“You can spend the money your dad gives you.” He was only driving with one hand, but if she said anything about it, he’d just get mad. “I saw your dad when he was here for the funeral. He even talked to me. He’s a lot nicer than your mom. Seriously. Someday I’m going to have cool clothes like him and ride around in a limo.”

Riley didn’t like it when people talked about her dad, which they always wanted to do, like they thought she’d introduce them or something when she hardly ever saw him. Now that her mom was dead, he planned to transfer Riley to Chatsworth Girls, which was a boarding school where everybody would hate her because she was fat and nobody would want to be her friend except to get near her dad. She went to Kimble now, but it wasn’t a boarding school, and even being in the same classes with her cousin Trinity was better than a sleepover school. She’d begged her dad to let her stay at Kimble and live with Ava in an apartment or something, but he’d said that wouldn’t work out.

Which was why she had to find her brother.

He was really her half-brother, and he was a secret. Only a few people knew Riley and he were related, and even Riley wouldn’t have known that her dad had this other kid a long, long time ago if she hadn’t overheard her mom’s old boyfriend talking to her mom about it. Her mom was one of the Moffatt Sisters, along with Aunt Gayle, Trinity’s mom. They’d been performing together since they were fifteen, but they hadn’t had a hit on the country charts in six years, and their new CD Everlasting Rainbows hadn’t been doing too good, which was why they’d gone on the paddle wheeler that night, to do a promotion for a bunch of radio people visiting Nashville for a conference. Now, with all the publicity about her mom drowning, the CD was at the top of the charts. Riley thought her mom would be happy about this, but she wasn’t sure.

Her mom had been thirty-eight when she died, two years older than Aunt Gayle. They were both skinny with blond hair and big boobs, and a couple of weeks before the accident, Riley’s mom had gone to Aunt Gayle’s face doctor and gotten these shots in her lips that made them big and puffy. Riley thought she’d looked like a fish, but her mom had told Riley to keep her stupid opinions to herself. If Riley had known her mom was going to fall off the riverboat and drown, she would never have said anything.