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her bursting heart. She missed that feeling.
    She would admit it to herself: she’d been in a funk. A rut. She hadn’t done anything worthwhile since the band split up. She’d stopped playing her bass; she’d stopped doing much of anything with music. She woke up, went to work, came home, sat in front of the television, went to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.
    So maybe the whole embarrassing incident with the Saving Graces and the guy at the bar hadn’t been so bad after all. Maybe that was what she’d needed to snap out of it.
    Her phone rang after dinner, when Luka was washing dishes and Bryce had retired to the sofa with his own glass of wine. “Hot date?” Bryce asked, as Leah fumbled around in her purse.
    “The hottest,” Leah said. Her fingers closed around her phone, and she fished it out. She didn’t recognize the number.
    She answered.
    “Hey, is this Leah Zielinski?”
    The guy completely butchered the pronunciation of her last name, but she was used to it. “That’s me.”
    “This is James Park, with the Saving Graces. We were all really impressed with your audition today. We’d like to hire you on for the rest of the tour.”
    Leah pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at it in shock. Then she realized the guy might be saying something else important, and hastily pressed it back against the side of her head. “Uh, wow. You want to—really?”
    The guy laughed. Leah wondered which one he had been: the intense guy in the middle, or the one on the left who looked like he didn’t want to be there. Or her guy. Hers , in ironic quote marks. The one whose name she didn’t even know.
    It wasn’t him. She would recognize his voice.
    Bryce was giving her an intense look and moving his hands in a way that was probably meant to convey a question. She made a quelling gesture and turned her back on him.
    “Really,” James said. “We’re kind of on a tight deadline, though. We’re playing a show in San Francisco on Monday evening. So you would need to be able to drop everything and get on a bus tomorrow afternoon.”
    “I can do that,” Leah said. Luka was leaning out of the kitchen now, eyebrows raised. She would call work tomorrow morning and quit. Her boss would be furious, but she was okay with burning that particular bridge. “How much longer is the tour?”
    “One month,” he said. “So you’re in?”
    Leah took a breath. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I’m in.”

 
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    She drove downtown the next morning to sign the paperwork. James had given her the address of a hotel in Beverly Hills, and she expected a five-star boutique monstrosity with a rooftop pool, the kind of luxurious place where real rock stars stayed; but when she pulled up in front, she was a little disappointed to see that it was just a mid-range chain hotel, and not very fancy at all. What was the point of dealing with all of the press coverage and crazy fans if you didn’t even get to live in the lap of luxury while you did it?
    She went inside. A man and woman were sitting on a low bench near the front desk, and after a moment she recognized them from the audition yesterday: the woman with the clipboard, and the Asian guy who had been sitting in the middle, the one who had seemed to be in charge. They both stood up as Leah approached.
    She didn’t see her guy anywhere. Maybe…
    Speculating was pointless. She would find out soon enough.
    “Leah Zielinski?” the woman asked, holding out her hand and smiling. She was wearing a bright yellow dress and earrings that brushed her shoulders, and Leah looked down at her own frayed jeans and wished she had dressed up a little. “I’m Rushani Aachari, the tour manager for the Saving Graces.”
    Leah shook hands with her and then with the man, who said, “James Park. I’m the drummer and, I guess, unofficial responsible adult.”
    It sounded like a joke, but he wasn’t smiling. He was very good-looking, and he wore his plain white