As I stepped from the RV onto the pavement, the hot sunset hit me full in the face. It was a moment before I glimpsed Sam, Ace, and Charlotte talking behind the orange tape with the security guard watching them from a few yards away. When they saw me, they waved me over.

Part of me didn’t want to go. But I couldn’t spend the rest of the night going around being firm with people. That felt good only while I was doing it, and I knew better now than to take rash action that I would regret for a year. I walked toward them. When Sam held out his arms, I ran the rest of the way in my cowgirl boots and didn’t bother crossing under the tape before I lost myself in his hug. The tape stretched between us, and we hugged around it.

“I’m sorry,” he said in my ear. “I was wrong. I didn’t mean it. What you said about cutting your hair, that you knew as you were doing it that you would be sorry for the rest of your life, but you were so angry that you couldn’t stop . . . that’s how it was when I was saying that to you. And I don’t want to be sorry for the rest of my life. Please come back to us.” He held me at arm’s length. “Please come back to me.”

I looked into his dark, intense eyes, then over at Ace and Charlotte. They both gazed at me somberly, with Ace’s arms wrapped around Charlotte’s chest like they couldn’t believe they’d finally gotten together and now they had no intention of letting each other go.

Finally Julie’s voice came from behind me. “You’d better say yes, Bailey. You haven’t had a boy that cute come on to you since that blond guitar player at the bluegrass festival. The one you looked for for years? The one you had such a crush on?”

Sam stared dumbfounded over my shoulder at Julie. His eyes slid to mine.

I felt myself blushing hard. There was nothing left to do but duck under the tape and walk forward into his arms again.

“Thank God,” Ace said.

“Hi, I’m Charlotte,” I heard Charlotte say to Julie, “and this is Ace, and that’s Sam. We’re Bailey’s band.”

“You’re in a band?” Julie shrieked at me. “Bailey, you didn’t tell me you’re in a band!”

“You haven’t been speaking to me,” I murmured against Sam’s chest. I never opened my eyes, just listened to his racing heart.

Suddenly I backed away and looked up at him. “Are you missing your gig right now? For me?”

He looked stricken. He said carefully, “I am willing to miss my gig for you.” Gesturing to the parking lot and the distant crowd around the Riverwalk stage, he said, “I am here, potentially missing my gig, for you.” He glanced at his watch. “If we hurry, we can still make the gig. But if you want me to miss it to prove how much I love you—”

“Bailey doesn’t need that proof, do you, Bailey?” Charlotte prompted me.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I didn’t mean what I said before, either. Missing a gig would be completely out of character for you. I wouldn’t love you if you weren’t you.”

He eyed me a moment more. “My God, you look gorgeous. You always do, but tonight you wanted me to eat my heart out.” Suddenly he shouted, “Okay, let’s go!” and dragged me by the hand down the sidewalk, toward Broadway.

As we ran, I turned around and called to Julie, “Good luck with your gig!”

“Good luck with your gig!” she hollered back.

The four of us hustled around the crowds and up the hill. I didn’t think about Julie again that night. I had a show to put on.

But late the next morning, I sat on the bed in my old room at my parents’ house as Julie asked, “Are you sure you’re not going to move back home?”

She and my parents and I had spent an hour talking our problems out. Now that Julie and I had retreated upstairs, she lay in my very old beanbag chair—she’d gotten a pink one and I’d gotten a yellow one for Christmas one year—with her blond curls spilling across the carpet, looking at me upside down. When she was in that position, I couldn’t read her expression, but her voice sounded pleading.

“I’ve hardly seen you for a whole year,” she said. “My tour kicks off in a few weeks, and I know you’ll still want to move to the dorm at Vanderbilt. But in the meantime, you and I can hang out here, like always.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on. Don’t tell me you’d honestly rather live with Granddad!” She sat up and spun around to face me, her mouth in a cute pout. “It sounds to me like you said in the family meeting that you’d forgiven Mom and Dad for the way they’ve treated you, but you haven’t really forgiven them.”

I pushed my glasses up on my nose—the glasses Mom had had the nerve to tell me didn’t become me yet again. “It’s not that I haven’t forgiven them,” I explained. “It’s just that I can’t live with them anymore. They didn’t think they were pitching me out on my own just by making me stay with Granddad for the summer. That’s what it felt like to me, though, and now I can’t come back. Just like you couldn’t go back after you put your foot down and told them you will have a say in your next album or else.”

There was one big difference between her assertion of independence and mine. Hers was likely to make millions of extra dollars for her and the record company—or lose that much—whereas mine mattered to nobody but me. A year ago I would have pointed out this difference, bitterly. Today I was able to put it in my pocket. I had learned to play in a group.

“Besides,” I said, “if I moved back here, we wouldn’t see each other that often anyway. You may be in town, theoretically, but I know you’ve got meetings and concerts and interviews lined up. I have a lot of gigs.” There was my mall job, which I planned to continue until conflicts popped up. And for the first time, I was hopeful they might.

I lowered my voice. “I didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad this unless something comes of it”—more residual bitterness, maybe, but my secrets were mine to share or not—“but the gig on Broadway last night went great. After our set, the owner asked us not to pack up just yet. She introduced us to a record company exec who’d been watching in the audience.”

Julie’s eyes widened with excitement. I’d intended to tell her this whole story soberly, because it was only a nibble, and maybe it wouldn’t pan out. But when I saw her expression, I couldn’t help grinning as I told her the rest.

“When the place closed, he went to get his guitar from his car. He played with us for another hour. Then he asked for Sam’s number and said he’d try to set something up for us.”

“What does that meeeeean?” she squealed under her breath.

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But I’m glad I went.”

I cocked an ear toward the window. Two stories below, gravel popped in the driveway. Someone was coming. Much as I loved being in love, I wished my heart didn’t race into overdrive at the very thought that I might catch a glimpse of Sam. There was no reason for him to be driving up to my house this morning. It was probably the mailman.

But sure enough, moving to the window, I saw Sam’s truck parked in the driveway, dust settling around it. He got out of the cab and glanced toward the window where I stood, like he knew I was there.

“Who is it?” Julie asked. “Sam?”

“Yes,” I said. “Lucky me.”

As I bounded down the stairs, though, I remembered that he hadn’t met my parents. I’d put my foot down with them that morning, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t harbor some residual ill will about me joining a forbidden band. They might blame him. I sped up, hoping to catch him before my parents did, and nearly tripped on the last step.

I shouldn’t have worried. Yes, he was already in the kitchen, but he was doing the Sam thing he did so well, looking my dad straight in the eye as he shook his hand, and complimenting my mom on the scents of the big family lunch she was about to serve us.

“Won’t you join us?” my mom asked him.

“I would love to,” Sam said, “but I came over—I’m so sorry to interrupt—because I was hoping to steal Bailey away for a gig.”

My dad just raised his eyebrows, but my mom looked at me accusingly, like I’d known about this beforehand and hadn’t told her.

“What kind of gig?” I asked Sam.

He opened his mouth, about to tell me. Then his eyes darted sideways to my dad and back to me. “I need to talk to you about it.”

I couldn’t imagine what this gig could be. An impromptu Lao wedding? “Let’s go outside,” I said, taking him by the hand.

As I opened the door to the porch, my mom called after us, “Can I make you both a plate to take with you?”

“Ma’am,” Sam said, “I wouldn’t put you out, but it smells really good.”

My mother smiled to herself and turned back to the stove, murmuring, “You got it.”

“Sir, nice to meet you.” Sam reached over to shake my father’s hand again before he followed me.

I closed the door behind us. When Sam and I had come here a couple of days before, I’d thought the place seemed dead without the familiar braying of farm animals, but I supposed it was all in my perspective. Today it seemed quiet but peaceful and welcoming, warm with the memories of all the years Julie and I had spent playing in the creek and rolling in the grass.

I slid onto the porch swing, patting the seat beside me. “Look at you!” I told Sam. “You really know how to lay it on the folks.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.” He weighed down his end of the porch swing, but instead of nudging us into motion, he turned to me and put both hands on my knees. “I came out here to tell you I got a call from Mr. McAdory this morning.”

The record company exec. “What’d he say?” I breathed.

“He can’t schedule us this weekend because he’s waiting for all the CMA folks to clear out. But on Monday he wants to meet with the band in the studio at his office. He’s asking his boss to listen to us.”

“And . . . what if they like us?”

“He’s being cagey. You know how they are. He’s not going to make us any promises unless his boss likes what he hears.”

I nodded. “I want you to be prepared that they might not pick us up.”

“Of course I know that. I’ll bet they do, though.”

“I know they’ll pick you up,” I said.

“What?” He seemed honestly surprised.

“And if they do, I want you to go.”

“No. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m the one Mr. McAdory has been communicating with. If he wanted just me, he’s had plenty of opportunity to tell me that by now. Anyway, I’ve said before that I don’t want to be this talking head that the record company controls—this singing head—this solo act who might or might not get the good songs. I want the band. I want your songs. I want you. I love you. Not that your parents and Julie don’t, but with you and me it’s different because we’re coming from the same place. You know?”

I smiled at him. “Yes, I know.”

He paused. “After we had that fight at Boot Ilicious, I went home and played through all your songs.”

“All of them?” I asked. “You must have stayed up until noon the next day.” He did have that hard, Johnny Cash look about him again, like he’d been missing sleep.

He acknowledged this with a small shrug. “And Bailey. If Julie really gets your songs on her next album, that’s going to be great for her. Our band sounds terrific, in my humble opinion, but your songs are going to put us over the top in the meeting with the record company. Your songs . . .” He swallowed, then smiled wanly. “Some of them are painful.”

“Yeah.” I wished now I hadn’t shoved some of the choicer ones into Sam’s chest.

“Though it was a relief to find out that you feel as strongly about me as I do about you.” He laughed. “You’ve channeled your pain into something constructive, a lot better than I have. And if the band makes it big, you’re going to be why.”

I didn’t agree. If the band made it big, we would all be why. But I was glad to be a part of it. I was proud my songs were part of it. After a year living in a fantasy of being called in to save Julie, I had saved myself instead, by doing what I loved.

“So!” he said. “We’ve got today, Saturday, and Sunday to practice some of your songs until they’re perfect.”

“Oh.” No wonder he’d said we couldn’t stay for lunch. He knew I had to work this afternoon. We had another gig on Broadway tomorrow night, and on Sunday night, one at the first bar where we’d played in the District. We were all booked up, and now we had to find time to practice, too. Something told me I wasn’t going to get a lot of shut-eye between now and Monday.

I had never been so excited about losing sleep.

“We can practice at my house,” he said. “My mom doesn’t have to work this weekend, which is bizarre. And my dad . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked down at his hands on my knees. “It took me a while to figure out how to tell him I’m not going to make it to the mall this afternoon. For years I looked forward to the day I could tell him to his face that I didn’t need him anymore, but when I finally did, it was a lot harder than I thought. And he didn’t react the way I thought he would. At all.” Sam squeezed his eyes shut.

I held my breath for the horrible thing Mr. Hardiman had said to Sam. It wouldn’t be true, but I was afraid Sam would believe it.