Page 23 of Not Another Love Song

Ms. Michaels was right. The publicity wrote itself. Now she just needed to be good enough to earn her place.

No matter how many pep talks Jacob had given her or how many celebratory drinks Mei had forced on her, she couldn’t stop hearing Xander’s voice in her head—

She has no technique. Her intonation is awful—almost no vibrato.

She’ ll certainly make for a pretty picture on the brochure. Doesn’t matter if she can play, I guess.

Gwen stopped the Ava Fitzgerald autoplay cycle she’d found herself stuck in on YouTube, and with quick, guilty fingers, typed Xander Thorne into the search bar.

Thorne and Roses had done one professionally filmed music video, of their Nirvana cover, but according to their Instagram page they were working on a second. She spent the next fifteen minutes clicking through Xander Thorne’s live performances, watching his hair flip through each song in front of his four other musicians.

She recalled what Chelsea at the wedding had called him. Alex.

She tried Xander Thorne + Alex and watched as Fitzgerald autofilled in the search bar.

Strange, but it made a certain amount of sense. He played first cello opposite Ava Fitzgerald in the Pops. Their names would come up together. But the first search result was a gangly teenager with cropped black hair. Playing a violin.

Gwen gasped. She clicked and watched as Xander Thorne executed a flawless solo rendition of the Vitali Chaconne in G Minor.

Oh god.

She knew it was him. There was something in the fluidity, the lack of tension. And also the hair, the jaw, the shoulders— all parts of him that he’d grown into over time. Pieces began to click in place as Gwen muttered a barely audible “Fuck” under her breath. Xander, or Alex, hadn’t always been a cellist. He had been, first and foremost, a violinist.

She watched as Alex, age ten, worked his way through the Tchaikovsky concerto. She watched as Alex and Yo-Yo Ma played a duet at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

And down at the bottom of the search results, she caught sight of the words Alex Fitzgerald.

She blinked at the screen. A much younger Ava was pictured in the thumbnail with a four-year-old boy with a black bowl cut.

She clicked—and watched as Ava led the child onstage, holding his hand to thunderous applause. The boy beamed at the crowd and took a little bow, cracking everyone up. And then he lifted his tiny little violin, and Gwen watched as Ava played a violin duet with her son, Alex.

Gwen had leaned herself so far into the screen by the end, she almost fell inside, her hands on her cheeks, eyes wide and dry.

Xander Thorne was Ava’s son, and Nathan’s stepson. She knew Ava had a son from a previous marriage, but they never talked about him. And if his last name was Fitzgerald, had he taken Ava’s last name instead of his father’s? This seemed like a wellspring for gossip. Why wasn’t the entire orchestra talking about this?

She knew Xander and Ava spent an inappropriate amount of time arguing when he sat in the first cello chair, and she knew that he was frosty at best with Nathan. She assumed they kept him around because he was excellent.

But Ava was retiring, and the Fitzgerald chair was being passed down to Gwen, an outsider, instead of the Fitzgerald child prodigy, Alex. The Fitzgerald child who played violin at the age of twelve better than she did now.

As the autoplay switched the video to a five-year-old Alex Fitzgerald playing at the White House, Gwen hung her head in her hands. She was in over her head.

CHAPTER SIX

On the last Monday in April, Ava asked Gwen to afternoon tea at the top of Bergdorf Goodman—two firsts for Gwen. She knew that Ava was only fulfilling her promise to mentor her and answer any questions she might have, but Gwen couldn’t help feeling like Ava knew that she knew.

Gwen’s leg was bouncing under the table by the time the finger sandwiches arrived. Ava had already talked through her process for submitting the bow markings to the music arranger, given Gwen tips on building a healthy working relationship with Nathan, and was now going over interpersonal interactions within the strings.

“Like for example,” Ava said, pressing her cloth napkin to the corner of her mouth, “this year’s Christmas concert. If you remember, the cellos and basses were…less than enthusiastic about the last-minute changes.”

Gwen did remember. The guest singer for the holiday concert had gotten laryngitis, and a different vocalist with a different range had been brought in the day before.

“When Xander spoke out about ‘unnecessary’ extra rehearsals, I had to take him aside and remind him that not all string players are as adept as he is, and they needed more time with the material.”

Ava plucked a cucumber sandwich from the tray.

Gwen felt her eye twitch.

“So,” she continued, “sometimes there’s a bit of coddling you need to do.” Ava turned a mischievous smile on her. “For bratty children.”

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