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Finn: Ask her what music she likes.
I watched Juliet blink when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, then pull it out. She glanced at it, then put it away without looking at me.
“I mean, I know you guys are opposites,” Alistair was saying. While I was sending my text, he had looked at his own phone, checking the time again. “You don’t have to get along. But give it a try, would you? Do whatever you can.”
“Juliet isn’t a charity case,” I said as Hayley wrapped up her speech. “It’s me who’s a charity case.” When Alistair gave me a puzzled look, I took out my phone again and swiped open Instagram. I showed him the photo Hayley had posted half an hour ago, a selfie of me and her. Bestie’s wedding party gathering with Finn Wiley!
I tapped the comments, showing them to Alistair.
OMG what? I didn’t know he was still around?
Get him to sing Ice Cream Girlfriend lol.
Nooooo, don’t let him sing it. Worst song EVER!
I loved that song when I was 15!
That is so random. Where has he been?
Maybe he is making a new album lol.
LORD he grew up HOT.
Alistair scanned the comments and rolled his eyes.
“At least no one has said I’m dead yet,” I said. “It’s still early.”
Alistair dutifully clapped for the speech Hayley had given that neither of us had listened to. “Since when do you have an Instagram account?”
“A few weeks.” I had shut down all Finn Wiley social media years ago, uninterested in the mix of petty insults and rabid stalkers that joined the bots sending me comments. But the Road Kings had an account now, and in order to follow it I had made an anonymous account called musiclover followed by a string of numbers. Juliet didn’t have an account, but sometimes she showed up in the pictures posted by the Road Kings. I liked seeing her, and I wasn’t even sorry about how pathetic that was.
“Wow,” Alistair said, his eyebrows rising. “You really are rejoining the land of the living.”
“I’m working up to it.”
He smiled. “Work up to it with another beer. Do it for me, since I’m driving tonight and you’re not.”
I caught the eye of one of the servers assigned to the room and lifted a hand. She jumped into action, taking my order and bringing me another bottle of beer. I had given her an autograph earlier, and when she brought my drink, I tipped her a ten-dollar bill, because serving a room full of people is hard work. Dad had taught me early to look out for the people who do all the work for none of the money, no matter how famous I got. You don’t have character worth knowing if you treat the people at the bottom like dirt, he’d said. Even when I was a snotty teenager with an expensive haircut and a hit song, I had lived by those words, and I still did.
“Mom sent me a card,” Alistair said, as if following my train of thought.
“Wow. That’s a big effort for Mom.”
“Right?” Alistair’s tone was dry. “I’ll cherish it always.” He raised his glass of soda and I clicked it with my beer bottle.
Our mother had left when I was eight. She had moved away, remarried, and apparently left us out of sight and out of mind. It was the kind of thing that screwed up a kid, but Dad had been both parents to Alistair and me the best he could. He wasn’t perfect, but just knowing that I had one parent who was truly doing his best—who loved me that much—had gone a long way. Well, that and therapy.
Mom had made overtures about reconnecting after I got famous, but even though I was still wounded back then, I had sensed how hollow it was. She was only interested in me because of my fame and because I had made money. When I didn’t jump at the chance to get closer to her, she’d ghosted me again. I had come around to being grateful that she’d taught me a lesson about knowing which people care about you as a person and which people only care about fame.
“What about Vicki’s father?” I asked Alistair. “Did you hear from him?”
“The usual excuses,” Alistair replied with an eye roll. “He has to be somewhere, he has to do something, he can’t get away. He really would like to come to the wedding, but he just can’t. He’d like to see the kids, but he can’t. It’s always the same line.”
I nodded. I knew that Vicki and Juliet’s father was a musician who had never made it big. He’d spent the last thirty years going through a succession of women, making promises to his kids and not keeping them. “Do either of them even talk to him at this point? There doesn’t seem to be any relationship there.”
“We hear from him once a year or so,” Alistair said. “He calls and makes a bunch of noise about visiting, but he never means any of it. I don’t know if Jules talks to him. Except for the fact that he’s a complete asshole, she’s a lot like him. She even looks like him.”
I felt my defensiveness rise, and I had to take a second to grip my beer bottle and inhale a breath. Did Juliet’s family think she was like her father—careless, irresponsible, selfish? She was nothing like that. She lived the musician’s life, but she hadn’t dragged anyone into marriage only to abandon them, and she sure as hell hadn’t brought children into the world only to ditch them when things got hard. She could have made promises and bailed on this wedding, just like her father had—but she hadn’t. Instead, she had showed up.
