“I wish he’d been more flexible, more open to letting me pursue my own goals. But I’ve had a good life. If I hadn’t married him, I wouldn’t have you and the twins, and you girls mean everything to me.”
Lourdes wondered if she’d one day regret choosing such a demanding career. Maybe not, she told herself. She could still have a husband and family at some point. Just...later, after she’d recovered from the missteps she’d taken in the past couple of years. “It’s hard to miss children I don’t have, Mom. I don’t want to get stuck in Whiskey Creek or anywhere else I might feel I had to stop singing. If I marry someone who doesn’t understand my passion for what I do, I’d only wind up feeling guilty for leaving him whenever I was away. You know, for concerts or recording or promo. I don’t want to live like that.” In other words, she and Kyle knew they had different goals. Why set themselves up for failure?
“But I thought you’d be destroyed over Derrick and yet you...you seem fine.”
She was certainly doing better than she’d expected. The disappointment was there. So was the hurt and anger at being let down by someone she cared about. But the sharp, immobilizing pain she’d experienced for the past several months was gone. Kyle had somehow anesthetized her against that. “I still love Derrick, just not in the same way. I think the past six months killed what romantic love I had for him.”
“And now you’ve found someone else. Good men don’t grow on trees, honey. So if Kyle’s special, you might want to think twice, that’s all,” her mother said.
“Thanks for the advice, Mom. You’ve made your point. Can we talk about something else?”
“Of course.” Her mother filled her in on the latest with Mindy and Lindy, who shared everything—including an apartment and a job serving tables at the same high-end restaurant in downtown Nashville. Renate wanted them to get serious about their lives, to show more ambition now that they both had degrees. But they were still young and having fun. Lourdes had long ago recognized that they didn’t possess the same kind of drive she did. She’d worked so hard for what she’d achieved—and despite all that effort, it seemed as though she’d turn out to be nothing more than a footnote in the country music industry.
She’d just finished talking to her mother when another call came in, this one from Derrick. She didn’t answer it, but she opened the photo album on her phone and swiped through it. She had so many pictures of him—in Paris, in various American cities when they were on tour, at Lake Powell on the houseboat they’d rented last summer. As she stared at their laughing faces, she remembered how much fun they’d had together. She should be suffering more than she was now that they were no longer a couple. She’d suffered before. So where had all the heartbreak and desperation of the past several months gone?
She didn’t know. Or at least she couldn’t come up with an answer that made sense. The only one that did echoed what her mother had hinted at a few minutes earlier—that what she felt for Kyle had changed everything.
*
Although he’d called around noon, to tell her the fire was arson, Kyle was gone for most of the day. When Lourdes finally saw him, he seemed to be in another sour mood. But they’d told his friends that they’d be going to Victorian Days, and he acted as if he was still planning on it.