The song my parents wrote for me the year they didn’t think they were going to be able to adopt me begins to play and I watch my parents and my uncle onstage for a few minutes. It’s called “Losing Liam” and it launched their career, according to my mom. It also makes people cry, yet it was number one for like a ton of weeks. I guess some people like to cry.
It doesn’t make me cry. It makes me feel . . . I don’t know . . . happy, I guess, that they wanted me that much. My mom says it’s important to find happiness and that not everybody’s happy ending looks the same, and that’s okay.
Watching them, listening to the words they wrote about me and how much they love me and how badly they wanted to be my parents, I realize that Teddy really was wrong.
Music does save lives.
It saved mine.
MISSING DIXIE PLAYLIST
“Goodbye,” Who Is Fancy?
“Lonely Eyes,” Chris Young “Turning Tables,” Adele “Games,” Luke Bryan
“Better Than You Left Me,” Mickey Guyton “Marry Me,” Train
“She Don’t Love You,” Eric Paslay “Sippin’ on Fire,” Florida Georgia Line “Not in That Way,” Sam Smith “Burning House,” Cam
“I Know You,” Skylar Grey “Love You Like That,” Canaan Smith “Just a Kiss,” Lady Antebellum “I’m to Blame,” Kip Moore “Life Support,” Sam Smith “Devil’s Backbone,” The Civil Wars “I Believe,” Christina Perri “Take It Out on Me,” Florida Georgia Line “Not on Drugs,” Tove Lo “Playing with Fire,” Katie Armiger “I’m Coming Over,” Chris Young “Ride,” Chase Rice
“Lead Me,” Kip Moore
“Fly,” Maddie and Tae
Acknowledgments
WHEN I LOOK back on the year it took to write this series, it feels like a blur. A beautiful, bright, neon lit blur.
I have to confess that I didn’t know exactly how the Neon Dreams series would end when I began writing it. I knew the band would finally make it big. I knew that they would never want to share their backstory but that it would be a story worth telling. What I didn’t know was how real their hearts and souls would become to me. While Liam may not be Dixie and Gavin’s biological son, I did learn this year that family truly does come in the form of people who love and support you in both the best and worst of times and that it’s not always comprised of people who are related by blood or marriage. Liam was born from that discovery.
When Dallas went on the road and Dixie stayed behind, some people were outright angry. I was. At both of them. I was confused about why this felt right. I didn’t know Liam existed yet. I didn’t know he was going to be wandering by an old house in the backside of Amarillo alone and afraid. I didn’t realize that Dixie had to be there giving piano lessons to other kiddos so that Liam would hear and be drawn to her.
Everyone was exactly where they needed to be—even when I hadn’t yet realized it.
So my first big thank you is for you, for those of you who read this series and allowed me to figure it out as I went. For each of you who leaves a review somewhere—anywhere—and tells a friend to read it, thank you times two. Times ten. Times infinity, as my daughter says.
My second thank you is to my editor, Amanda, who didn’t tell me to take a hike when Liam entered the picture and it meant a rewrite of the second half of the book and that I wouldn’t make my initial deadline. I love you. I thank God for you, for your always having my back and for allowing me to write the story I believed in, the way that I needed to write it.
Thank you to my agent, Kevan, for also not dropping the crazy lady who said “So . . . my life is a mess and I need this book to go a different way and I am going to hunker down in the bat cave until I get it right.” Promise not to do that again . . . at least not on purpose.