“The ‘world’ wants you as you’ve always been. Theirs. You don’t belong to yourself. You belong to the more than two hundred people who depend on you for their livelihood—from the roadies and costume designers to your website techs and tour personnel. And you belong to the record industry—the TV hosts, BRW shareholders, the stores’ sales staff and even the factory workers who manufacture your CDs. You are a big business. And you want to walk out from it all to play dolls?”

“I’m opening up to the most incredible experience of my life. To have a child is to believe in everything all over again.”

He gathered some papers and flipped through the bills in his money clip, counting. “We are our work. The factory worker is no less chained to his machine than the president of the United States is chained to the Oval Office. No one has the freedom to walk away. Not Jean-Claude, not Mauriello—not even me.”

“I’m not walking away from my work—”

“There are three million castaway babies in China. Yesterday, a cameraman found a live one peeking from a garbage bag when he was trying to take a discreet leak in the market. I saw a dead one under a bush in the Forbidden City. Are you going to adopt them all?”

The truth hit her. The gap that yawned between them had opened the moment Lulu was thrust into her arms. “From the start, you had no intention of adopting Lulu!” she called out. “You just humored me, dragged me along with false hopes!” She scrambled to her feet. “Lulu is a fact in my life—she’s no longer an option to deliberate about. She’s my daughter.”

A vein bulged in his brow. “You’re pushing me into reminding you what happened the last time you cared for a baby—”

The room turned hollow, airless, the floor dropping from under her feet. Suddenly she saw the two of them in new roles. She was in the audience, watching him on stage with a clear vision of who he was, who she was. Then their life together was like a magnificent stage floor being dismantled, exposing the roughly hewn lumber, nails, ropes, then collapsing.

“I will adopt her. With or without your consent.” Nola walked backwards as she spoke. “And if I am so important to so many people, let it be for a reason beyond selling more CDs. I can be the voice for these other babies. I am going to make sure someone stops their dying.”

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 10

Stepping outside the hotel doors, Nola stopped. She registered the paparazzi, a wriggling mess, like a beached school of jellyfish.

The sky was still overcast, low clouds connecting it to the earth. The air was moist with the smell of rotten roots and fried food. “No comment,” she mumbled again and again to their questions. “No comment.”