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Finally, my family, and my heart, were no longer in pieces.
Epilogue
Thalia
IfinMay,you’dasked me what I was going to be doing in September, I wouldn’t have had a clue. All I knew, is I would be hustling to make ends meet for me and Luna.
There was nothing wrong with that, of course. It had been my life for years and it was a noble thing to do whatever it took to provide for your family. And I was ready to do anything.
But life sometimes had some surprises up its sleeve.
A lot of times, those surprises were lemons. And a lot of them. Sometimes those lemons are in the form of a man who cut you down when you were young and vulnerable and shoved you out of the spotlight in favor of someone else.
But sometimes… Well sometimes, life handed you a glass of sweet, sweet lemonade just when you needed your thirst quenched.
Or should I have said: a bouquet of sunflowers.
After Damian releasedSunflowerand broke several records, he went ahead and rebranded his tour asThe Sunflower Sessionsand still continued the same scheduled dates. Well, they were allrescheduleddates, thanks to Sadie’s amazing logistic skills. I was still accompanying him, but this time, I wasn’t his studio assistant.
He was showing me all the things he’d learned throughout the past years, and I couldn't help but be thankful to be coached by the world’s biggest music superstar. Sometimes it's hard to be with your significant other while they are teaching you something, but Damian taught me with such patience and love, I soaked everything in.
I could tell that Damian felt a deep sense of guilt about what happened with Kurt. I tried to assure him that he didn’t do anything, and also dealing with his guilt was annoying. So we agreed that he could stop apologizing and we could focus on moving forward.
Sometimes Adriana and Luna came to Damian’s shows, and we all had a blast singing along to his songs. It had been going so well ever since we told Luna that Damian was her father.
After a lot of conversation, we decided Luna and I would move into Damian’s house. It felt fast and like the relationship was going at warp-speed, but it also felt right, and it gave us so much time to spend together as a family. We had a lot of catching up to do, but Damian and I also had a lot of work to do in rebuilding our relationship. It hadn’t been all sunshine and rainbows in the short time we’d been back together, but we decided that it was worth fighting for and worth working through the hard times.
We had been surprisingly successful at keeping our relationship and Luna out of the tabloids. Damian had approached a few other celebrities who managed to keep their kids out of the public eye and had gotten tips and a list of schools that prioritized privacy. That was top of our list when it came to enrolling Luna in school. He beefed up security to make sure our private life could stay private. I was incredibly grateful that he, for starters,thoughtabout these kinds of things, and that we were on the same page about the importance of privacy.
It allowed us to take things one day at a time, to a certain extent. We were back in LA since Damian was on a short break from shows. I took the downtime as an opportunity to tinker around in the studio. Damian had told me when I was ready to start making music, the studio was all mine and we’d work out a formal agreement through his label, if I wanted. He was also supportive of me talking to other labels and finding whatever fit worked for me.
I was just finishing tuning a guitar; Damian always played a little too aggressively when he got excited, and never bothered to tune them afterwards, when Jackson walked into the studio.
“Looks like your days as a studio assistant were pretty helpful, huh?” Jackson asked as he sat down in his designated chair in front of all his buttons and dials that I had yet to understand.
I laughed.
“Sometimes Damian is a little too careless with his stuff and needs someone to clean up after him.”
“No truer words have been spoken, Thalia.”
Jackson and I shared a laugh when, on cue, Damian burst into the studio with Luna on his shoulders. She was squealing in delight, getting a ride from Damian. It was great that this building could be one of our safe spaces.
“We have arrived,” Damian announced proudly. “We just did a little shopping for our trip to Bali next week.” Damian gently eased Luna to the floor, and she ran into the recording booth to give me a hug.
“Mommy!” I never got tired of how her sweet voice rang out in the booth. She wrapped her arms around me tightly.
“Hey there!” I planted a quick kiss on her head as I put the guitar down. “So you had fun with Daddy, huh?” Damian and I had both been very surprised when she stopped calling him 'Sir Laze-a-lot' and switched to 'Daddy' so quickly. But she sometimes still liked to throw her favorite nickname for him in the mix.
“Yep. Daddy bought me so many new clothes.” Luna’s smile spread wide across her tiny face. I flashed a low-heated glare in Damian’s direction. We’d been talking about spoiling Luna. I completely understood his need to make up for lost time, but I still wanted Luna to stay grounded.
“We sure did some damage at Tar-zhay.” I rolled my eyes. Damian stressed the frou-frou name for the neighborhood Target store, as if the fact it wasn’t a high-end place on Rodeo Drive made it better. But it also kind of did make it better. A little bit.
“It sounds like you’ve been spoiled enough today, Luna. But unfortunately, since you’re going on vacation soon, this is the last time I can treat my little friend to a snack. How about an ice cream, Luna?”
Jackson stood up from his chair and leaned against the doorway.
“Yeah!” Luna cheered, and they left the studio hand -in-hand, giggling and laughing.
