I tilted my head. I remembered the picking. I remembered following along behind Tuck. But I didn’t remember humming. It was because my mind had been free to roam, I imagined, like it was now, my body moving from tree to tree, reaching and plucking, reaching and plucking. Daydreaming as I worked. I wondered if that was when I’d first started composing “Find You in the Dark”—the melody, if not the lyrics—which became the single that had catapulted my career into the stratosphere. Because the thing was, when I wrote that song, and the others on the album too, they’d all felt so effortless, like they’d lived inside me all my life, and had just been waiting to be set free.

They could have picked up any pretty girl off the street and created Nova. They didn’t need talent. They needed compliance.

I sucked in a breath, once again shoving aside the words Tuck had volleyed at me on the plane. He’d said them out of resentment at being exposed. The problem was…they hit hard because it was a vulnerability. He must have known that and that’s why he’d said it. To hurt me back.

I hadn’t written anything nearly as inspired since “Find You in the Dark.” My deepest fear, the one I didn’t like to think about, was that that was all I had. The well had run dry. I was a one-hit wonder and nothing more.

Maybe it was why I pushed myself so hard to milk every drop I could from all the recent opportunities I’d been given. Because there wouldn’t be more after this. The Louis Vuitton I’d tossed aside really was the last luxury item I’d ever own, the final sign of my once shooting star that had fizzled to the ground. A part of me wanted to run back and snatch that suitcase from whatever animal was now burrowed inside of it.

A void opened inside me as words attached to the fear that had been skating at the edge of my brain for years, the one I’d refused to really think about. The one Tuck had clearly seen and thrown at me.

I massaged my temples and looked at Tuck. He was watching me, a look of curiosity on his face as though he was mesmerized by the shifting nature of my thoughts. He’d noticed I was humming too, and I hadn’t even realized until Tuck had mentioned it. A cascade of emotions tumbled through me: bitterness, fear, happiness, uncertainty, hope. I couldn’t grasp any of them, because they were all fleeting, and I didn’t know what to attach them to.