Chapter 6

ROWAN

I'm not sure that anything about me is lucky, but I do go inside with him, only not through the gate leading to his outdoor classroom. Instead, he leads me up the steps to the school's imposing entrance. That's where I grind to a halt, which makes no sense.

I'm not on a ledge about to crumble. I have both feet planted on a green and white mosaic tile telling me Welcome to Glynn Harber. I still can't cross the threshold.

He turns, and there's no way he can hear the drums in my chest, but his smile dims a fraction before he comes back to me. "Don't let the way the school looks put you off. The same goes for the headmaster. They're both a little bit forbidding at first glance, but this really is the best place I've ever worked. And Luke Lawson?" He names this school's headteacher. "He's as soft as butter. He'll be so pleased to meet you." He crosses his heart. "I promise."

I can move again then.

I can also hear the click of our heels on polished floor tile. They tap out a quick rhythm matching my internal drumbeat. It doesn't slow when I stop at an office to sign in and I'm given a visitor's lanyard. The teacher points at his own. "Fill it out like this." His says Charles Heppel-Eavis with Early Years Teacher printed on the line beneath it. A third line asks for a specialism.

His handwriting is terrible. I can make out the word playing. The rest surely can't say with my maggots. He sees me squinting."Because my children do a lot of wriggling. It's my job to get those wriggles out of their system so they're good and ready for lots more learning."

I go ahead and write my own name then, aware that his lips move almost as if he's sounding out each letter. "Rowan Byrn. Why did I think you were called…"

"Ciaran?"

His frown disappears once I tell him the reason.

"That's my middle name. The production company thought it sounded more Irish. That's where they wanted more votes from on their premium-rate phone lines."

"You aren't Irish? You sound a little…"

"I've lived there for the last few years. I didn't at all before the contest." I see his eyebrows raise. "I know that isn't how they painted my background, but almost everything about that contest was a lie." I meet his gaze and see more of that sympathy from the car park as I touch the name I've written. "I'm Rowan." I also print trainee next to the teacher designation followed by music therapy as my specialism, and I hope to fuck I get to achieve at least one ambition. "I'm just Rowan, not a boy band member." That was another production company fabrication I should have refused instead of going along with. "And I'm not anything else they said about me." This is what has lingered for the longest. "Or that I said about the other contestants. I'm not… I'm not that person."

I never was.

I don't know why he peels that brave-boy sticker from his shirt. If he watched the show, he must have heard me parrot whatever backstabbing poison was fed through my headset all too often. He still presses that sticker to the underside of a lanyard he loops around my neck as if awarding me a medal for being honest.

"There." He straightens the lanyard over my heart. "You're Rowan and I'm Charles and none of that could have been easy for you. You were so young. How old were you?"

"Seventeen." I focus on a trophy cabinet full of shining silver earned by real winners. Charles follows my gaze.

"Far too young." He says that like I deserve the brave-boy label he pats one more time. I'm not so convinced about bravery, not after so recently clutching a real-life action hero. My thumb still brushes that hidden sticker all the way to the foot of a curving staircase, where a sign points upwards to a place I used to avoid at all costs.

Headmaster's Study This Way.

Charles doesn't pause there. He looks over his shoulder, issuing a cheerful, "This way," and strides along another hallway, where he shows me into a classroom that doesn't match the regimented rows I couldn't wait to leave behind for contest fame and fortune.

"Excuse our muddle," he warns while a mirror in a dressing-up corner reflects me looking as wary as in the photo that got me sent to Ireland to stay out of trouble. "We've been very busy today." He dodges a pile of cardboard boxes, a couple of which topple.

I add them back to the stack. "These are for your bridge-building?"

A line of chairs snakes between the tables. Charles hops up on one, before looking back. His grin is infectious. "Yes. And so are these. Follow me."

Here I go, following orders all over again, although I have to admit this is a lot more fun than backstabbing other contestants. "What about health and safety?" I know I've sat through university lectures on risk.

Charles has a different, risky outlook. "The sooner my little ones learn how to balance, the safer they'll be. Obviously I take care, but my number-one job is to arm them for their futures. Yes, I've fallen plenty, but I'm even better at bouncing back, so who better to help them bridge the gap between what they can do now and their next challenge?" He hops down to gather some spilled playing cards. "These are for our bridge-building project as well, only they help the little ones bridge a different kind of gap. Between their emotions."

He must see that I don't grasp his meaning. He turns a card over.

"Like this." It has a photo of his own smiling face and is labelled happy in English and a couple of other languages. He studies my own face, his gaze searching. "I'm such a telly addict that I remember you looking this happy all the time during the auditions and your first performances." He taps that grinning image. "The performances where you sang solo, right? So amazing. But later in the season? After they put you in a group, and whenever you went back to that house you all shared?" He digs through the set of cards, passing me another. "I remember seeing a lot more of this."

For a moment, I don't want to see what was caught on a livestream that I all too often forgot was running.

What did that twenty-four-hour feed show him? A bad person not strong enough to do the right thing? An idiot who let a random fuck snap photos? I turn the card over to find out, and a hollow stare greets me with a surprising word printed underneath it.

Lonely.

How can one word be paralysing? I don't know, but I can't move and I also can't acknowledge that this teacher didn't only see, but remembered and named the one feeling I couldn't ever admit while in the competition.

I thought I'd been lonely after Mum died. Thought I'd been lonelier still after my stepdad tried to wedge me in a boarding school full of boys as posh as Charles sounds. I didn't fit there. I didn't fit in that contest either. Now I can't do anything but blink away a sting for the third time today, only this time I'm not watched by Liam. It's a man with glitter in his beard who says, "Look."

I almost can't take the next card he offers until he adds a quietly voiced, "This is what I found when I came to work here." He turns the card over for me, showing me three letters summing up my little Irish cousins. They still think I'm a musical magician instead of a complete letdown. Now all three cards are pressed into my hands by a man who tells me, "This is all any of us at Glynn Harber want for our children. Joy. But some of them need a bridge to reach it. Need people who've been on both sides to help them make the same journey. I can't tell you how valuable that is. It's priceless, Rowan, like you."

He moves on.

I can't.

I'm stuck—completely still yet reeling—every single negative I've held inside for years wanting to grind into a new alignment. Then I follow him in a hurry, even if that makes me late for an interview I should be at already.

I find myself on the threshold of an outdoor classroom and realise we've come full circle. In the distance, I see my car beside that willow. A man wearing a clerical collar is much closer. He helps children balance on a plank spanning a sandpit. This must be the padre husband Charles mentioned, one who could give the headmaster I saw on the website a run for his stern-faced money until I realise this sternness is down to a scar. It leaves half of his face immobile. The other half lifts in a smile when Charles tells him, "Thanks for staying with the little ones, Hugo. I'm back now. You can get off."

"One moment. I promised to help Hadi first. He's almost ready to try crossing his bridge again." He murmurs to the child next. "Look at how well you're doing. You took that step all on your own. I know you'll take another when you're ready." He also repeats what his husband told me in the car park. "There's no hurry. No need to worry. Take your time, Hadi." He encourages a little boy who has such wide and dark eyes that I'm reminded of my lamb until Charles distracts me.

He heads for an older student who kneels with more children. They're all engrossed in building another bridge to carry toy cars. The student gets to his feet and is so much taller than I expected. He could give the rapper I listened to while driving down to Cornwall a run for his moody money. This student is just as attitude-filled, giving me a squinting side-eye as soon as Charles makes a request.

"Teo, can you let Mr. Lawson know his next candidate arrived right on time?" Charles nods firmly as if that's the truth, which it technically is, as long as we all ignore how long I sat frozen in my car. "Make sure he knows that he wasn't late, okay? Not even by a minute. And please tell Mr. Lawson that I want to keep him. Mr. Byrn, I mean. To introduce him to the children. Okay?"

Once that moody student leaves with his message, Charles looks about to get that introduction started. Instead, he lets out a sigh. "Oh, dear."

I see why. The school padre still offers a hand to the child on the plank across the sandpit, only that dark-eyed boy has started to cry. Not that he makes a sound, but he's silently in pain in a way I recognise with zero trouble. I don't need a card with a photo on it to name what this little boy's face shows me, but it's those cards that I prise myself off the threshold to impulsively show him.

I hesitate almost as quickly, but Charles nods, so I spread those cards along his plank bridge, each emotion facing upwards, and it also feels natural to pull out an old tin whistle I hadn't intended to bring with me. I play a happy tune matching the card closest to him.

"SpongeBob!" he whispers at a melody I summon from memories of entertaining little cousins, and more children gather. I stay focussed on the one who takes another step to grab a card showing the smiling face of his teacher. He eyes the next card with what looks like interest instead of worry.

I stop playing to ask, "I wonder which tune could go with this card?"

It's a simple question, but before I know it, I get so many answers that Charles scratches a tally of votes into the sand, and I play a few bars of each, if I know it, or find a sample on my phone. Asking who can name each tune is a competitive business, and thank fuck I grew up helping Mum run sessions for little ones just like these. She made crowd control seem second nature. I do the same now by asking for raised hands instead of shouted answers, and I get them. I also play theme tune after theme tune from start to finish, and when that little boy croons about building a snowman, he also holds a card with lonely printed on it.

I'm far from lonely now I'm surrounded by children. Far from as panicked either. I can't be when another panicked soul chooses a song for the final card, and the little boy who couldn't face crossing this bridge whispers a song he thinks is joyful. "From Aladdin."

I have no idea when I last played a song about a whole new world but here it is, soaring, tumbling, freewheeling from the very first instrument I learned to master, and his face lights up. He also shouts, "Daddy!"

I turn to see who watches from the same threshold where I first hovered, unsure if I belonged here.

The headmaster looks right at home, not stern at all when his son runs to greet him. And okay, he jumped off the bridge and ran across sand to do that, but Luke Lawson still swings him up onto his hip as if he's a winner.

I'm not an emotion expert. I never have been, but my heart lurches when I see another musician is with him. This one carries a smart instrument case like the ones I left in my car. They also hold a sheaf of music, no doubt for the theory lesson I was meant to deliver to older students, and what have I done instead? I've played Disney hits on a whistle to little children in a sandpit. This candidate is professional while I still smell faintly of sheep shit, and I've?—

I've missed my chance.

The headmaster must say as much while backing away, but the same internal drums as earlier kick in, boom, boom, booming, so I don't catch his parting comment.

Charles does. "Don't look so worried. He just said he'd seen enough and he'd call you tomorrow, didn't he?"

Who knows what my face does to make Charles flick a final card across the sandpit. I can't let myself believe I'll ever get the four letters printed on it.

"Take some hope home with you," he tells me. "Maybe you'll get to bring it back here with you in September."