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I’D LOST COUNT of the times I’d stood in front of baggage claim four, watching suitcases bump along the carousel as I waited for mine.

You would think after eight years of living in LA, I would have put an AirTag in my bag, but I think deep down I liked the drama of standing there, watching, wondering if this time it would be lost somewhere between LAX and Raleigh.

It was one of the few thrills that still got to me, mostly because in the grand scheme of things it was such a tiny worry.

A small bump in the road. It wasn’t like having your house get flooded, or being fired from a job, or needing to write your next song on contract but every time you sat down to try your chest began to constrict and your heart leapt into your throat as you tried to pull something—anything—from the depths of yourself, because you used to so easily, but now you just find yourself … empty.

No, waiting for my luggage was not like that at all.

I think that was why Sebastian Fell’s comment about offering me inspiration hit so hard last night—because I panicked thinking that he somehow knew .

That he’d somehow divined that hitmaker Joni Lark was bone-dry, that she hadn’t written a new song in close to a year.

Sure, she’d revised old ones, pulled them out from the depths of her old notebooks and journals to keep the mirage going, but now she was stuck.

Empty.

I’d never felt empty before.

My phone buzzed with a text from my manager, Rooney. HAVE FUN ON VACAY! ; )

I replied with a margarita emoji. She knew about my stuckness. She had to. She was also the only one who did.

When I first went to LA eight years ago, I had these big dreams of being a songwriter.

My mom taught my brother and me piano and raised us in the Revelry, so how could I not want to make music, too?

And even in that first year—which was rough, waiting tables and working dead-end catering jobs—I wrote.

I couldn’t stop writing. I chiseled out time for it wherever I could, during ten-minute “smoke breaks” and inside bathroom stalls.

About a year into subsisting on ramen and Popsicles, I met a woman smoking out back by the dumpsters of one of my catering jobs.

She was about a decade older than me, with a blunt platinum blond bob and sharp eyebrows and a scowl that could make grown men wither.

She overheard me singing to myself as I sat on an overturned mop bucket, scratching out a song.

“The true tragedy of this city,” she had told me in greeting.

I’d been immediately confused. I’d looked around and guessed, “The full dumpster?”

“A young person with caviar on their work shirt, writing a song while catering a music exec’s ten-year-old’s birthday party,” she clarified. “And the kid’ll probably get on the radio before you.”

“I’ve been on the radio,” I replied easily, returning to my little bent notebook. “College. I took a midnight slot as a DJ and played my own demos between the top hits.”

The woman had barked a laugh. “Anyone find out?”

At which I finished my lyric and grinned at her. “No.”

She seemed impressed. “Singer, too?”

“Just a songwriter,” I replied.

“Pity.” She dropped her cigarette and crushed it under her Louis Vuittons.

“Why?”

“You probably could make it big if you sang them, too. It’s a tough industry. Your biggest fan has got to be yourself.”

I stood and closed my notebook to face her.

“I know that, but I want other people to sing my songs. I want to give them words they didn’t know they had in themselves.

And I don’t care about making it big —I just want to make it.

I’d rather be ten people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s tenth-favorite thing. ”

The woman gave me a long, considering look, before my phone beeped, signaling the end of my break.

I stashed my notebook in my pocket and politely said goodbye.

As the party ended, the woman found me and slipped her card into my caviar-stained shirt.

Her name was Rooney Tarr, and she was a music manager—one of the biggest in the industry.

“Send me a demo,” she told me, and walked away.

The next morning before my shift at the local coffee shop, I did just that, and we’ve worked together ever since.

The first few years were rough. I poured my heart into demo after demo, but the critiques were all the same—the sound was too similar, the lyrics were too emotional, the chords too complicated, they had too many love songs already.

So I adapted, and once I found what I was good at—pop-rock anthems about best girlfriends and endless summer nights and living like that Tom Petty song—the rest just came naturally.

Rooney Tarr touted that I could write anything, and I could.

But I excelled at writing the kinds of songs you didn’t see coming. The unexpected. The new. I was a wheel constantly reinventing myself, searching for something perfect.

Something rare.

I wrote songs and scraped by on the royalties because, despite popular belief, songwriting royalties were awful even if you wrote hits.

After a while, with enough songs and a foothold in the industry, I should have gotten comfortable, slowed down, but I never did.

I just kept writing more and more and more—

Then Mom got sick.

And now I couldn’t write anything at all.

“It’s a curse,” I mumbled to myself, watching the same four suitcases rotate around the carousel until—finally—mine creaked around the corner. I hauled my beat-up neon-pink suitcase onto its wheels.

A moment later, my name echoed down baggage claim like an ominous siren—“ JOOOOOOOOO! ”

I turned around.

And there, sprinting toward me in a pickle costume and waving a sign that read you’re a real big dill now! was my best friend.

Whatever dread had clung to my heart evaporated. A laugh bubbled out of my mouth. I abandoned my suitcase and rushed toward her. She threw out her arms, poster flying away like a Frisbee, and I threw out mine, and we grabbed on to each other so tightly, I thought our spines would crack.

We almost toppled each other over, giggling.

Gigi always hugged like it’d be the last time we ever would.

It was one of her mindfulness exercises in college, and it stuck.

The costume smelled like chili cheese dogs and beer and beachy surf, and it scratched at my face angrily, and people were looking at us weirdos making a scene, and I didn’t care.

I was home .

Finally, she let go and looked me up and down with a critical squint. “Damn, are you sure you didn’t also have to check those bags under your eyes?”

I felt the grime of LA shuck off like an old skin. Lighter. And I couldn’t stop smiling. “Carry-on only. Could you imagine if I had to check these suckers?”

“They’d be over the weight limit,” she agreed, grabbing the handle of my suitcase, and walked me back to her car, illegally parked in the arrivals drop-off. She drove a beat-up yellow VW Bug that could barely fit my suitcase, never mind the plethora of costumes she had crammed in there for her job.

“I feel like a five-hour delay is a new record—how many of those were on the tarmac?” she asked.

“All five,” I moaned. “And I had the middle seat.”

She pushed my suitcase into her trunk beside a shrimp costume and one that looked like an anatomically correct heart. “That sounds like quite the pickle.” Then she finger-gunned me.

I gave her a deadpan look. My dark hair was pulled back into a sloppy braid, and I was sure I hadn’t gotten all the Cheetos out of it from sitting between two food-fighting siblings, and while I’d thought to put mascara on in the morning, if it was still there, it’d clung on by mistake.

I felt oily, and I smelled like an airplane, and my legs hurt from sitting that long.

“It was a big dill, yes,” I commented flatly.

She laughed and unzipped herself out of her costume.

Right there at the curb. Then again, Gigi was so used to quick changes in odd places that she didn’t even give it a second thought.

Unlike the traffic guard coming to tell us we had to move.

Under her costume, she had on her street clothes, a T-shirt that read revel at the revelry , high-waist denim shorts showing off her black floral tattoo accented against the warm brown skin of her thigh, and high-top Converses.

Her box braids were swirled up into a bun, and her chunky glasses matched the teal beads at the end of them.

We piled into the front seats and snapped on our seat belts.

“You ready?” she asked, and I hesitated for a moment.

We could buy a ticket to Spain , I wanted to suggest. Maybe Norway? Take a vacation—ignore this summer. Ignore everything that’s coming.

But there were some things I couldn’t run from even if I tried. That awful, curling dread returned to my stomach. “I’m glad to be home,” I replied, the lie tasting sour in my mouth.

She reached over and squeezed my hand tightly. She knew the truth. “We’ll get through it.”

Georgia was my oldest friend in the world. She knew me—the real me—on a level that no one else did.

A driver blared their horn behind us, wanting our spot in the airport pickup lane. Gigi threw them the bird out her open window, took her time putting her VW Bug into gear, and crept out of the parking spot.

“You’d think you’d be flying first class by now with all those royalties rolling in,” she commented, pulling out onto the highway for the long three-hour drive back home.

I scoffed. “ Ha .”

She shrugged. “I hear your song all the time! The Marge loves blasting the trap remix. It’s annoying, but also kinda cool, too.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “I haven’t heard it.”

She grabbed her phone on the console. “I think I have it on a playlist—”

“No!”

She glanced over at me with a frown. “Everything all right?”

I fiddled with my seat belt. “Oh, sure—I’m fine. I just don’t want to hear it right now, you know?”

“You’re probably sick of listening to it.”

“Yeah.” Something like that. “But you know what I do want? Do you got the goods?”

She scoffed. “As if you even have to ask.” She reached into the back seat and grabbed a greasy bag from Cook Out. “You know I always deliver.”

I dug into it. “Bless you.”

She always stopped by the drive-through before coming to pick me up because I was too cheap to get food at the airport, and too forgetful to bring anything with me from home. Cook Out was tradition. Hush puppies, two large Cheerwines, and a three-hour drive to Vienna Shores. The perfect life.

She handed me my large Cheerwine, and I sucked down half of it in one go.

I tried not to have too much soda in LA—it made my adult acne go nuts—but here?

There were no rules. And my skin liked Vienna Shores a lot better.

But when she presented the bag of hush puppies, she pulled it back when I tried to snatch it.

“Hey,” I complained. “C’mon, I’m starving.”

She sat the greasy bag down definitively in her lap. “Then tell me what’s wrong.” And she took a glance away from the road to glare at me.

I chewed on my straw.

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll feed all these pups to Buckley.”

Buckley was the Great Dane that she shared with her long-term boyfriend. Who just happened, by no small coincidence, to be my brother, Mitchell. We all grew up together, sort of like the Three Musketeers, except fifteen years later two of them decided to start banging backstage at the Revelry.

I gasped, stricken. “You will not . Buckley doesn’t deserve the pups!”

“And neither do you if you keep lying to me.”

I sank down in my seat, sullen. “I’m not lying,” I grumbled.

She held out for a moment longer, and then sighed and handed me the bag. “ Fine. I can’t stand the look on your face. You look hungry enough to gnaw off your own arm.”

“Aw, I’d gnaw yours off first,” I replied, shoving a hush puppy into my mouth.

Chewed slowly. Telling Gigi what was on my mind was something I didn’t want to do, but she was my best friend.

If anyone would understand, it was her. After I washed it down with Cheerwine, I asked, “Are we going to the Rev?”

“You don’t mind, do you?” She put her blinker on to merge into the next lane. “I promised Mitch I’d help out tonight. They’re a bit understaffed.”

“Really? Did someone quit?”

“It’s just for tonight,” she deflected.

I took a deep breath. Steeling myself. “And Mom … ?”

My best friend’s voice was perfectly neutral as she replied, “Don’t worry, she’ll be there. She’s having a good day.”

And there it was.

The reality of what I was coming back to.

We didn’t know how quickly Mom’s dementia would progress, so a few months ago Dad called asking if I could come home for a little longer this summer.

One last good summer. I hated the idea—as if all the other summers after this would suddenly be bad on principle.

It felt like everyone was just assuming the worst.

I felt that sometimes I was, too.

What was a good day, and what was a bad one?

I didn’t know, those were just the ominous words I’d heard over the phone these last few months.

I could have asked—maybe I should have—but I was scared to know, really.

My imagination kept coming up with new bad days, growing worse and worse with every Google search, teaching me a new impossibility.

“I’m glad it’s a good day,” I said, my voice quieter than usual.

Often these last few months, I imagined what Joni Lark’s life was like—the one people like Sebastian Fell imagined for me.

I wondered if that Joni would have a plan for this last great sun-soaked month, if she knew what to say to her mom, what to do about this strange emptiness in her chest, or if she was as afraid of it all as I was.

But here, in Georgia Simmons’s too-small car, I was just Jo. Nothing about my life was easy. So I pushed down that terrible mounting dread, and told my best friend the secret that was festering in that cold, terrible feeling in my chest, “I’m afraid of losing her, Gi.”