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grabbing a handful of chips and then picking them off one by one from his fist with his teeth. She would have been concerned, except it seemed like he had done this before.
    “It's the same ,” he concluded as he swallowed the last of his fistful of chips. He took a large gulp from the glass of water with a slice of lemon that had been served. “Even the water's the same.”
    “You're joking.”
    “I swear. And you've been coming home every year without doing this? You should be ashamed.”
    Her mouth made a sound that was almost like a word before she stopped herself from explaining the no-fajita diet. “Consider me properly shamed.” Haley tentatively reached for the bowl. “Is it safe to get a chip now?”
    “Get some now before I drop the bowl into my mouth.” He took another look around, his eyes lighting up as they swept through the room. “I performed here, in Houston, a few years ago. Didn't have enough time to drop by, so they sent me fajitas in a bag. Not what I had been dreaming of for years, but close enough.”
    Haley got a Liberal Arts degree (with a business concentration) in college, while getting as much musical training as possible. In any case—she had a semester each of education, psychology, and sociology and was seeing all sorts of cries for help in Oliver's nostalgia.
    “Romanticizing home isn't going to solve your crisis,” she said.
    Oliver grinned at her and gah, she was reminded of melting cheese on her tortilla chips. “Hot Piano Girl is also a mind reader?” he teased. “Or it's that obvious that I'm that close to washing up?”
    “I didn't say that .” Whoops. “But no one loves home that much, especially if he spent so much time away from it when he didn't have to, you know?”
    “Oh, but I had to. Family of traveling musicians. Home was that place we went to between airports.”
    See, Haley had always been curious about that. Traveling to do this job, this career. Her time with Breathe Music showed her that it was possible to stay home and be a musician, but maybe…not the kind of musician she wanted to be? When she was at her height of fangirling Oliver, she was well aware of his tour schedule, and he really did seem to be everywhere at once.
    “Do you consider New York City your home?” she asked. She knew that it was where he was staying between airports.
    He shook his head right away. “No.”
    “Oh. I thought it would be.”
    He leaned back and looked at her in a way that made her feel examined. “Why Tampa?”
    “Because the lady offered me money to go there.”
    “Yes, but it’s not where you should be if you want to do this.”
    Haley laughed. “Who said I wanted to do ‘this’? What is this ?”
    “Well, you’re doing something. Not directly, but touching the edges.”
    “I wanted….” Haley looked down at her hands, which were laid flat on the table. “I wanted to try it, away from people who thought I should be doing something else.”
    When she looked at him again, he was still examining her. “That’s how it is. Yeah. So NYC isn’t home, not yet. I need a place to call home. I literally will need a roof over my head after this weekend, because I'm sure that one of the messages I got during our flight was my landlord telling me that my stuff is on a Brooklyn sidewalk.”
    “It's that bad?” Oh man. She tried not to look sorry for him. She forced herself to think of mean people, of baseball, of mushrooms, of superhot green chili, any mundane thing that would keep her heart from reacting like it saw a kicked puppy. But a sliver of looking sorry might have slipped through.
    Oliver picked up the bowl and turned it over, the remaining chip fragments falling into his mouth. “It's bad because I let it get bad. I already had my rock star rock-bottom crisis moment, so don't worry.”
    “I’m sorry. Should I…?” Was she supposed to keep him from alcohol then? Was there a rehab stint at some point, a drug problem? She couldn’t remember all of