they screamed and cried them up at her, drawing her back into the world of music that she and Will had built for themselves all those years ago. Although it was bittersweet after what had happened to Aurora— it was sublime, just the same.
ChapterSeventeen
Aurora was back in Brooks’ truck, screaming like a wild animal. She felt as though she couldn’t get enough air, couldn’t possibly breathe, and she opened the truck window and dropped her face into the crack, heaving. Tears spilled from her eyes, and she said words that she didn’t even fully understand. Things about her mother, about how much she missed her, and how she didn’t want them to take her away.
Throughout her tantrum, Brooks had his hand on her knee the entire time, his eyes bloodshot. He gave no indication that he needed her to stop crying. In fact, several times, she was pretty sure he whispered, “It’s okay. Cry it out.”
When Aurora was finally able to form coherent sentences, she demanded of him, “Why did you come after me? Why did you do this?”
