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“But—”

“You’re her competition,” Seren says, “and she’s not nearly as good as you, so she has kept you under a proverbial rock.”

“But she said if she ever heard about?—”

“About a job?” Seren arches a brow. “And inyears, she’s never once heard about a single job you’d be a good fit for? She’s never once recommended you?”

I feel like an idiot. My own mother thinks I’m a dupe.

“You’ve always been afraid to try things,” Seren says. “I probably should have pushed you more—then you’d know that failure isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

“What’s worse?” I ask.

“Never trying.” Seren walks past me into the family room and sits down. “You know I lost my husband many years ago in an accident.”

I follow her over. She never talks about this.

“One thing I almost never tell anyone is that I was pregnant when the bus crashed.” She meets my eye, and I can see the wreckage. “I lost that child, and I lost my uterus, which ruptured in the accident.”

“I’m sorry.”

Another tear rolls down her cheek and she swipes it away. “For a long time, I thought I’d never be a mother. Even after I’d managed to resurface from the grief of losing my parents, my husband, my grandmother, and my siblings, that thought would throw me back under. I didn’t know how to breathe after that. I’d lost my little girl, and I’d never have another. Not ever. I couldn’t.”

Now I’m crying too. Again. And there’s no rain to blame it on.

“But Beebee.” She’s smiling through her tears. “I didn’t know yet.” She’s shaking her head. But when she opens her arms, I fall into them. Against my hair, she says, “I didn’t know that I didn’t need that uterus. My children were already out there, waiting for me to find them.”

She holds me for a moment.

And then she says, “But first, I had to take a really big risk.”

I sit back, watching her.

“I had to love again—and it felt absolutely terrifying. Dave’s such an easy person to love, but it felt. . .it felt impossible. Until it wasn’t.” She shrugs. “Loving himopened the doors for me to meet and love Emerson, you, Jake.” She smiles. “All of you came into my life because I took a risk. A really big risk. A scary risk, each time.”

After Seren dries her tears, she turns on one of our favorite movies.Sabrina—where a girl is hung up on the younger playboy brother, but she eventually falls for the crusty old businessman. By the time it ends, I feel glued back together reasonably well.

On the way home, I keep flipping radio stations. None of the songs sound quite right, so I finally shut the radio off. Driving home in silence might sound depressing, but it’s not. It’s just what I need. And when I get home, I breathe a sigh of relief that Jake’s not home.

Because there’s a song that’s trying to claw its way out of my head, so I sit down in front of the piano and start banging it out.

11

BEA

Songs have always taken shape in my head.

I used to sit, huddled, while my mom and Joe did whatever noisy and disturbing things they did. She dated a lot of guys, and I couldn’t ever keep up with their names, so they all became Joe. It bugged Mom at first, but eventually she stopped caring about that, too. Whenever Joe and Mom did things that made me feel sad, I would plug my ears and hum.

At first, my sounds were messy and unformed, like when a little kid sits at a piano and insists they’re making music.

But eventually, the songs improved. When I moved in with Seren and Dave, I would sing them sometimes, when I thought no one was looking. Seren caught me once, and they put me in piano lessons straightaway. That’s when the songs in my head really started to take shape. With inspiration from the greats, I started understanding pitch, key signatures, octave runs, and so much more.

A new world opened to me, a world I’d always longed to navigate.

But my music rarely came with words.

Words were tricky. Emotional. Dangerous.

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