Page 25 of Second Song

“Rowan, I’m so sorry.” Most people would back off from this subject. He surprises me by asking more. In fact, he’s the first person to ask, “And that’s where you wanted to go? To stay with your stepfather’s family for a while?”

Unclenching my jaw again takes even longer.

“Take your time,” he murmurs, and it does take time. Long seconds pass while a little girl gathers petals in a reminder of my little Irish cousins. They were the only good part of that shit situation, and maybe that’s why I tell him, “There wasn’t anywhere else for me.” I eventually add, “Or anyone else. Mum was an only, like me. I don’t know my real father.”

I lift my chin in case he judges. He doesn’t, so I continue.

“She didn’t have any other family. I don’t either, so it was just me and her new husband, and he didn’t know what to do with me.” Nerves mean I chuff out a laugh. “And I didn’t know what to do with him either. That’s how I ended up in a boarding school until the contest. Not one like yours.” Glynn Harber couldn’t be further from it. I mention the name of a school where people pay a fortune to buy their kids high grades and connections.

His eyebrows rise. “I know it. That’s a top-performing Supernus Group school. Ultra-academic. Very?—”

“Strict?” There’s no way I could ever chuff out laughter in that school’s headmaster’s study like I do now. “I couldn’t wait to get out.”

“And that’s why you entered the contest?”

I nod. Across the pathway, Jamila nods as well, only she does it along with bobbing daisies, as if she’s dancing to the kind of internal music that fills my head twenty-four seven. Seeing her bobbing to that beat helps. I talk in time with it. “I never expected I’d have to go back there with my tail between my legs. If I didn’t fit in before I all but ran away to audition, it was so much worse after they all saw?—”

I don’t mention the photo that made each day torture.

I can’t.

I settle for saying, “I couldn’t face it. I failed my exams.” Failed? I locked myself into a practice room instead of sitting any. “I couldn’t make myself sing, but I could bang away on a drum kit to drown out…” Everything. “That’s when my stepdad sent me away.”

Luke Lawson lets out a soft hum, his eyes lowered, and it takes me a moment to realise he’s focused on the pen I borrowed and that I now use to tap an agitated rhythm on my borrowed pad of paper.

I’m fucking this up so badly.

I force myself to stop that worried drumming. I also drag in a slow breath, not as deep as the kind I felt rumble through Liam last night, but it helps. “Anyway,” I say brightly. “The past is the past. What matters is that I’ve got some classroom experience and I’m actually a grade eight pianist and flautist but I can play pretty much anything.”

“I saw all of that on your application. And I saw it in action in the outdoor classroom, with Charles.”

That’s all he says, his gaze now fixed on his daughter, who toddles between banks of daisies, and that switch of focus is better. His silence isn’t. It demands that I fill this vacuum, and not with a sales pitch, so I tell him the bare bones of how I reclaimed some of what I lost.

“Getting to know my little cousins was the best part. And volunteering at the village school. I did retake my exams and got good enough grades for teacher training.” I rub my sweaty palms dry on my trousers right where he can see me do it, no doubt making another great first impression.

You’ve got true grit.

I close my eyes, seeing who said that to me as if he believed it.

Dig deep for some more of it.

I finally open my eyes to a view of flowers and the sea glinting in the distance. The shush of the waves is rhythmic. Soft. So is this headmaster’s next question, which has nothing to do with my exam grades.

“You say you got to know them. Your little Irish cousins. You didn’t before living with them?”

“No.” I rub my forehead, a headache threatening like Mum’s used to increasingly often. “I didn’t know any of them. My mum and stepdad got married quite fast. Had a tiny wedding.” Just the three of us. “I hadn’t met his family. And I didn’t speak Gaeilge like they did at home.”

“And now you’re back in England and up to full speed?”

“Instrumentally?” At last, I can speak confidently. “Yes. Once I started to play for my cousins and picked up enough Gaeilge to help with reading and writing at the school, it…” I don’t know how to describe what working with kids did for me. Not in a single sentence.

“It opened a locked door for you?”

“Yes.” That’s it exactly. “I could access everything…”

“That trauma cost you?”

“Trauma?”

---