I open my eyes and stare across the room at Gwen as she mirrors me, drumming her own fingers on top of her desk. She still isn't one hundred percent healed from her years in an abusive marriage, and I fear she might never be, but at least the spark is back in her eyes. I would do anything to make sure it remained there.

“Fine. Whatever they offered for this stupid ass job, call them back and add twenty percent. If they agree, I’ll do it.”

I rock back in my chair, confident in the fact that they'll turn down my obscenely high request. I mentally calculate how much money I have left in my savings and how long it will last while Gwen lets out a squeal of delight, turns around in her chair, and pulls out her cell phone to make the call.

Chapter 2

With my eyes closed, I reverently wrap my left hand around the neck of the guitar, letting the weight of the instrument rest gently on top of my jean-clad thighs. I drape my right arm over the wide, flat side of the hollow piece of wood and rest my palm against the strings. With my head tilted to the side, I listen quietly, half expecting to hear a pulse or some other sign of life—something to break me out of this funk I’m in.

My name, Layla Page Carlysle, practically screams amazing musician thanks to my father naming me after his favorite Eric Clapton song and his most beloved guitarist, Jimmy Page, twenty-four years ago. Lately, I’ve spent most of my alone time pulling this guitar out of its hiding spot from the back of my walk-in closet, buried underneath clothes and boxes of shoes, and cradling it to my body in the hopes that the nineteen-sixty Gibson Hummingbird will bring me back to life, breathe something back into me so I don’t feel so empty. I long for the sixteen inch wide, flat top, mahogany acoustic guitar to play something with meaning, something with substance. Something to help me belt out the chords of a song I wrote that will shake my fans to their cores and call to their souls.

But just like every other time I have a few minutes to myself without the shrill, ear-piercing scream of adoring fans, the incessant questions thrown at me from curious journalists, or two dozen members of my management team, production team, wardrobe consultants, and every other well-meaning member of the entourage that's paid to hover over me, the guitar won’t do anything other than sit in my lap waiting for me to wake it up.

I can’t do it. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get my fingers to strum the Hummingbird. I can’t produce even one note and haven’t been able to since my father, Jack, walked out the door. The guitar had been a gift from him on my tenth birthday. That was the year I discovered the one thing in the world that made me happy, aside from him.

“Where’s my little hummingbird?!”

My dad’s booming, happy voice carried through the house even though I was down in the basement in his home recording studio.

Despite the fact he knew exactly where I was, he'd still shout for me when he came home from work and walked through the door. Every day since my birthday, I'd go straight to the studio and play the guitar he gave me after school. I loved my guitar and I loved my dad. It was his guitar, given to him by his dad when he was a kid, and now he had given it to me.

He had showed me where to place my fingers on the frets and how to strum a basic chord progression.

“Okay, the first chord you’re going to learn is the C major chord open. Put your ring finger on the fifth string, third fret,” my dad explained as he took my hand and placed it in position on the neck of the guitar. “Then put your middle finger on the fourth string, second fret,” he continued, once again finagling my fingers to the right spot. “Lastly, put your pointer finger on the second string, first fret.”

He moved his hands away from mine as soon as they were exactly where he wanted them, stood back, and smiled down at me.

“Now, strum down from the fifth string twice, slowly.”

I could never forget the look on his face when I strummed the guitar those first few times. Within a half hour, I could play every note without having to look down and make sure my fingers were in the right spots. His face lit up with the biggest smile I had ever seen, and he immediately started teaching me how to read music and play songs.

We'd spend hours down there together every single day, and I couldn’t think of anything else I would rather do than spend time with him. Plus, it made Mom mad and that was okay with me. Mom didn’t like anything that made me happy, but Dad said I should just ignore her.

“Layla Page! You are supposed to be working on your speech for my charity event at the children’s hospital!” my mom yelled angrily down to me. Her order was drowned out by the sound of my dad’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

“Oh, leave her be, Eve. That event is weeks away, and all she has to do is talk about her two-day stay with them last year when we thought she had pneumonia,” my dad yelled up the stairs to her as he walked off the bottom step and gave me a wink. I immediately stopped worrying about how irritated she would be when we finally surfaced from the studio in a few hours now that my dad was there. I had a surprise for him, and I was too excited to care about my mom yelling at him, complaining he spends all his free time with me and never pays attention to her.

“There’s my beautiful girl! How was school today?” Dad asked as he rushed over to my side and placed a kiss on top of my head.

“It was boring. But I got an A on my spelling test.”

My dad laughed and pulled up a chair next to me, resting his elbows on his knees.

“Never tell anyone I told you this, hummingbird, but school never stops being boring,” he said with a smile. “Now, show me what you’ve been practicing.”

I tried to hide my excitement, but it showed all over my face with a smile that stretched from ear-to-ear and my eyes dancing with anticipation. I could barely sit still.

“Well, I got tired of playing Leaving on a Jet Plane. I know you said it’s good for beginners because it only uses three chords, but that song sucks and it’s depressing,” I told him honestly as I positioned my fingers on the right frets and concentrated on what I was about to do.

“Well, alright then, show me what you learned!” my dad told me with another laugh.

I immediately closed my eyes and began strumming the first couple of notes to the song I’d secretly been teaching myself every day after school. One of my dad’s favorites. I always forgot where I was when I played. I forgot who was in the room with me and couldn’t hear people talking or anyone making noise. I forgot about everything but the music and how it made me feel—like I was free.

I finished the song a few minutes later and opened my eyes to find my dad staring at me with his mouth open and tears in his own eyes.

“You just played Wonderful Tonight flawlessly,” he whispered.

“I know,” I told him nonchalantly with a shrug of my shoulders as I looked back down at the guitar and fiddled with the strings.

“That was amazing, honey. I don’t even know grown men who have been in the industry all their life that could pick up a guitar for the first time and play something like that after only a few weeks,” he told me in awe.

“That’s probably because their guitars don’t take them away. Mine can take me anywhere I want to go if I just close my eyes.”

He continued to stare at me while I started to play the song again for him. I kept right on playing when he spoke next. I was already lost in my own world of music, but I could still hear him. I could always hear my daddy when he spoke.

“Don’t you ever forget that, hummingbird. You can go anywhere you want to go, be anything you want to be. Play because you love it and for no other reason. The day you stop loving it is the day it becomes a job. Making music should never be a job.”

I stopped loving it the day he walked out on my mother and me. I could understand why he would want to leave her. That part had never been a mystery to me. Even as a teenager, I knew he felt trapped. I could see the unhappiness etched on his face. He was tired of the arguments, tired of the guilt, and tired of not being happy.

“You look sad, Daddy.”

“Don’t worry about me, hummingbird. I’ll be okay. I have you and that’s all I’ll ever need to be happy.”

I didn’t blame him, really. I was the stupid, naïve one who thought that I could be enough for him.

My mother never wanted children and she made that perfectly clear to me on a daily basis.

“You are more trouble than you’re worth. I always knew having a child would ruin everything.”

She never wanted to ruin her body or have another human being share my father’s time and attention. I lost track of how many times she and my father fought over me. I was an accident, something that never should have been. But he begged and pleaded with her not to terminate the pregnancy. He promised her he'd do anything she asked if she only did this one important thing for him. The first time I heard that argument I was six years old.

“I knew promising to go through with having that child was a bad idea. All of your stupid promises you made me when I was pregnant about how you’d do anything for me if I kept it were all lies. All you care about is HER!”

At least back then he wanted me. He really wanted me.

The majority of my early life, my mother ignored me unless she felt like she wasn’t getting enough attention. But after I learned how to play the guitar, and my father taught me how to harmonize and sing as well, she could no longer pretend like I didn’t exist. Especially when strangers stopped her in the grocery store to tell her how beautiful my voice was the previous night during a school concert. Teachers, faculty members, and the women she spent every afternoon at the club with pulled her aside to tell her how amazing my natural talent was and how they’d never seen anyone so young play a guitar with such passion. My mother knew at that moment she’d finally found a way for me to pay her back for the misery she endured as my mother. I could never forget the fight they had the evening he died. It was long and loud and things were said that could never be unheard.

“I HATE her! Do you hear me, Jack? I can’t even stand to be in the same room with that ungrateful brat! And all you do is coddle her. She can fiddle around on an instrument and carry a tune. Why the hell shouldn’t she finally pay us back for all these years of putting up with her?”

My mother wanted to capitalize on my talents. My father just wanted me to be a kid for as long as possible. He knew I had more talent than anyone he’d ever seen, but he also knew what the pressure to be something more could do to that talent. It would turn it into something you worked your fingers to the bone for, something you sweat blood and tears for, instead of something you loved. In his career, as the owner of Hummingbird Records, he saw that happen to more than one person over the years. He didn’t want that for me, his little girl, not now, not ever. He wanted the choice to be mine when I was old enough to make it, not when I was just learning how to become a woman.

As I sat in my room that night, with the journal I wrote songs in resting on my lap, I heard the words I had always wished my father would say to her when she was going off on one of her tirades.

“I can’t do this anymore, Eve. I want out. I want a divorce.”

My heart had sped up and I held my breath when he said those words. I wanted to jump up and down on my bed and scream with excitement. He was leaving her and he’d take me with him. No more fighting, no more unhappiness, no more guilt.

When he walked out the door that night to supposedly clear his head, he had no way of knowing that all of his hopes and dreams for me would be erased within the hour. He would never know that even before his SUV wrapped itself around a tree, events were put in motion and choices were made to guarantee his opinions never saw the light of day. Someone else’s dreams and someone else’s wishes were piled so high on top of my teenage shoulders that each and every day, I grew weary from all of the pressure to be what someone else wanted. Even though I never heard him say it during their fight, my mother told me he wasn’t planning on just leaving her. He hated every aspect of his life, and as much as it pained him, he needed to leave me as well.

“Your father said he needed a clean break and a new life. Music just didn’t make him happy anymore, and I guess neither did we. I told you, he explained it all in the note he left.”

My mother’s weak attempts at comforting me when other people were in the room fell short. She didn’t lie about the note. She’d showed it to me plenty of times to prove I wasn’t as special as I assumed whenever I would question her about my father’s motives.

The day my father walked out the door and never came home, coincidentally, became the day that music became a job for me—the one thing he never wanted. But he didn’t want me, so why did I care anymore? I’d read the note; I knew how he really felt. I took up too much of his time, and he felt weighted down, like he had nothing left for himself. Everything he had to give went to me, and he was tired of it. He wanted to live for himself for once. The first time I read the note, I signed on the dotted line my mother put in front of me without even caring what I was doing. I was fifteen years old and just lost my best friend—the one person who had always protected me and stood his ground for me and who suddenly decided I was too much to handle. I had nothing on my side at that point except for my music, but after a while, even that left me.

I wasn’t free anymore. On days like today, I feel like I never will be.

At the sound of footsteps coming up the porch of my log cabin, my eyes fly open and the past disappears from my thoughts. I nestle the guitar back into its red velvet cushion in the case laying open by my feet and quickly snap the lid shut. With the heels of my well-worn, cowboy boots, I slide the guitar case under the couch and out of site before getting up to greet my guest.