I muttered, “And here comes Toby.”

I had no doubt Aidan really texted Toby then, but it took Toby three songs to reach the roof, probably because he was three sheets. Despite the fact that he’d changed his hair from dyed black to bleached blond and gotten a second eyebrow piercing in the week and a half since the wreck, I recognized him right away because he was so tall and thin, a head above the crowd. He stood next to Aidan for a moment, talking with Aidan but never taking his eyes off me. Then he started to move in my direction.

I had nothing to worry about. He could stare all he wanted, but I felt safe several feet above the crowd and him. I turned away from him and watched Sam for the signal to start the fourth song.

The next time I looked around, Toby was alarmingly close. Despite the tightly packed crowd, he’d managed to push within three people of the stage. He locked eyes with me. I lifted my chin and looked at the Nashville skyline, concentrating on my solo.

Then when I looked down, he was right next to me. My heart jumped, but I didn’t. I didn’t even glance over at Sam for help. I didn’t need his help. Toby would never intimidate me again.

Even though I’d made an effort not to signal to Sam about what was going on like a helpless female, somehow he knew. “Next we’d like to do an easy Johnny Cash tune for you,” he said into the microphone. “ ‘Cocaine Blues.’ ”

I had no time to check for Toby’s reaction. “Cocaine Blues” was a doozy, not the kind of song that the lead singer of a band should drop into the playlist and spring on his fiddle player, especially after he’d lulled her into a false sense of security with Justin Timberlake and Ke$ha. We got through it okay, though, because we were professional musicians. And then when I glanced down at Toby, he was looking straight up at me and licking his lips.

I pulled Sam’s handkerchief from the pocket of my dress and wiped both my sweating palms, holding my fiddle and bow in the crook of one elbow and then the other.

“Switch places with me,” Sam called. His voice didn’t register with me at first because he’d said it outside the range of the microphone. When I understood what was going on and looked over at him, he nodded toward Toby, then moved his finger between himself and me.

I hadn’t asked for his help, but I wasn’t going to refuse it, either. Obediently I switched places with him. We took a moment to detangle our cords while the crowd whooped impatiently. Sam glanced behind him at Ace and Charlotte, who must have been motioning that they wanted to know what was going on, because Sam put up his hands and shrugged. His one-night stand’s leering ex was hard to explain during a set. He signaled to Charlotte to start the next song.

I tried not to look toward Toby. I kept my chin up and my eyes above the crowd. But he was so close to the stage that I couldn’t miss his white-blond head and the angry curses from other guys as he pushed his way from Sam’s side of the stage to my new side.

When the song ended, Sam took a moment to stare Toby down silently. Don’t do this, I messaged telepathically to Sam. Challenging Toby would only make things worse. But Sam and I had no psychic connection. The crowd got restless. Someone yelled, “Play ‘Freebird’!” Sam glared at Toby for a few seconds more and finally signaled to Charlotte, who started the song.

And Toby grabbed my ankle.

I never stopped playing. The crowd didn’t notice mistakes. They noticed hesitation. I could play right through this number and then deal with Toby.

His hand slid up my calf to pause at the back of my knee.

Now I was shivering, afraid he would yank me offstage and forward into the crowd. My fiddle might get scratched, and my mother would never forgive me.

His hand moved up the back of my thigh, under my skirt.

Sam’s voice and guitar riff disappeared. He’d stopped playing and was staring at Toby. Slowly I lowered my fiddle like Toby was a snake I didn’t want to startle with any sudden moves.

It took Ace and Charlotte another few seconds to stop playing. Even the crowd noise slowed to a halt. Into the dead silence on the rooftop, Sam growled into the microphone so that his words echoed against the brick walls, “Get your hands off my fiddle player.”

Holding my fiddle and bow, I didn’t have a hand free to defend myself. I could only shudder as Toby’s hand crept higher.

Sam dropped his guitar. I felt a spike of adrenaline and the urge to leap forward and catch it. But before the electrified strings’ earsplitting complaint sounded over the speakers, Sam was off the stage, shoving Toby.

Guys shouted. Girls screamed. I reached blindly into the crowd to grab Sam and only succeeded in dropping my bow. Ace leaped past me. The entire crowd shifted to the left, then parted, drawing Toby and Sam away from each other, despite some idiot hollering, “Fight!”

The door to the interior of the bar burst open. “Break it up!” a burly bouncer yelled. Two even bigger men followed him. The crowd stopped moving toward Toby and Sam then and began to drain sheepishly out the door. One of the bouncers grabbed Toby by the collar of his T-shirt and made a show of muscling him out, even though Toby had gone limp. In two minutes, nobody was left but a couple of older men who probably owned the bar, and the band.

I jumped down from the stage to retrieve my bow, which didn’t seem any worse for wear after I’d retightened the screw. Then I sat down on the edge of the stage, crossed my legs primly, and listened to the owners cuss Sam out because they’d had to clear everyone into the first and second stories until the next rooftop band set up, and a lot of those people would probably leave.

“Your patron had his hand on my girlfriend’s ass!” Sam shouted right back at them. “I won’t start a brawl if your security people do their jobs!”

That’s when Ace walked over. “Please excuse us for a moment,” he told the owners. He put his hand on Sam’s chest and pushed him backward across the floor, all the way to me on the stage. Then he hissed, “Shut up. Let me handle this.”

“Ace,” Sam cried, “they—”

“Shut. Up!” Ace insisted. He gave Sam one last glare, then sauntered back to the group of men with his hand out for introductions like he was selling them a car. Sam scowled after them for a moment, then took out his phone and scowled at that.

Charlotte sat down beside me—not between me and Sam, for once, but on my other side. With her eyes on Ace, she whispered to me, “Do you think you could possibly take me and my drums home?”

“Sure,” I said with lots of fake enthusiasm, “if they’ll fit in my car.”

“Ace isn’t talking to me,” she said. “I think I f**ked up.”

“I think you did, too,” I said.

“Thank you,” Ace called to the men, who were retreating through the door into the bar. “See you soon.” When they’d disappeared, he turned to us with rage in his normally placid face. “Well, we’re not blackballed,” he said, “but we have five minutes to clear out before the next band. I swear to God, I’m not sure I even want to be in this band anymore. I am sick to death of you.” He pointed at Sam. “And you!” He had a special scowl for Charlotte. Then he turned to me. “And . . . I don’t know what the f**k you’re doing half the time. The way things are going, I’d just as soon quit.”

“That’s too bad,” Sam said quietly, handing Ace his phone with an e-mail message open, “because tomorrow night, we’re playing on Broadway.”

The next afternoon, at the end of a long four hours touring the mall with Mr. Crabtree and Elvis, I slipped into Ms. Lottie’s chair.

“Well, hon,” she said by way of greeting, “I didn’t think your face could get any longer than it already was.”

Suddenly angry and tired of her teasing, I burst out, “Remember when you told me Sam Hardiman was a heartbreaker?”

She stared at me in the mirror with two hairpins in her mouth and two hands on my ponytail wig.

“I am done with all the sage advice Nashville has to offer. If you’re going to hurt, not help, what are you dispensing advice for?”

Frowning, she spat out the pins, which made the smallest clinks as they hit the floor, and spun me around in the chair to face her. She towered over me with her hands on her hips. “Sam Hardiman is a good man,” she declared angrily.

“O-kay,” I said, hoping my ironic tone would kick her out of my business and shut her up.

No such luck. “He is not a drinker,” she said, tapping her pointer finger with a long, French-manicured nail. “He is at work every time he’s supposed to be.” She tapped her middle finger, then paused on her thumb. “He didn’t cheat on you, did he?”

A lump formed in my throat. I couldn’t even answer her. He had better not cheat on me. But now that we weren’t together, he could do what he wanted. The thought of him hooking up with someone else stopped me from breathing.

“Then you need to get your ass off your shoulders,” she told me, “and figure out how to make it work.”

“There’s more to it than that!” I exclaimed. “You make it sound stupidly simple, like a country song.”

She looked over her bifocals and down her nose at me. “Country songs are so simple because they’re about what really matters.”

“Would you stop it with the aphorisms?”

Abruptly she spun me back around in the chair. We faced each other in the mirror. Muttering to herself, she took the rest of the pins out of my ponytail wig and lifted it off my head. I scowled down at my hands in my lap. I should have been relieved our confrontation was over, but the lump in my throat hadn’t gone away. I swallowed.

“Bailey.”

I looked up at Ms. Lottie in the mirror.

She put her hands on my shoulders and asked my reflection, “Do you have a gig with Sam tonight?”

I nodded sadly.

She fingered my black hair. “I see the look you’ve been going for. Do you want me to help you do it better? Like a real country star?”

I pictured Goth-country, rebel-hearted me, but better. Just as Julie had looked like herself at the Grand Ole Opry, but better. That’s what a professional like Ms. Lottie could do for me.

And whether Sam only thought it would help the band’s reception, or his heart raced because his latest ex looked so beautiful, he would take notice.

I told her, “Yes, ma’am.” And then, as she got to work with her comb, I whispered, “Thank you.”

When I got back to my granddad’s house, with my makeup dramatically perfect and my hair in a glamorous version of itself like I was headed to the Grammys, my granddad had already left to fight the CMA Festival traffic and take his VIP seat for Julie’s performance on the Riverwalk stage. It was easy for me to dress in an outrageous country getup to go with my starlet hair and slip out of the house for one last gig. Picking up Charlotte at her run-down apartment complex made saying good-bye to my life as a performer a little easier, because I didn’t have to ride with Sam and talk to him, or drive alone and obsess about him. I’d had a couple of song ideas since last night, but I hadn’t written them down.

Because we’d made it up the musician pecking order to a Broadway bar, the city had reserved a parking space for me in back. We pulled into the place in plenty of time before the gig so Sam didn’t have a stroke. The summer solstice was approaching, and the sun hadn’t quite gone down. Sam leaned against the wall outside, pretending to focus before he sang, but actually making sure we showed up. Ace stood on the other side of the door, with his back to Sam, talking to a group of college-age girls.

I cut the engine, but neither Charlotte nor I made a move to get out of the car.

“Maybe we could find a way to make the band work with none of us dating,” she mused, eyes on Ace.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Maybe we’ll have such a great time tonight that we’ll forget what we were fighting about before.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, because she wanted to believe there was still hope for her and Ace, and she wasn’t listening to me anyway.

“I guess we’d better get out,” she said, and I was about to agree when my phone rang. The ringtone signaled the call was from Julie.

I pawed through my purse so violently that even clueless Charlotte knew to ask, “What’s wrong?”

Ignoring her, I said breathlessly into the phone, “Julie?”

“You have to get down here to the Riverwalk stage,” my mother said. “Julie has her first CMA Festival performance in just a few minutes, and she’s refusing to go onstage.”

I stared through the windshield at Sam. He was still pretending I wasn’t here, but I knew he was hyperaware of me and was dying to go onstage. What my mother was saying did not compute. “Let me talk to Julie.”

“She’s not allowed to talk to you,” my mother said. “Not while she’s refusing to go onstage. She’s grounded from her phone. You come down here and talk to her right now.”

“Mom,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on and how serious it is. I’m in the middle of something.”

“You’re in the middle of something?” my mother shrieked. “You’re spending the summer sanding guitars for your grandfather, and he’s here. What could you possibly be in the middle of? What could be more important than your sister?”

With a pointed look at me, Sam slowly pushed off from the wall, crossed in front of the door to the bar, and laughingly joined the conversation with Ace and the college girls.

“I’ll be right there.” I clicked my phone off and turned to Charlotte. “I have to go. I’ll try to be back before the gig, but no guarantees.” I jumped out of the car.