What if Oscar hadn’t even made it to rehearsal? What if he couldn’t face it? He’d sounded better in that last voicemail, but—

I clenched my fists.

Kudzu Giants were deep into the song now—catchy, I had to admit, the guitars making this susurration with their strumming that seemed to imitate the movement of the ocean. I wondered if they could imitate forks.

“Stop freaking out,” Jules whispered, turning my head to face her. “This is fun. You deserve to have fun!”

I bobbed along with the music to show I was trying.

“Yes!” she said, shoving me. I wondered if she’d managed to sneak past the stamp restrictions at the bar. “This is what I mean. It’s not just saying hell no, you know? You need to seize life, Ruby. Plunder it. Don’t think about other people—you do that too much. Take it. Like a goddamn pirate.”

Did I think about other people too much? Was there such a thing as too much? Didn’t we all owe each other something by virtue of being alive at the same time? And when you loved someone, it was a contract. You could walk, break it, fight against the pain, but you’d wind up like Mom. Or feeling the way I felt right now. Fragmented.

Without a pause, the band transitioned into a new song—one that sounded eerily familiar, like I’d heard it a long time ago, played by a different band.

Was it a cover, classical, something that they’d adapted? Or . . . no.

It was “Sparkler,” a Kudzu Giants original, but to me it was Oscar’s, forever and always, the song he’d turned into the Kudzu Variations. I remembered him now as he was in that handheld YouTube video—not a lightning strike—just a bright spark, playful. Free.

I gripped the railing while Jules’s advice replayed in my head. “Take what you want.”

My whole life had been spent collecting definitions, one after another, piling up, cluttering my brain. The music washed over me, and I let go of them, one by one, watching them drop over the edge onto the crowd beneath us.

Musician.

Socialite.

Daughter.

Muse.

Anchorite.

All gone. I was Ruby. This was my life. So—what did I want? More than anything else in the whole, real, world? Right this second, now, now, now?

I answered the question before I’d even finished posing it, engines firing.

To hear Oscar’s symphony.

I turned to Jules.

“A for effort.” She kissed me on the forehead. “Tell him I say hi.”

And with that, I was off, through the crowd, out the door. I flagged a lit-up cab—seconds before it was taken. Then I ran to Madison, waving wildly just in case, towers of lights cheering me on in every direction. Thunder grumbled above, louder than the city drone, and the skies opened up.