Chapter 20

Micah

It's been a long time since I snuck around in a dark house, but I'm having major flashbacks of my teenage years as I move to shut Raegan's door behind me while clutching my shoes to my chest. I do a triple-check in the dim hallway for any early rising Farrows. Thankfully the coast is clear.

After a speedy shower—which smarted far less on my scorched shoulders than I feared—I finally took a moment to assess the other fear lurking in my mind. The one that shook me from a dead sleep. The one that would make me Tav Zuckerman's half brother.

I read the last few entries of my mom's journals this morning searching for clues, yet they ended as unresolved as I feel right now. What had happened after my mom pushed my father away? Where did she go? Who did she see?

I follow the smell of strong coffee down the stairs, mindful of every creak and groan. I don't know who's up at this hour, but I pray at least one of them is Luella. I'm only two steps into the kitchen when it's clear my prayer has been answered.

"Good morning, handsome," she says in her honeyed tone, wearing an apron that has the state of Kansas traced in glitter on the front. She holds out her arms for a hug I gladly accept. Somewhere between rescuing her from a nightclub and stripping off my T-shirt for her to wear like a scarf yesterday, hugging became natural.

"How did you sleep?" she asks, pouring me a mug of coffee as if she's the hostess and I'm her guest.

I take the mug she offers and appreciate the fact that she doesn't bother to offer cream. She knows I take it black. "Uh, I slept great, thanks." I don't bother to conclude that the reason for such great sleep was likely where I'd slept. It certainly didn't hurt my feelings to wake up to the sight of Raegan sleeping at her desk ten feet away. It took every ounce of my willpower not to plant a kiss on her head as I tucked the quilt around her shoulders before I left her room.

"What about you?" I consider Luella through filtered eyes after yesterday's fainting spell. "You feeling okay this morning?"

"I guarantee I'm feeling better than those crispy shoulders of yours." She grimaces. "I do feel terrible about that. I asked Dottie to pick up some aloe vera for you at the grocery store. She should be back in a bit, but she told us to make ourselves at home. She left us some options for breakfast, too." Luella lifts the egg carton as if it's a foreign object she's never before beheld and says, "Perhaps I'll whip up some eggs for us right quick." And something about her innocence is so endearing I can't help but laugh. Perhaps the conversation I need to have with her will be much easier than I thought.

As she turns toward the stove, I'm about to ask if she's considering ditching the festival to become Dottie's second-in-command at the inn when Adele breezes in with a mug already in hand. Apparently, she's been up for a while. And apparently, she hasn't been keeping company with her mother this morning. The bus breakdown had definitely thawed a few layers of their freeze-out, but given Luella's sudden look of uncertainty and Adele's robotic posture, there's obviously still work to be done here.

"Can I get you a refill, Adele?" I ask, gripping the coffee pot before she has a chance to.

"Sure," she says, looking about as comfortable as my shoulders feel every time I lift my arms ninety degrees. "Thank you."

I keep my pour slow while I make a mental switch to the order of my priorities for the day.

"Your mom just offered to make us some breakfast," I say.

Adele lifts her gaze from the stream of dark liquid to her mother at the stove. "You're going to cook, Mother?"

My lips quirk at the surprised tone in Adele's voice, and I realize my hypothesis was correct. I don't think Luella has spent nearly as much time in a kitchen as she has in a studio.

"Every Southern woman knows how to scramble an egg or two, darlin'," Luella declares, cracking one into a bowl where more shell than yolk end up.

Adele and I share a knowing look.

"What can we help with, Luella?" I ask, emphasizing the we. Adele doesn't miss it. "Is that pancake mix on the counter there beside you?"

Luella stops fishing for shells long enough to look to her left and read the blue bag beside her. "Affirmative."

"How are you at pancake flipping, Adele?" I ask the eldest Farrow daughter. "Because I admit, I'm pretty lousy. I'm much better at slicing fruit." I grab a handful of apples from the basket on Dottie's table and then go on a hunt for a knife.

"Oh, Adele has always been a wonderful cook," Luella chimes in. "I always told Russell he should have let her go to culinary school. That girl loved experimenting with all sorts of recipes. She even taught Jana a few of her signature dishes."

"Oh yeah? I could use some tips in the kitchen. Did you take any culinary classes?"

"No," Adele answers simply, wasting no time in finding a mixing bowl and spoon.

"Russell said brains like Adele's would be wasted in the kitchen. He used to tell her she was—what was it, Adele?"

"‘Built to sit at the head of a boardroom,'" Adele answers in what might be the most reticent voice I've heard her use. Soon, she's collecting the ingredients she needs from the pantry and fridge, and its only then I notice how she leaves the store-bought mix unopened. She's making pancakes from scratch, from memory.

For a woman who brought her own prepackaged meals aboard the bus, I'm more than a little surprised to find out she's a foodie at heart.

I slice a few apples on a cutting board I find next to the fridge. "How long have you been CEO of Farrow Music?"

"Just shy of five years." She stirs the batter, adding in milk a little at a time.

"And she's done a fabulous job taking over after Russell died. It's a hard gig, but we're hoping it will get lighter. Aren't we, darlin'?" Luella says, and I don't miss the way Adele's gaze flicks to hers.

"That's the hope, yes."

"I would imagine it's tough to balance work and home life." I leave an intentional pause. "Cheyenne seems like a really great kid."

"She is," both women say in unison and then look at each other once again.

"There's a special place in a grandmother's heart for her first grandchild," Luella says as she plops a giant brick of butter into her frying pan to make way for her egg mixture. "Adele and Michael did a wonderful job raising her—they were very involved parents right from the start. She has her mother's tenacity and confidence and Michael's open-mindedness and charisma. He's a physical therapist."

I'm careful to keep my tone light and my hands distracted with the apples when I say, "I've worked with a lot of young adults her age, and it's rare to find such support and love shown to them in a family."

Adele says nothing, but as she pours the batter onto the griddle, the stiffness in her back and shoulders disappears.

"I do love her," Luella says, turning away from her scramble to stare at her daughter. "So very much."

"No one doubts that, Mama," Adele says, staring at her bubbling pancakes. "But love doesn't mean encouraging a nineteen-year-old to quit school just because it's not as fun as when she's playing her guitar. I know that she's talented and beautiful and can write a song hook like she's been doing it for decades, but it's important to us that she has a degree to fall back on. She made a commitment. That means something to her father and me." She quickly flips several pancakes in a row with ease. "You and Daddy would have hunted me down if I would have dropped out of Cornell halfway through to pursue cooking."

I glance up at Luella, who seems to have forgotten all about the eggs on the burner. I leave the apple station and step in to turn the stove off so Dottie doesn't come home to a fire drill in her front yard.

"You're right." Luella doesn't hesitate to inch her way closer to her daughter at the griddle. I can barely hear her when she says, "We expected a lot from you—too much."

Adele angles her head.

"I've been thinking about what you said at the hotel, about how none of us have been unscathed by my fame—"

Adele closes her eyes. "I was angry when I said that, Mother."

"But you weren't wrong. I know your father gave you very little agency over your future at the label. I should have been more present to challenge some of his expectations. He was the love of my life, but he struggled to let go, to rest."

Adele is quiet for so long I'm not sure she's going to respond at all, but then she says, "I don't regret my degree or the time I got to spend working side by side with Dad, but perhaps he could have given me space for ... balance."

I can't help but feel grateful when Luella touches her daughter's shoulder. "Then maybe that's what we can help Cheyenne discover, too."

The freeze-out between mother and daughter appeared to be fully thawed by the time Cheyenne and Hattie joined us for breakfast. With the help of a few well-placed questions here and there, the conversation between the women flowed naturally throughout our meal. Even when Dottie showed up with armloads of groceries, the warm atmosphere remained stable. Several people questioned Raegan's uncharacteristic sleep-in this morning, to which I did my best to cover by suggesting she was likely still recovering from our long and tenuous day yesterday. Hattie seconded my statement with the raise of her coffee mug.

Once the chatter at the table dies down and the dishes are cleared and washed, I overhear Adele inviting Cheyenne to sit with her out front. Cheyenne nods easily and then reaches for her mom's hand. I see Adele give it a squeeze as they walk out the front door.

It's another step in the right direction.

And now it's time for me to take a step of my own.

I track Luella through the living room and watch as she steps onto the back patio. She's holding an iced tea in one hand and a book—no, a Bible—in the other, and though I know I'm intruding, I can't wait. Not another day or even another hour. I ask God to be with me in this, come what may, and then I step out as soon as she settles into a rocking chair.

"Mind if I join you?" I point to the matching chair beside hers.

Luella's expression holds no sign of irritation at the interruption. Instead, a light seems to turn on inside her. It's easy to see where Raegan gets her infectious smile from. And just like that, my steady pulse trips over itself.

"I'd love nothing more than your company. Please, sit." She gestures to the empty rocking chair, and I comply. "I watched the sunrise out here with Dottie this morning. It came up just over that wheat farm out there." She points to the field beyond Dottie's fenced yard. "Who knew Kansas was so lovely? I think God planned this stop for us on purpose. Thank you for picking up on His cues."

"A smoking radiator is pretty hard to miss."

"I'm not just talking about the radiator." She rocks back in the chair, her hands resting on the Bible in her lap. "I know what you did for Adele and me today. Consider me in your debt."

I dip my head and chuckle humorously. "I think I might be calling in that debt sooner than you think."

"That right?" She quirks an eyebrow. "What's on your mind?"

My knee bounces on its own accord as I meet her gaze. There are at least ten different ways I've thought about approaching this conversation with Luella, but I push them to the side now as I work to reconcile the woman beside me with the one I spent reading about through the eyes of my mother in the wee hours of the morning. "I finished reading the journals."

Immediately, her face sobers. "Ah. I'm sure you have questions."

She can't possibly imagine how many questions I have. "Have you read them?"

"Yes." A simple answer, yet her tone is anything but.

"I figured so," I say with an exhale, "seeing as this road trip is a mirror image of the one you took with my mother in 1975."

"Until Kansas," she amends with a thoughtful smile.

"Right. Until Kansas."

A pang radiates from behind my rib cage as an image of Luella stepping out of my mother's music room in April materializes in my mind. "Was this road trip something you discussed with my mother the night you came to see her in hospice?"

"It was certainly inspired by her, but no, we didn't discuss it. I didn't even realize I had her journals until after I started the renovation of the bus." Her face turns contemplative. "As you know, it was a challenge for her to speak when I saw her, but forgiveness is in our hearts more than it's in our words."

"Forgiveness," I repeat. "Is that what was happening behind that closed door?"

Luella takes a minute as she rubs her palm over the cover of the Bible. "Both given and received. It's meant to come in a perfect pair, no matter how pride may tell us otherwise."

Her admission is stirring, yet I'm still struggling to understand how an estranged friend for more than three decades would be granted forgiveness when the truth my mom held surrounding her son's conception was buried with her.

"Would you tell me what happened between the two of you after that tour? It seems, from my mother's journals, like there was a slow but steady decline in communication between the two of you, as well as some differing expectations as time went on. Which I suppose is understandable after a twenty-year partnership."

Luella flashes me a knowing grin. "Are you always this diplomatic, Micah?"

"It's always my goal, ma'am, but not always a reality." Especially when the subject hits closer to home.

She takes a cleansing breath as she rocks back. "As you know, that summer was especially stressful, not only because Russell was caught in the red tape of the American embassy, but also because we'd used our life savings as collateral for booking that first international tour, seeing as our label was too new to secure a loan. Your mom had written a few songs to record for our new album, and the sound was raw and emotive and like nothing we'd ever created before. Russell and Dorian were excited to promote it."

"But that album never happened," I supply.

"No, it didn't."

Luella picks up her iced tea from a glass side table and takes a sip. "I used to say two bad fights is what ended us, but as I've reflected and prayed and read your mother's journal entries, it's just as you said: a slow decline of poor communication and unmet expectations. The fights simply revealed what was already broken." She turns her glass and watches the ice cubes collide. "The first argument happened the morning after we pulled Old Goldie into Nashville. Ending a tour is always chaotic, and that one was no exception. Everybody was exhausted as we unloaded—our band, our crew, my girls, Lynn, and myself. The tension in the bus had been high, but I figured it would sort itself out once everyone was back home on a regular schedule again. But that next morning, just as I'd set the phone down after talking with Russell at the embassy, Lynn stormed into my kitchen soaked from head to toe from the rain, gripping a magazine. She demanded I tell her what Russell and I were really up to with her. I had no idea what she was talking about.

"I remember having to tell my girls to stay upstairs while the two of us went out on the patio in the storm. I'd never seen her so enraged. She accused me of going behind her back with Russell and trying to steal her songs while slowly edging her out. The suggestion was so ludicrous to me I laughed, but then she threw the magazine at my feet. She told me someone had alerted her to an article in Country America magazine. In it was a statement supposedly quoted by Russell alluding to some big changes with our upcoming album, changes that would make Lynn little more than a backup vocalist instead of an equal partner in our band." Luella shakes her head. "It's what your mom feared most, and it was right there, printed in black-and-white. Even our picture looked distorted, me in the front, her pushed off to the side. I swore to her I knew nothing about it and that there was no way Russell would ever say anything of the sort—he loved her like family. But she refused to believe me, and why wouldn't she? I was the wife of the man she'd accused of breaking the foundation of our friendship."

Luella takes a deep breath and seems to center herself again. "I told her I would get ahold of Dorian and figure out how this botched quote made it into such a reputable magazine in the first place and get it retracted."

Dorian's name strikes a match in my gut, and it's an effort in self-control not to cut in with more burning questions that need answers, but I take a breath and coach myself to wait. "I'm guessing the retraction wasn't as easy as you thought," I conclude.

"No," she says. "Three days later, I heard a rumor from a reliable source that Lynn was seen at a bar downtown we used to frequent with an old associate of ours, discussing the legalities of breaking her contract with Farrow Music so she could go out on her own—as a solo act. I'd never felt so betrayed."

"Wait, you're saying my mom wanted to break her contract with you to secure a new one?" My brows furrow at this. "That doesn't seem right. She became a music teacher at a private elementary school in her hometown the year after I was born. I never knew her to have any ambition toward fame. She wouldn't even join the church choir."

"Yes, but remember: you have the gift of hindsight now. Back then this was fresh, and I was fueled by stress and betrayal—two dangerous factors. When I went to her house to confront her on the rumor, she was gone and nobody seemed to know where she'd went or with whom. My anger grew by the day, and with Russell still detained, the entire world felt like it was crashing down around me. The idea of her leaving us high and dry with no explanation enraged me. Then one day, about a month later, I saw the tabloids in the supermarket. The front page was a picture exposing Lynn and Franklin's secret Las Vegas wedding."

The match strike catches on fire as I contemplate the dates she's referring to now, knowing that sometime between their initial fight and my mother's Vegas wedding was a conception date with a man that wasn't her husband.

I'm just about to say this when Luella hits me with "I told her for years that Frank would be a man who would treat her right, a man nothing like her own father. But she was adamant she'd never marry, so to realize she'd married him without even telling me they were involved was ... extremely difficult. We'd kept so many secrets for each other. For heaven's sake, she was the only person I'd trusted with my own secret marriage to Russell, and yet she hadn't confided any of this to me."

"Is that what your second fight was about then?" I ask. "Their wedding?"

"You know as well as I do that a fight is never really about the subject we claim it to be."

"Very true," I say.

"When your mom finally showed up in Nashville in a large moving van with her new husband, I was ready for her. There are few things I regret more than the ugly words we exchanged that day. I threatened to sue her for breach of contract, while she threw all our lyric books off the shelves and told me she was done. She wanted nothing more to do with anything we'd created together. At one point, your dad stepped between us and pleaded for us to stop and consider our history instead of throwing away twenty years of friendship. But our pride proved stronger than our loyalty. By the time we settled out of court, Lynn agreed to sign over all her rights to our songs—even the ones she wrote under our shared name. She also signed over any and all royalties those songs might accrue in the future." Luella lifts her head. "We signed a no-contact agreement with our lawyers, and that was it. Our songs were the first and last connection we shared."

"Until you sent the award to their home last spring."

Her nod is solemn. "Yes."

For several minutes, the only sound on the patio is the whir of the overhead fan.

"I'm sorry, Luella," I say. "I know you had to file for bankruptcy to cover the cost of that canceled tour and that Russell had to start the label from the ground up again. My mom was wrong to leave you like that."

"We were both wrong." Her voice is watery and thick. "And it cost us both dearly. I would pay back the money we lost on that tour twenty times over if it meant getting to have Lynn in my life these past thirty years. To have stayed close with Franklin and been able to watch their two sons grow up."

As her last words stab into my subconscious, I lean forward and stake my elbows on my knees. This is going to be harder than I thought. For a moment, I can't decide if Luella being able to provide the answer I need will hurt more or less than her not being able to. In theory, I know how I should feel. But theories are often proven wrong because people aren't theories.

"Luella, I wish there was an easier way to say this, but part of why I agreed to drive the bus for you this summer is because ... I'm searching for my biological father."

There's a long pause followed by a look of denial and then, "But Franklin—"

I shake my head. "Is my dad in all the ways that matter, but we don't share blood. My brother ran the paternity test at the hospital himself, twice. Just to be sure."

"I don't ... I don't understand. When? Who?"

I lift my head and meet her stunned gaze. "By all my calculations, I would have been conceived sometime by the end of the tour and before their wedding date in Vegas. I know this is a lot to take in. I'm sorry."

"Don't you dare apologize to me. I'm—I'm the one who's sorry. You just found this out?" Her eyes soften and leak at my confirmation with a sympathy that shreds through the top layer of my composure. "You were hoping I might know who? Oh, sweet boy." She shakes her head several times. "I wish I could give you that." She covers her mouth then, her eyes growing round. "You're saying she was pregnant with you the day we fought at her house?" I give her a moment to process these events again through the lens of this new filter. I've had weeks to think on it, yet it still feels like a foreign object being shoved into my brain.

I scrub a hand down my face as a sticky breeze causes a sheen of sweat to dot my brow. Luella's skin appears flushed, as well. "I do have a working hypothesis that it could be Dorian Zuckerman."

"Dorian?" Luella's protective pushback is stronger than I anticipated. "No, it's not him."

Obviously, I've hit a nerve. I approach with caution, knowing she's still close to Dorian's family. "I know he was your friend and that he was married at the time of the tour, but affairs often occur when—"

"It's not that." She sounds flustered, and I'm about to tell her we can take a break from this for now, that maybe getting a refill on her iced tea and moving inside where it's cooler would be better, when she says, "Dorian was injured in Vietnam. It left him unable to father children. They struggled for years trying to have a family of their own, undergoing dozens of tests and procedures back east."

I sit up straighter. "You're saying Tav was adopted?"

"No," Luella says patiently, "I'm saying Dorian and Donna did in vitro and used a sperm donor to become pregnant with Octavian. In vitro had quite a stigma back in the '90s so they rarely volunteered that information. Honestly, with as close as Tav and Raegan are, I'm not even sure if she knows."

The present tense of their combined names in Luella's sentence is like three shots of espresso hitting my nervous system all at once. Somewhere a voice of reason tells me to leave it alone, to move on with this conversation, but that voice doesn't have a chance now that every neuron is firing in the same direction. "It sounds like your two families have meant a lot to each other?"

Luella nods absently. "The older girls were always a bit annoyed with Tav—he was the stereotypical only child, and they weren't used to having a little boy around the house. But Raegan." Luella clucks her tongue. "That sweet girl of mine has been smitten with him since the day she learned to say all four syllables of his first name, Oc-tav-i-an," she emphasizes with a smile. "I'm rarely surprised when it comes to my youngest daughter, as she's always been my easiest child to please, but she about shocked my curls straight the day she broke off their engagement last fall."

Engagement.The word is a freaking neon sign shorting out my frontal lobe, zapping weak brain cells left and right before I can even process what Luella's just said.

The opportunity doesn't come.

The patio door slides open, and Billy, Dottie's brother, steps out.

He removes his ball cap and dips his head toward our table.

"I apologize for the interruption," Billy says in a relaxed timbre I could easily mimic after spending hours with him yesterday. "But I'm afraid I have some bad news about the bus."

"Oh no." Luella sits up straighter. "Are we not good to leave later this evening?"

"I'm afraid not, ma'am." Billy looks to me. "There's been a shipping mishap at the warehouse. Part we need is currently en route to Florida."

"Florida?" Luella shrills.

"That's right, ma'am." He nods again. "I've secured us a new replacement part. Only, thing is, we have to drive west of Denver to pick it up. At this point, it's an overnight trip. They close in a couple of hours. But once I have the part in hand, I should be able to fix you folks right as rain in roughly a work day. Best case, I can get you back on the road within forty-eight hours."

"I'll go." I'm so desperate for fresh air and a fresh perspective that I practically jump out of my chair. "If you can help me secure a rental car in town, I'll pick up the part in Denver and bring it back to your shop."

"No need for a rental, son. I'm happy to take you myself, though according to Dot, I'm not as good with night driving as I use to be." He winks. "Might need you to be my eyes come nightfall."

"I'll grab my bag."