“Nothing important. Don’t worry,” she says, way too casually. “I asked him about you. He told me you were doing just great. That your music was really striking a chord with people. He seems to be a very competent manager. Very invested in you. And…”

“And?”

My mom smiles warmly as she relives the conversation. “And he mentioned that you told him about my own music. The album I recorded in seventy-eight. He said he’d love to hear it. I told him if he ever found a copy to be sure to make me a copy, since they only printed five hundred of them.”

“Mom!” I say, when I notice how happy she looks. “Don’t look so pleased when you’re talking about him! He’s a … he’s an asshole.”

“He can’t be that bad,” she says. “He promised to find that record and let me know as soon as he did.”

I groan with every fiber of my being.

“Wait,” I say, holding a palm up. “I don’t understand. How did you get from that conversation that he was the one I told about…the secret.”

“Sweetie,” my mom says in a way that makes me feel thirteen again, “I might be old but some things don’t change. The sound of a man’s voice when he’s talking about a girl he’s infatuated with is one of them.”

“Mom! He’s just my manager!” But the lie comes out sounding defensive and weak, and I know I’m not convincing her.

She smiles gently. “I’m not judging.”

“Fine. But still…”

“Listen, Haley, the kind of man who would look for a rare, limited edition record for a girl’s mother is also the kind of guy who would go to the ends of the earth for that girl – young woman, I mean – and her secrets.”

“And is apparently also the kind of man who would spill those secrets to the whole world?” I say, slumping back against the chair in exhausted defeat.

“Are you sure about that?” my mom asks.

“Yes! It’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do. Probably for publicity or something.”

Mom’s expression remains skeptical. “Did he tell you that?”

“Of course not. He said he didn’t tell anyone.”

“So why do you think it was him?”

“Because…he was the only one who knew! And he’s lied to me before.”

My mom gives me the same sigh-and-critical-look combination that she gives her music students who skip their homework.

“Haley…”

“Mom…” I say, in the same voice I used when I wanted to skip school. “The whole music thing…it just sucks. Someone messed up my guitar before a gig. And way before that, Brando made a bet with some douche bag that he would make my song a hit. One minute the label won’t give us a video budget, the next they send me on tour with Lexi. They basically forced me to sign with Majestic by throwing a bunch of lawyers at us saying I’d have to repay the studio time back myself if I didn’t. This business is just full of snakes and lies and people playing fucked up games. It’s not as simple as it looks. You don’t understand.”

“Don’t I?”

I look at her soft face, barely able to conceal the hurt she feels.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

She shrugs it off and smiles. “It sounds to me like the music industry hasn’t changed one bit, honestly.”

I let out a little laugh, but the smile disappears quickly when I remember. “The point is, Brando probably did this. And he probably thought he was doing me a favor, that it would help my career.”

“Haley,” my mom says with an air of finality, “the - ‘secret’ – as you call it, was never going to stay secret for long once you got your name out there. Do you know how many people found out about me and Rex at the time? How many of his biographers I’ve had to fend off insinuating questions from? What about the strange letters I get from his insane fans that think they’ve made some connection between us? You’re right. I don’t know this Brando, but I do know people. And it’s worth giving them the benefit of the doubt every once in a while.”

I nod slowly, taking in her words, wishing I believed them. “I’d like to say thanks for the support, Mom. But the truth is that I’m more confused than ever right now.”

“So listen to your heart instead of your head,” she says simply. As if it’s that easy. “Now sit tight and let me make you some tea.”

Chapter 13

Brando

Her house is exactly how I imagined it would look. On the outskirts of a quiet hippie town near the beach, at the end of a quiet road that winds slowly up a hill, surrounded by a few quiet clusters of shady trees. It’s no wonder she enjoys making noise.

I step through the worn, wooden gate and knock on the door, shaking my arms and stretching my neck like I’m bracing for a fight. The door opens slowly, but the person who opens it is anything but confrontational.

“So you must be Brando,” says the striking woman in the doorframe.

She’s tall and slim, a flowing dress hanging from softly-curved shoulders. Her angular bone structure seems to catch and hold the light like a supermodel. Though she’s got the comfortable smile and glinting eyes of someone in their fifties, something about her makes everything else seem a little less physical.

“Ms. Cooke,” I say, quickly suppressing the guilty pang of finding Haley’s mom kinda hot.

She smiles, and it’s like the sun is shining directly at me. “Call me Wanda. Come on in,” she says, standing aside. I step through the doorway, looking around the room like a detective scanning for clues. “She’s not here,” Wanda says, noticing my tensed muscles. “She’s out in the shed.”

“The shed?”

“It’s where she likes to record and play. Me too, sometimes,” she says, as she leads me through the house toward the back door. “It’s a kind of studio. And a guest room.”

She pushes open the kitchen door to the long lawn of neatly-cut bright-green grass, colored blooms and bushes lining it all the way to the end, where a ramshackle wooden structure sits amid the greenery like some miniature English cottage that time forgot.

“Look. Wanda,” I say, turning back after she holds the door open once again for me to step past. “Thanks for telling me she was here. I know she probably told you not to.”

“You’d have found her here eventually. Better sooner rather than later.” Wanda looks down sadly. “Haley’s like a wild flame: Quick to start, and quick to calm. But if you leave her to herself, she can burn everything around her.”

I know Wanda’s right, but something about the way she says it makes me feel like I’m hearing a secret.

“I can see where she got her poetic side.”

Wanda takes my hand in hers and looks at me with mint-blue eyes. It feels like she can read my mind.

“I hope she didn’t inherit my taste in men.”

As soon as she says it, she drops my hand and steps back into the house, closing the door. The message is clear: You’re on your own, buddy. I spin around to face the shed across the lawn, which seems a thousand miles long now, and start walking.

By the time I get close to the shed door, my head’s swirling with so many thoughts, so many emotions, so many memories, that I can’t tell if the sound I’m hearing is real or imagined. It’s only when I get close enough to put a hand against the deeply-grained wood that I know it’s really her. She’s singing. Low and long, a sad song. She stops every few lines, then starts back up again, the same way she always does when she’s writing.

I listen for a while, taking deep breaths, and then brace myself once again. I glance back toward the house and see Wanda looking through the glass pane of the door. She offers me a gentle look of sympathy before turning away and heading back into the house.

I knock.

Haley calls out something that gets muffled through the wall, then gets back to playing. I knock again. This time I hear her stop, and the thud of what’s probably her guitar being put down. I take a step back from the door.