She wanted to do something astonishing with her life. The potential to be astonishing with Vagabond hovered, just out of reach. But she could blink and end up a regular here. Around her, people laughed and smiled, but it was like she’d gotten a particular form of X-ray vision she couldn’t turn off, and now all she saw was an undercurrent of regret beneath it all. Her limbs tightened up. She drained her beer. Then she tugged on Quinton’s hand and asked if they could go.

Quinton didn’t understand when she tried to describe it to him on their walk back to the B and B. “I thought it was fun,” he said.

“No, it wasn’t bad. I’m not saying that. They were good musicians, and that’s what made it even sadder,” she said, stumbling over her imperfect words.

“Maybe this is what they want for themselves,” he said, so she let it be.

Surely there was a way for her to be there for Quinton, if he needed her, and to get back to Vagabond as soon as possible. And when she did get back to Vagabond, she needed to stand up for herself more. She needed to show up to practice with song lyrics or even full songs rather than just hoping that Marcus would ask for her help. She wanted to be more than just the token female eye candy.

And then on Sunday morning, when Quinton was in the shower, Claire stretched out in their two-hundred-dollar-a-night room with its rose-patterned wallpaper, pulled up a video from the Vagabond show on Facebook, and realized how much she’d fucked herself over. Marlena strutted around the stage, gorgeous, her voice a weird, thrilling yowl. Marlena was curvy where Claire was flat, with dark, striking features while Claire looked like a spare member of the Weasley family. Marlena and Marcus sang into the same microphone for “Idaho Eyes”—how could they have debuted “Idaho Eyes” without her?—their lips almost touching, their bodies moving in perfect rhythm, and the sexual chemistry was so strong, it even turned Claire on a little before she closed out of the video in disgust.

Marcus and the others moved fast, sitting her down for the talk just a few days later. She’d been heartbroken and wildly angry, and spent a lot of time reading articles about Pete Best, the first drummer for the Beatles, who the others kicked out when they were right on the cusp of success. Pete Best, at least, had had the comfort of rumors that the other guys had been jealous, that he’d been the most good-looking one, attracting the most ardent fan attention, and so Paul and John and George had traded him in for goofy-looking Ringo, who was safer. Claire knew that the Vagabond guys had traded up in every way.

All those times she’d spitefully mailed her parents clippings of Vagabond reviews or interviews, wanting to show them that they had been wrong for trying to hold her back, came swimming into her mind, filling her with a hot, sinking shame. Her entire grandiose view of herself as a special talent had come tumbling down, a pyramid crumbling into dust. She’d paraded from Ohio to New York like an emperor but—surprise!—she hadn’t been wearing any clothes. The story didn’t talk about the emperor afterward, did it? How he felt when everyone realized that he’d been duped, that his expensive new suit was no suit at all? She wanted to know what had gone through the emperor’s head, how he’d dealt with it. Did he sleep with any lady who would still have him? Did he drink himself to sleep each night? The story didn’t respect him enough to say.

But the really bad feelings had kicked in when the “Idaho Eyes” music video went viral, and suddenly, Vagabond was everywhere, from the radio to the home page of Pitchfork to Saturday Night Live. Claire tried to hate-watch their SNL performance, but it just made her feel horrible because Marlena was better than she would have been, and if it were any other band, she would’ve been a fan.

Quinton didn’t even have cancer. It had been fucking bedbugs all along causing the rash—the same bedbugs Claire woke up to find in her own apartment a couple of weeks after Vagabond kicked her out. Quinton had helped her stuff all her shoes and books into bags and sat with her while she did all her laundry on the hottest setting, and she knew that she would never be able to stop blaming him, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. So in short order, she had gone from having a career she loved, a boyfriend she liked, and a certain sense of self-respect to having jack shit.

* * *

—

Excellent, Claire thought, as her eyes welled up. She was breaking down in front of Amara for the second time that day. She hadn’t meant to tell her everything like that. Not even Thea knew about the Marcus kiss. “Please, don’t spread this around to the other moms,” Claire said. “It’s been nice being around people who don’t just see me as the girl who wasn’t good enough to stay in the band, you know?”

“Of course I won’t,” Amara said, an unfamiliar look of sympathy on her face. She shook her head. “That’s rubbish. The way they treated you was rubbish. But if it makes you feel any better, they’re nothing special anyway. The only really interesting part of that song is the bridge.”

Claire let out something halfway between a laugh and a sob. “I wrote the bridge,” she said. She’d never asked for an official songwriting credit—she’d done only that one part, and only because Marcus had come into rehearsal completely stumped, soliciting ideas, and there’d been a free-form brainstorming session in which everyone had tried things, and hers ended up being the lines that worked best. And then they were all celebrating the completion of the song, and she hadn’t wanted to be a bitch and ruin the moment by demanding credit.

“So what are you going to do?” Amara asked.

“Well, obviously, the dream is to show them that I’m doing just fine. I’ve been on the lookout for bands that need singers, but I keep freaking out at the prospect of actually auditioning for them.” She rolled her eyes. “Maybe I should just find a rich guy who’s into artistic types and have his babies.”

“I’m sorry,” Amara said, sitting down next to her on the couch. “You wrote the only good part of the number one song in the country, and you’re going to give up? Don’t be an idiot. Why are you trying to just be the girl in someone else’s band?” She paused and gave Claire that appraising look she was so good at, the one that left no room for secrets. “Play me something. Not a kids’ song. Not a cover. Something of yours.”

“Oh,” Claire said, shifting uncomfortably. “I think I’ve embarrassed myself in front of you enough for one day.”

“What, you need me to share my hidden shames?” Amara asked. “How about this: I’m freaking out that my baby still isn’t standing, my husband and I haven’t had sex in two months, and—” She stopped short.

“And?” Claire asked, an image coming unbidden into her mind—Amara with her hand in Whitney’s desk drawer, desperation all over her face.

But Amara just shrugged. “And I tried to go back to work and fucked it all up.”