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TWENTY-SEVEN

MILLIE

Still March

Everyone knows the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

I’ve run the gambit of them over the last few months. The moment Gavin walked out of his apartment, leaving me there with my mouth on the floor, I entered my first stage: denial.

There was no way he’d actually ended things. That was a certainty in my mind. So I did what any rational person would do. I packed up my stuff, drove to my mother’s house, and waited for him to call.

The phone never rang.

Christmas passed without a word. Without a single text. Then I saw photos of him circulating online. He was out and about with his brothers, smiling and laughing and looking as if he’d already moved on.

That’s when anger set in. If he could be out and about having a grand ole time, then so could I. Pissed off, I called Chrishell and Taylor and made plans to fuck him out of my system. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how one looks at it—Chrishell and Taylor continued to disappointment me. They were nothing if not predictable, I suppose. When I was adamant about not attending my father’s New Year’s Eve party, they were conveniently too busy to hang out.

Apparently, I was only worth their time if it meant hanging out with my brother and his NHL friends at my dad’s party.

The truth hit me hard then. There wasn’t a single person in my life who was willing to show up just for me.

I wasn’t enough.

So I got on a plane back to Paris and entered my bargaining stage. Depression slid in quickly from there. I told myself that I’d do anything to stop feeling so empty, so morose. I drank too much, ate absurd amounts of chocolate, ignored calls from my parents and Daniel, dedicated all my attention to work, and got my nipples pierced.

That last one was drastic, yes, but since Gavin had always been obsessed with my tits, I suddenly hated them and knew only changing them would solve that problem.

Then my father showed up at my door in February, suitcase in hand, eyes weary and arms open.

“Daddy, what are you doing here?”

“You don’t return my calls, and you didn’t come home for Christmas. I miss you.” My father stood in the hallway, his face etched in lines of desperation and sadness. But he was here. Present. He’d shown up for me. And it was in that moment that I knew it was time.

Time to grow up. Time to admit to my father what Gavin had begged me to tell him almost two years ago. How music had been my dream. How I’d wanted to work with him but had been devastated when he gave half the company to Lake. How it wasn’t so much their relationship that caused the rift between us, but how he’d stopped seeing me when he met her.

Not in the real sense, but in the figurative sense. He’d stopped being my person.

It had taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that my father had simply fallen in love.

He hadn’t done those things intentionally. He wasn’t Chrishell or Taylor. He wasn’t even like my mother. He’d gotten swept up in his own love story—something I finally understood, because I’d lost mine.

I rushed into my father’s arms, and then over dinner, I opened up. About all of it. Except Gavin.

“I never knew.” He shook his head, his face a mask of shock.

I shrugged. “I didn’t know how to say it.” My face heated in embarrassment. “I felt like a whiney teenager who just wanted her dad’s attention.”

“The company is yours, Millie. I want it to be. I’ll turn over my shares to you right now. Hell, I’ll talk to Lake. We’ll figure something out?—”

I held up my hand as a wave of painful relief hit me. Somehow, just having my dad finally see me—having him recognize that I was lost—freed me.

It was in that moment that I realized that the dream I’d been clinging to was no longer what I wanted. Like my dad, I wanted to build my own life. For almost two years, I’d watched Sienna run her company on her own terms. Even though fashion wasn’t my passion, standing on my own two feet was.

So after my father and I spent the weekend reconnecting, I gave Sienna my notice and started working at the bar in Paris where Gavin and I had gone that first time he came to visit me, singing when I could and tending bar to pay my bills.

Most of my songs are written while there are tears in my eyes and snot running down my face because even though I’m finally doing what I love, I miss the man who opened my eyes to the truth about why I was unhappy. The man I buried myself in to hide from all the hurt. The man I used as a Band-Aid to cover my emotional wounds. Gavin was right to break up with me. I just wish it hadn’t taken losing him to realize how wrong everything else in my life was.

I like to think I’m now living between the depression stage and acceptance.

That realization, unfortunately, doesn’t change my circumstances. And that’s why I’m currently sitting at the piano in the club, crooning another sad love song, much to the crowd’s dismay.

As I finish my set, with tears streaming down my face, I look up and find Sienna and Gabe watching from the crowd. My neck goes hot, and I suck in a breath. Then I scramble to my feet and rush off the stage, swiping at my eyes with the backs of my hands, knowing I must look like a wreck.

“Bonjour.” I kiss Gabe on both cheeks, then Sienna. Then, wringing my hands, I clear my throat. “What brings you here?”

Sienna gives me a pitying frown.

Gabe’s expression is one of pure guilt, making it clear who I should blame for this unexpected visit.

“It had to be done,” he says in his thick French accent. “You don’t even brush your hair anymore.”

I pat at my head and scowl. “I do too.”

Sienna studies me in her quiet way, her head tilted to one side. “No, I don’t think you do.”

I sigh and drop into a seat at their table. There’s no avoiding this little intervention. That’s obvious. When they sit too, I wave to the bartender, silently signaling that I need a drink.

With a cocktail in hand, I’m feeling only a modicum better, but I force myself to meet Sienna’s green eyes. “I know this looks bad, but seriously, I’m fine. This is what I want to do. Write music. Do this on my own. Just like you did with the fashion industry.”

She arches a brow and sips her dirty martini. “Like I did?”

“Yeah. How you bucked your family’s plan for you and paved your own way.”

“My family wasn’t in the fashion industry.” She takes another long sip, her eyes locked on me, warning me not to interrupt. Then she sets her drink on the table. “I didn’t do it all on my own. Beckett lent me the money for the start-up because my parents refused. Gavin set me up with the company jet without my parents’ knowledge every time I had a meeting. Brooks sat with me in the back of a limo with his arm around me while I cried and hyperventilated into his jacket because I was so afraid of failing. Aiden posted almost daily on every social media outlet he could find about how proud he was of me and how everyone needed to see my designs.” She presses her lips together, her expression pitying again. “If my family hadn’t offered to help, and if I hadn’t accepted it, I would not be sitting across from you wearing my own design, in a room filled with people whose outfits are in some small part influenced by me, chiding you for being so obtuse.”

Heat creeps up my neck and into my cheeks so quickly I drop my head in an effort to hide. “But you had people who believed in you. I don’t have that.”

Sienna’s face softens. “Yes, I have four brothers who would do anything for me. Maybe Daniel and Paul have been too busy to notice you floundering, but I know for certain that, at one point, you had the full support of one of my brothers.”

My breath catches in my throat, and I sputter, searching for a denial.

“Please,” she tuts, picking up her glass. “I’ve never seen my brother so taken by someone. Anyone with eyes could tell he’d bend over backward for you.”

I swallow down my nerves and breathe deeply, trying to keep a straight face. “I-I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

She smiles. “Oh, Gavin may love me, but I’ve never seen him more in my life than I did last year. I don’t believe for a second it was because he’s got some hockey thing going in Paris. The man was here to see you. And the song you sang that night, the one about forbidden love, that was about him, right?”

I flatten my lips and pull my shoulders back, refusing to give an inch.

“Listen, I’m twenty-six and alone. I’ve never had a love like that. But I have an amazing career. And that’s thanks to my family. I may not have gone into the family business, but I definitely used my family connections to get where I am.

“Yes, our last names come with certain expectations, and sometimes they weigh us down and make us feel like we need to run in the opposite direction of our parents to be taken seriously, but if you really want to make a career of writing music, then you have to take all the help you can get.

“And if you find a love like you so clearly had with my brother, you don’t walk away from it.”

Her words hang between us as my already shattered heart disintegrates further.

Gavin tried to tell me he loved me, but I wouldn’t hear it. He begged me to tell my family about my music, and I kept my mouth shut.

“What if it’s too late?” I whisper, barely able to breathe past the weight pressing down on my chest.

A pleased smile forms on Sienna’s lips. “What if it’s not?”