Indiscreet (The Discreet Duet Book 2)

by Nicole French

  “Yeah, you are.”

  The deep voice echoed over the mic, and after that, a face so many knew and loved stepped into the light from the back of the booth.

  Van flushed. “Oh, hey. You, um, had a visitor come by to listen. I thought it would be okay.”

  Will and I stared at each other through the glass.

  “Um, yeah,” I mumbled. “It’s okay.”

  “Lil, I’m coming in.”

  Will entered the recording area while Van busied himself with the soundboard. He examined the host of instruments that littered the space and the scattered papers over the top of the keyboard.

  “Holy shit,” he murmured. “That was…that was yours?”

  I nodded. “Um, yeah.”

  “When did you write that? It’s so…Jesus, Lil. It’s painfully good. And I mean that in every sense.”

  My heart thumped, and my stomach flipped. I needed food. Soon. “I wrote it this morning.”

  Will’s eyes darted back to me. “Where? I came home this morning, and you were gone.”

  “Calliope and I went to a hotel last night. I needed some space.” Then I was pulled back to the circumstances at hand. “This morning, huh? So, where were you all night?”

  “I––I stayed at Corbyn’s. It seemed like the smart thing to do, all things considered.”

  “Smart because you were too trashed to come home? Or smart because you needed a private spot to get busy with Amelia and that other wench?” The words tasted so much bitterer than they sounded. They made my face twist like I’d sucked on a lemon.

  Will blinked, confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m…gonna go.” Van’s thin voice sounded from the booth. “I’ll send the track to Calliope when I’m finished.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Van!” I was cheerier than I felt considering I was busy glaring at the six feet, three inches of frustrated sex symbol in front of me. Emphasis on the word “sex.”

  I dug out my phone, then swiped angrily to a tabloid site running the article about Will’s “wild night.”

  “I imagine you had a very good time after I left,” I snarled, thrusting the phone at him.

  “What the fuck…” Will scrolled over the photos and the article, then handed it back to me. “Lil, you can’t possibly believe this. I told you not to read this kind of shit.”

  “Why, because the writing’s on the wall? You’re trashed, that one chick has her hand down your shirt, and Amelia’s two seconds from sucking you off.”

  “Stop it.”

  “No.”

  “Lil!”

  “Don’t call me that!” I shrieked, unable to deal with it anymore. I hurled my phone across the room, and it smacked against the thick, soundproofed walls and fell to the floor. It wasn’t quite the same effect as hurling it against a rock, but I didn’t care.

  “Li—Maggie. Let’s calm down a second—”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!” I shoved my hands back through my hair, pacing around, unable to keep still. “You—you fucked up here, Will! You said—y-you said you weren’t going to fall back into this kind of shit. Not if I was around. Well, I was around. I’ve been around every day, trailing after you like a pathetic lap dog. Dealing with your ex’s petty bullshit, the fact that my ex has been harassing me! Dealing with the fact that you’re never around, that I’m basically alone in that stupid house, day in and day out. That we’re both being trailed by photographers and cell phones, and with the fact that your mother thinks I’m no better than a common prostitute. And in the end, none of it mattered. Because you pushed me away. You called me a whore. You still couldn’t deal with all of it, and as soon as the opportunity presented itself, you went straight for the bottle and let Amelia get her fucking claws into you all over again while Theo tried. To. Rape me!”

  “Maggie, that is not what happened!” Will’s voice bounced around the room. “This is bullshit! Yeah, I was pretty fucked up last night, but I came here to apologize! Do you really think I would cheat on you just because we had a fight?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “You’re kidding, right? You’re really going to believe one of these fucked-up outlets over me?”

  “I don’t know what to believe right now!” I shouted, unable to keep my hand from sliding around my stomach. “I saw her. With you. In those fucking pictures. And last night, you were blitzed out of your mind! Do you even remember everything that happened? Who the fuck are you? What the fuck happened to my Will?!”

  “I’m only going to say this one more time. I did not sleep with anyone. Not with Amelia.” He held out the phone, and I shied away. I didn’t want to see that. “Look at this. Look at it, Maggie.”

  “I don’t want to look at that! You don’t think I’ve seen enough of that skank’s hands all over you?”

  “Fine, then I’ll tell you! See that sofa? That’s in the middle of Corbyn’s backyard. And what you don’t see in the photograph are the twenty other people surrounding us. Yeah, I was fucked up last night, Lil. I was, and I apologize for that. But I didn’t do anything with anybody. You have to believe me. What kind of person do you think I am, anyway?”

  “I DON’T REALLY KNOW, DO I?” I screamed, falling backward onto the piano bench from the effort. My heart pounded furiously, and my whole body was shaking. Unconsciously, my hand drifted to my stomach. This couldn’t be good for the baby.

  The baby.

  Everything raced through me. Flowing drinks. Easy pills. Amelia touching him. I was splitting apart.

  Will approached, squatting down onto his heels and caging me on the bench.

  “Listen to me. There are a shit ton of manipulative people in this business, and Amelia is a pro. She probably fed the outlet this story to begin with in order to build buzz for the movie. That’s how it’s done, Lil. But one call from Benny, and this gets yanked, okay? That’s all we have to do.”

  “You still don’t get it,” I said miserably. “It’s not the story that bothers me, Will. It’s that you were even there at all. It’s all the nasty things you said last night.” I swiped at the tears that wouldn’t stop falling. “It’s that in the end…you chose all of that…over me.”

  “Lil, I said some shitty things, but I did not choose anyone over you.”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “And how would you really know?”

  The words fell like bombs between us, and Will took a step back, like he’d been hit. “What?”

  I rocked forward. “Will, I have lived my entire life with someone with a substance abuse problem, who only has partial memory recognition half the time because she’s too blitzed the other half. You said yourself—you were fucked up last night. So really, how would you know? What did you have? Drinks, and what else? I see you in that photo. I saw you last night. Right there, you look like you couldn’t even remember your own name, much less everything that happened.”

  Will pulled out his phone and swiped to the site again to look at the photo. He studied it again, looking through the rest of the reel. It was obvious on his face that what I said was true—that he didn’t actually remember everything that happened.

  My heart deflated.

  “I didn’t take anything,” he whispered, but he looked like he didn’t even believe it himself. “I didn’t…”

  “You said you did,” I whispered. “Last night, when we—”

  He looked up, full of regret. “Please tell me you believe me, Lil. Please. I would never do that to you.”

  I opened my mouth. I didn’t know what to believe, but I couldn’t take it when he looked at me like that. I clasped a hand over my stomach. Now, a small voice said inside me. Tell him now.

  “Will, it’s not only that,” I started. “I’m—”

  The door to the studio swung open, and Calliope rushed in, phone in hand.

  “Maggie?” Her frantic gaze pinballed around the room until she found me. “Oh my God. Maggie. You—you need to call home. You ne
ed to call Lucas. Right—right away.”

  Will practically growled. “We’re kind of in the middle of—”

  “No.” Calliope cut him off, handing me her phone, which was already dialing Lucas’s number. I didn’t even know she had it. “Here.”

  Ducking the concerned glances from her and Will, I turned around as Lucas’s voice sounded through the speaker.

  “Maggie? Mags? Is that you?”

  “Y-yeah. Lucas, what is it?” Something in his voice, a peculiar frenzy, made my chest grow cold.

  “I—I couldn’t reach you. I didn’t know who else to call, so I looked up Calliope’s number, and—”

  “Lucas, what’s going on?”

  There was a pause. A deep breath. Maybe even the sound of someone crying.

  “Mags, you gotta come home,” he said with hitched breaths. “You—you need to come back right now.”

  “What? Why?”

  And then the message came, spiraling around me like loose streamers. Disconnected, because how can news like that ever be truly uniform, linear? Instead, the words landed in a cacophony of sharp, staccato notes, shearing through space and time like hand grenades, each one a deadly weapon that somehow cohered into a larger narrative that exploded through me.

  Mom.

  Sorry.

  Ellie.

  Driving.

  Curly’s.

  Late.

  Drinking.

  …

  …

  Dead.

  29

  “Maggie, we’re here, babe.”

  Calliope tapped my shoulder, almost like she was nervous to do it. It was the same way everyone had been touching me, looking at me, even walking around me for the past ten days.

  I let her guide me out of her rental car and into the church parking lot, where people were gathering for my mother’s funeral.

  Funeral. The concept still hadn’t really clicked. It didn’t make sense. How could I be here? What was I doing?

  We stood outside a pretty typical Presbyterian church—rectangular and white, with a tall spire that reached to the sky, and a gravel parking lot on all sides to accommodate everyone who wanted to say goodbye to Ellie Sharp. The Forsters, God bless them, had walked me through every single step of arranging the funeral. Linda in particular had done almost all of the planning while I had numbly nodded and tried to process what was happening.

  Mama was dead. Rolled her car fifty feet off the road into a ditch. The police said that based on the tire tracks, it looked like she had steered into the opposite lane, then over-corrected. She had been going much too fast—at least sixty, given the speed limit on Trent—and the car had flipped.

  She was not wearing a seatbelt and was thrown through the windshield.

  The coroner estimated she had been killed on impact. Mercifully, he said, though nothing about this seemed like mercy to me. An autopsy revealed that her blood alcohol level was somewhere near .16—almost twice the legal limit.

  She had done it to herself, and no one was surprised. Not the police officer, who had showed up to drive her home more than once from Curly’s. Not the Forsters, who were sorry, but clearly expected that something like this would happen one of these days. Not Barb, her best friend, who loved her to death, but perhaps knew in the bottom of her heart that Ellie was never going to make it to old age.

  Not even me. And I couldn’t really forgive myself for that.

  Amazingly, Mama had taken out a life insurance policy after I was born. I had looked at it in shock—it was the only evidence that she had ever had more than a few days’ prescience when it came to raising me. It wasn’t for much, but it was enough to pay for the funeral expenses, finish fixing up the property, and pay the taxes for at least a year. A strange gift that she was only able to give dead, not alive.

  I would have given it back in a second if I could have seen her again. However she was.

  “Hi, hon.” Linda greeted me with a kiss on the cheek as I approached the church.

  Calliope and I were late, as I had hemmed and hawed in front of the mirror for more than an hour. How do you dress for your own mother’s funeral? In the end, I’d let Callie choose for me—conservative black dress with flower appliqué down the A-line skirt. It swished around my knees. Mama had always liked that cut on me.

  “Hey, Mags.” Lucas greeted me with a warm, yet uncertain hug, his brown eyes full of sympathy. “You okay?”

  I shook my head. This was going to be the hardest part—a million people coming up to me, giving me their condolences. Asking me to express what I couldn’t put into words.

  I fingered the eulogy folded in my palm. “I’m fine,” I said eventually.

  Calliope squeezed my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s find your seat.”

  “The guitar?” I wondered. “Where’s my—”

  “It’s by the microphone, hon,” Linda said calmly, patting my shoulder. “We brought it this morning.”

  I looked up toward the altar, where, on the low-lying step of the church I’d attended sporadically as a child and where Mama had tried and failed to fit in most of her life, my Martin had been set on a stand to the right of the closed coffin and the scattered floral arrangements Linda and other people had donated. A blown-up photo of my mom at a local rodeo was propped on the other side of the coffin. She was laughing, holding a cowboy hat on top of her head to keep it from blowing away. It was a good picture of her, but almost felt like a mockery given the day.

  “Okay,” I murmured, and allowed Calliope to guide me to my seat in the front pew.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Sharp?”

  I turned to find an unfamiliar man holding a cowboy hat in a rough, weathered hand, extending the other toward me.

  “James Edelman,” he said as he accepted my weak handshake. “I, ah, was a friend of your mother’s. I sure am sorry about your loss.”

  Great. Another long-lost lover. By the number of men in the crowd, I suspected the place was full of men who had loved and lost Ellie Sharp over the years.

  “Nice to meet you,” I mumbled. “And thank you for coming. How, um, when did you know my mom?”

  “Oh, we knew each other way back,” James said. “When I was still playing with my band, back around ninety-one, ninety-two.”

  I nodded vacantly. Beside me, Calliope stiffened. James stood there awkwardly, showing no sign of moving.

  “So,” I said. “I’m guessing you and my mom were…”

  “Involved, yeah.” His shoulders curved sheepishly. “Ellie was…well, I never forgot her, though I messed the whole thing up. She left me after I got a DUI. She was trying to get right back then. I was a slave to the bottle—she was right to do it. I sure am sorry she relapsed.”

  “Relapsed. Well. Yeah, me too.” That was one way of putting it. Dead was another. “Did you manage to…”

  “Sober up? Sure did.” James pulled a token out of his pants pocket and held it out. “Ten years last month, actually.”

  “You knew Eloise in nineteen ninety-one, you said?” Calliope nudged my arm, and for the first time, I really looked at the guy.

  He wasn’t a big man––about average height, with shoulders that slumped a little to the sides with the weight of a harder life than most. He had tight, salt-and-pepper curls that were still mostly black and shorn close to his scalp, and his skin was a dark, rich brown with the sheen of a copper pot. His eyes, a kind, dark brown surrounded by substantial crow’s feet, slanted over a long nose and a mouth couched in wrinkles. It wasn’t the face of someone who had lived an easy life, but maybe of someone who tried to live a good one.

  “Where, um, where did you say you were from?” I asked.

  “I didn’t—I’m from Spokane. The rez, actually—my mother is Spokane Indian.”

  “What about your dad?” Calliope’s voice was sharp, maybe unnecessarily curious. “What…um, what was he?”

  I glanced at her. “Cal.” It was inappropriate, asking someone about their race. She knew as much as I did how
awkward that felt.

  James looked between us uncomfortably. “Oh, him. He was from the Valley. Black guy, disappeared when I was a kid, so we didn’t see him much.” He folded his lips together—that was clearly all he had to say on the matter.

  Calliope’s mouth dropped slightly, but because of my hazy state of mind, it took me a few more moments to put together the puzzle she’d already figured out.

  Nineteen ninety-one.

  Mixed ethnicity.

  Musician.

  My eyes shot open.

  “When did you say you were born again?” James asked. His words slurred together, though I didn’t think it was him doing it.

  “I didn’t,” I whispered. “But my birthday is in December.”

  “December fourth,” Callie added emphatically.

  “Nineteen ninety one,” I finished.

  James and I stared at each other as a slow realization dawned on both of us.

  “I guess we have some talking to do, don’t we?” he murmured.

  I turned to Calliope. I couldn’t do this right now. I really couldn’t.

  “We’ll be around at the reception,” she said, stepping in the way only a best friend could.

  James rocked back, clearly relieved. It was a lot for both of us, that much was clear. “Certainly,” he said. “That sounds…like a plan.”

  “All right, then.” Calliope took hold of my shoulders and guided me toward my seat.

  “Was that—did I j-just imagine—”

  “’Fraid not, babe,” she said as we sat down. “But not now. Put it away. Focus on what you have to do now, and we’ll deal with that later.”

  There I sat, staring at the particleboard walls of the church, the ugly red carpeting, and the red stained-glass window panels while the reverend began the service, calling people to sit while he opened with a prayer.

  How was I going to get up there? The same thought had been running through my head for the few weeks it had taken to settle everything: your fault. And it was. Nothing I had done had been enough to save her. Not leaving. Not an intervention. I had tried everything, and I had failed. It was my fault that she was dead.

  “Babe.” Calliope nudged my arm.