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  "Shit, Vy, don't even joke about that," Sebastian said, chocking on his toast. "I would not want to see a confrontation between dad and TC. No one can come out well from that. Especially not you."

  "Well, next week is going to be a bundle of fun," Vy said sipping at her coffee. It was so delicious. Maybe she could move back home, have coffee with her father in the morning and then both of them could go into the City.

  "So how was working with Andrew?" Alice asked.

  Vy took a long time swallowing the coffee. Somehow thinking of her father and TC locked in a contractual dispute was less disturbing than thinking about King.

  "He's a really nice guy."

  "We know that. How did it feel to share the stage? Like an equal."

  She shrugged. "I was too pissed off to enjoy it. I guess I cared more than I thought, and it felt like Carter abandoned me."

  "You never sang like that before," Alice said. "I cried when I listened to it."

  "If you sang like that, you would have won Sing by a landslide," Sebastian said.

  She tried to look insulted, but her brother's voice was too strangled with emotion. These people knew her better than anyone else. If it moved them so deeply, she dreaded listening to the song even worse. She remembered looking at Andrew on stage. She remembered how she hid nothing from him.

  "Carter hadn't tortured me enough by the final," she said.

  Andrew

  He sat in his dressing room, his first moments of solitude in days. Diane was at the hotel, getting a full night's sleep before their trip and he already missed her. After all the months apart, he didn't want to waste the precious time she was in his care, but he had a duty to the audience. He needed a little time to prepare for the long set that would close the Summer Festival.

  He was jerked out of his concentration by the vibration of his phone. Only three numbers were excepted from the pre-show silence settings on his phone.

  Christine. It had to be serious if she called.

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "Is this a bad moment?"

  Her voice was tinged with an emotion he couldn't identify. It didn't sound like panic, but it did sound like fear.

  "I'm about to get on stage. Are you ok?"

  "I'm sorry," she said immediately. "I didn't realize. We can talk another time."

  "No, it's fine. I have a few minutes. Tell me."

  "It's nothing," she said, and paused.

  The small sigh told him it wasn't nothing. Christine didn't forget his schedule for nothings.

  "It's selfish," she said. "How is Diane?"

  "She's fine. Looking forward to Legoland tomorrow. Are you sure you're ok?"

  "Yes. No. I needed to hear you. Nothing's wrong but... nothing feels right either."

  "I know how you feel," he said. "When the two of you left, everything seemed upside down."

  "It must have been hard on you. You're still living in our apartment?"

  "Yes. Sometimes I forget, when I'm in the music room in the morning. I get out and I expect to hear you."

  "Diane misses you all the time, you know? You should come to the States more often."

  They had discussed a visitation schedule, and he had agreed not to visit, to help Diane accommodate with her new life.

  "Are you sure? You said-"

  "Maybe I was wrong," Christine said. "I thought it would be easier for her to accept the divorce if you weren't around. But it's hard. It's hard for everyone it seems."

  "She's been with me for a week and she missed you since day one."

  Christine didn't say anything. He knew her well enough to know that she tried to hide that she was sighing. Or maybe even crying.

  How many nights he had spent on the road so that he wouldn't have to go back to the empty place which he had once called home?

  "She'd love it if you came to Legloand," he said.

  "I'd love it, too. Do you want me to come?" Christine asked, hesitantly.

  No.

  "I want her to be happy," he said. "Even if it's for a few days."

  "You are a good man, Andrew. I wish things-"

  A knock on the door and a voice shouting "One minute."

  "Sorry, Christine. I've got to go. Think about it. I'll call you once it's over."

  They were nearing the end of their set, when he realized that he had to say goodbye to Vy.

  "Guys, I want to sing Ghost of you."

  His band mates looked at him strangely. David spoke, in the weary tone of a man who had suffered through many failed rehearsals of that song.

  "You said we don't have it right yet," David said.

  "I want to see how they like it," he lied. "We'll record a good version in the studio."

  For months, Vy haunted him, reached into his cold and calm life from the cover of a magazine, smiled at him from a talk show on TV, or slashed his heart with a song on the radio. He'd been hiding in his dark nook at Dusk and watched her from afar. Being close to her again fucked him up completely. The way she bared her soul to the audience humbled him.

  He took his guitar, and sang about the woman he loved and lost. He tried to exorcise her ghost by spelling out how much it hurt to go on through life without her.

  Carter was waiting for him in the dressing room when the set finished.

  "That wasn't bad," Carter said.

  He sat in the only other chair in the room and rubbed his eyes. Was he getting too old for this?

  "What do you want? I want to go to the hotel to be with my kid."

  "I thought she'd be here," Carter said. "You used to bring her backstage all the time."

  "With Christine."

  Carter looked away. "Sorry to hear about you two."

  He pursed his lips, too tired to wonder if he meant it. It still hurt to accept his marriage was well and truly over. Taking off the wedding band had been one of the hardest things in his life.

  "These things happen," he said to fill in the silence.

  "Never expected to happen to you and her. For all my... you know… I thought the two of you were made for each other."

  "Never expected you to have a child. We all change, Tim."

  Carter let out a bitter chuckle. "I all but foresaw this. Remember Dirty Thursday?"

  The Waves' best-known hit and most quotable. How could he forget it? A powerful vignette of a young man losing the love of his life and settling down later in love with someone else.

  "Life imitating art," he said.

  "More like a self-fulfilling prophecy."

  Carter looked down at his closed fist. He took a deep breath, then opened his palm revealing a small USB drive.

  "I've been holding on to this for months. I had no idea what to do with it, but after the past couple of days... You should listen to it."

  "What's on this one?" he said, not taking the flash drive.

  "A song," Carter said, placed the drive on the table and walked to the door as if his job was done.

  "What do you want me to do with it?"

  Carter stopped with his hand on the door handle. "Listen to it. Alone. I'll be at Piranha," he said, and left the room.

  He thought he got used to Carter's weirdness, but the man still managed to surprise him. He checked the time, Long past midnight. His daughter would be asleep. He should go to bed, too, or Legoland could be hard to handle. Curiosity won over reasonableness. He went to the car, plugged the drive in its audio system and closed his eyes.

  Carter's voice. "Make him want you."

  Then Vy's voice. "Slow like honey". The version he had re-played so many times in his head. The song he had steeled himself to hear in the final, but never came. His secret treasure.

  He lost himself in the song again. Unlike the first time he had heard it, he had the taste of Vy's kisses to torture him while she sang. The pain in her voice when they sang together the night before. The feel of her body in his arms. The look in her eyes when she sang to him.

  He replayed the song several times. Each time she felt cl
oser. Each time he got more desperate to touch her. He pulled the flash drive out in mid-song and got out of the car. He had to talk to Carter.

  At Piranha, he found Carter alone in a corner, fiddling with his phone. He sat next to him, and placed the USB drive on the table. Carter took it and started twirling it between his long pale fingers.

  "Well?" Carter asked.

  He tried to gather his thoughts. It hadn't been the first time he heard that song, but after so many months, he had talked himself into believing that he had imagined it. He was very good at changing reality when it came to Vy. He had never held her in his arms. Never kissed her. Never loved her.

  "Why didn't you let her sing this in the final?" he asked.

  Carter quirked an eyebrow, but he seemed to accept he wasn't ready to talk about it yet. He took another swig of scotch before answering.

  "A few reasons. All of them good. Except the real one."

  "Such as?"

  "It didn't play to her strengths. Didn't showcase her voice. Temperamentally the song wasn't suited to her. I thought Lauren was going to go for a highly dramatic song, and that she was going to use the sympathy factor in her favor. Which she did. Brilliantly. Vy couldn't compete on terms of projecting emotion."

  "She does in this song," he said.

  "This song..." Carter said. "I worked with her for almost a year. In all this time she only reached that level of emotion twice. On that recording... and yesterday."

  He wished to contradict him, but couldn't. Carter had worked with her in the studio, but he had listened to her at Dusk. Vy had learned to seduce a crowd, but she had never sung like that.

  "Aren't you going to ask me about the real reason she didn't sing this in the final? Why I made the wrong choice and lost Sing this year?"

  He didn't want to know. He couldn't handle any more revelations. He didn't want to hear Carter confess anything.

  "I was jealous," Carter said. "All the women I ever loved... All of them chose you. All two of them."

  He focused on the amber liquid sloshing in his glass. He didn't want to listen to Carter's pain. He had enough of his own.

  "She was never mine, Tim. Maybe she had the illusion that she preferred me, but she chose you."

  "Not with her heart." Carter shook his head and let out another bitter laugh. "You have no idea how much I punished her for that. She was right to say that I took her apart and rebuilt her. The kicker is... that she's still yours."

  "She's just a kid. I couldn't... I can't..."

  Carter turned to look at him disbelieving.

  "You can't lie to me. Not after tonight, anyway. That song... You haven't sung like that in fifteen years. You're hurting."

  "You're drunk."

  "Possibly," Carter conceded. "But I was stone sober when I saw it for the first time."

  Andrew braced himself for the truth.

  "You're in love with Vy," Carter said.

  "Are you in love with her?" he asked, unwilling to admit it.

  Carter shook his head. "I lied. I only loved one woman my whole life, and you took her away. Vy fascinates me. Maybe that's a little like love. Or a lot. I don't know. Maybe I just tried to take away what you wanted."

  "I can't want her," he said, looking at his hand. He still saw the wedding band although it hadn't been there for months.

  "How's that song of yours? The soul doesn't feel only what it should?"

  He'd written that song a long time ago. When he had felt things he should have felt. And his soul had nearly withered when he had pulled the bad feelings out from the roots. Their deep, gnarled, dark roots.

  "I have to go," he said. "I have only a few days left with my daughter."

  "Don't wait too long," Carter warned. "She's fighting harder than you against what she feels. The duet scared the hell out of her."

  "It scared the hell out of me, too," he admitted, but Carter didn't seem impressed.

  "Do whatever you want. I am ill-suited to play Cupid. I like having my eyes wide open."

  Chapter 7

  Andrew

  HE CAME BACK TO ORSINO WITH A ROCK IN CHEST. The love for his family turned his heart to stone for anything other than the duty he chose to follow.

  The new season of Sing was going to start on Monday. He needed time to fly to America to be with his family. He would fight tooth and nail to strengthen the most important relationships in his life.

  David had accepted to take on more of the practices than the first year. Now he needed someone to help him prevent the underhanded tactics IBC employed to make sure there was enough drama in the season. His conversation with David had turned to who the other person on their team could be.

  Vanilla Velvet had one asset that most people hardly noticed. Sebastian had made fun of Alice's involvement in the activities of the Salona Drama Club. He knew from Vy that the Cesaras and Alice had watched every season of Sing.

  They agreed that Alice could do something for the contestants that neither of them could. She could guide them to display the right emotions and share the best fragments of their past in front of the cameras.

  Alice was not an excellent guitarist. She was not a dramatic presence on stage. But she had a knack when it came to influencing people.

  The trouble was that she might not want an extra responsibility. Alice had her life in Salona, and she had her duties for Maison Pellerin. He could already feel her want to step away from the band since her main reason for being there was gone. Alice was missing Vy even more than her own brother did.

  He waited for her at his desk, putting the last touches on a song he wrote for Vanilla Velvet the night before.

  "Come in," he said, putting down the pen when Alice showed up.

  She took a few hesitant steps, but hovered uncertain in front of his desk.

  "Sit down," he invited her. "Alice, I need a favor."

  "Sure," she said softly. "What is it?"

  She seemed to sit on a pincushion. He wondered if the girl's affection for her team and transferred even partially onto him. He would find out.

  "You worked with the drama club at Salona right?"

  Her eyebrows shot up. She nodded.

  "Wardrobe mostly."

  "Sebastian said you did a lot more."

  She tensed a bit more, but her voice was calm when she spoke.

  "He tends to exaggerate. I helped a little with diction, learning their lines. Small stuff like that."

  He looked at her more attentively and she shrunk under the scrutiny. Why was she so nervous? He went straight to the point.

  "I need someone to talk to my contestants on Sing," he said. "To teach them how to appear sympathetic on camera. You know that in the end, the public votes overwhelmingly on emotion and backstory, not on music."

  Her jaw dropped, but she recovered. It would not be polite to show him just how much his words shocked her, and Alice was nothing if not polite.

  "David and I will take care of their musical training," he went on. "But you know the segments when they show the contestants talk about themselves, their past, their hopes..."

  "The challenges they had to face in their lives," she said.

  He smiled, grateful for her polite spin on what was commonly referred to as 'sob stories'. They both knew that her best friend had lost the contest the previous year for that very reason. Those little segments in which Vy had been portrayed as a rich girl who had every advantage in life had cost her the prize. And Alice didn't know the details about Celebrity Jungle.

  The public never got to see the real Vy. They never saw the girl who stood up to bullies, the girl who had worked with Bryce on his technique even while they were in direct competition. The audience saw her as relentless in her pursuit of technical perfection.

  He hoped that Alice wouldn't bring up Vy, but it was in vain. She couldn't help poking him after their duet on the stage of the Summer Festival that weekend.

  "Sometimes talented people come off as arrogant or annoying," Alice said. "Like Vy."
<
br />   His schooled his features into the familiar ice mask as he did whenever someone mentioned Vy, but he clearly wasn't fooling Alice. He took a controlled breath and spoke again. She probably picked up on the shade of frustration in his voice.

  "I don't want my team to lie, but I want them to present themselves in the best light. While they're in the House, the contestants are focused on improving their technique. They have no control over how the audience labels them because of the presentation packages. Not even the best voice in the world can overpower emotional labels."

  She nodded thoughtfully. "Why me? You must know people who do this better than me. Drama teachers, actors."

  "You're between these worlds. You're also a musician. You and the Cesaras watched Sing! since season one. You know how the public votes, what sways them to root for a contestant."

  She didn't seem convinced.

  "This is quite the vote of confidence. May I be honest?"

  "Always," he said, preparing for a direct question about Vy.

  "It's not a tactic I expected from you."

  He relaxed. He couldn't deal with an honest discussion about Vy at that moment.

  "Why not?" he said. "The network made it part of the game without bothering to include it in the rules."

  "So... you want me to do what exactly?"

  "I want to hire you as one of my assistants. I'm allowed to bring two vocal and/or stage coaches. Officially, you'll be like the others."

  "And unofficially?"

  "I can't tell my team to listen to you, but I'm confident you'll be able to steer them."

  "So, I'll have to nudge your contestants to open up to the camera and say the right things."

  He nodded. "You're a natural. I've watched you handle the guys. They have no clue that they do exactly what you say."

  Her cheeks turned pink, and she lowered her eyes to the floor.

  "That sounds awful."

  "Sometimes we have to help people without their knowledge."

  Tears welled up in her eyes when she looked up again. He smiled as warmly as he could, trying to convey that he wasn't judging her for using her ability to influence people. He thought of Vy's imperviousness to such advice, and his expression closed up.

  The deep sadness in her eyes told him that somehow she knew that he was hurting. He was denying himself something he deeply wanted.