Page 24 of Not Another Love Song

Gwen choked on her sip of tea. Hot liquid sputtered from her lips. “I’m sorry,” she coughed.

Ava called for water with a flick of her finger, and Gwen wiped her mouth with her sleeve.

“Wrong pipe?”

Gwen stared at her through watering eyes. “Actually,” she said, “I know. About…Alex.”

Ava’s brows lifted. She sat back in her chair with a polite smile. “Ah. My bratty child, yes.” She paused for the waiter to fill her glass before continuing. “I’m surprised someone had the gall to gossip.”

“It wasn’t gossip, actually. How I found out was completely random. I won’t tell anyone. I didn’t know it was a big secret.”

Ava hummed and looked out the window. “Believe me, I would have no problem telling the world. It’s him who has the problem.”

“He wants it hidden?”

“He doesn’t want to be known as ‘Ava Fitzgerald’s son,’” she said with a faraway look. “He made that perfectly clear.”

A sudden thought rattled through her—how lovely it would be to be Ava Fitzgerald’s child. Images flashed behind her eyes of violin lessons and recitals and symphony records playing on lazy Sundays…all things she would never have with her own mother.

She shook off the dream and asked cautiously, “He studied violin first, didn’t he?”

Ava nodded. “He was excellent. More precise than I ever was and more determined than any child I’d seen. He’d have these tantrums if he missed a note or played under pitch, starting over from the top until it was perfect.”

Gwen remembered the Bach Cello Suites, the morning after the wedding—the way he’d started over and over.

“Mabel trained him, actually.”

Her fingers paused mid-reach for the sugar. “Mabel? My Mabel?”

“Mm-hmm. My father had trained me, and I knew what kind of strain that put on our relationship, so I wanted him to have a tutor who couldn’t ground him.” Ava smiled.

Gwen’s mind was running a mile a minute. Mabel had never mentioned that she’d taught violin to Ava’s son. “For how long?”

“Gosh, almost twelve years, I guess. Mabel started with him at three. She never treated him like a child, always expecting just as much from him as she did a twelve-year-old student. He really liked that, especially as he got older.”

Desperately running numbers in her head, Gwen tried to figure out if Xander had ever been at Mabel’s shop when Gwen was just learning.

“But around middle school, I started to pull him back a bit,” Ava continued. “I had grown up in the spotlight too. My father and my uncle were both well known, and I was always on display because of it. I didn’t want all of that attention on Alex before he could decide on it for himself.” Ava turned a wry smile on her. “But you try telling a kid that he has to go back to seventh grade after touring with Joshua Bell.”

Gwen’s stomach flipped. She couldn’t even imagine.

“He became difficult after that. Moody,” Ava continued, staring at a point over Gwen’s shoulder, and Gwen had the feeling that this was something bottled tight—something Ava didn’t speak much about. “I sent him to live with his dad in Jersey every summer, just to get out of the city, away from the pressure of it all. He was still set on violin before college applications, so I introduced him to the deans of a few programs. He got into Juilliard, went for a year, and then dropped out.”

Gwen jerked, her teacup clicking against the saucer. “He dropped out?”

Ava’s lips pursed, and she nodded. “I didn’t hear from him again. I was on the verge of hiring a detective like in some bad television plot, when he popped up as ‘Xander Thorne,’ the cellist.” She rubbed her wrist, as if all the pain lived there. “One of his Juilliard teachers had talked him into trying rock music, making a name for himself in a different way. He became Alex’s agent, and they created his music group.”

She took a sip from her teacup, and then said, “Alex called me shortly after he resurfaced. He told me he didn’t want the Fitzgerald name anymore.” Glancing at Gwen, she clarified, “We’d raised him with my last name once he started playing violin. His dad agreed it was smartest for his career.” She cleared her throat. “But he gave it up. And he made it clear that I wasn’t to publicly refer to him as my son. ‘Alex Fitzgerald’ went to Juilliard and was never heard from again.”

It was quiet except for the tinkle of porcelain cups against saucers. Gwen tried to imagine what it was that Xander found so offensive about his mother, their legacy, the violin…

Gwen didn’t know what it was like to be part of a legacy. She had no father to speak of, and only generation after generation of cancer on her mother’s side. When she was going through her mother’s belongings at ten years old, she’d realized that she wanted her life to be more than just “stuff” when she died. She wanted to be remembered for something.

“I’m sorry,” Ava said. “I didn’t mean to lay all this on you.” She straightened her napkin on her lap and brushed her lashes.

“No, not at all. Can I ask something, though?” Gwen’s leg started bouncing again. Ava nodded. “If he wanted to distance himself from you so much, why did he start at the Pops?”

“He called me a little over a year ago. Said he wanted first chair. He was very close to my uncle, who had been first chair since the founding of the orchestra. Alex used to idolize Uncle Walt, and Walt had told him that one day he would be first chair, just like him. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was something Alex had pinned a dream on.”

---