“No. You have to keep pushing. I’m not saying you need to do the exact same work. This experience has changed you, there’s no way around it. But you have to keep moving forward. Find your new voice.”

He set his soda on the table with a thunk. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. But it’s proving harder than expected. I’m all over the map, and Lara is about to throttle me.”

“Do you have to sell right now? Can you just take some time to figure out what you want to make? What you want to say?” I couldn’t imagine the pressure Brody must be under to not only create but also with knowing the world would judge whatever he put out there.

“It’s complicated. Art is a business. I’m just trying to find the happy medium between finding my truth again and having a career to come back to. But I think I bought myself a year by giving Lara the paintings she was boxing up today.”

I let out a low whistle. “A year is a good payday.”

“If she keeps to her end of the bargain. We’ll see if that happens.”

“Hold her to it,” I urged. “If she made a promise, she needs to stick to it.”

Brody grunted. “You don’t know Lara. The impression she gave today was polite and go-with-the-flow. She’s a bulldog when she wants something.”

“Then you’ll just have to be a bulldog right back.”

His lips twitched. “Maybe I’ll just sic you on her.”

“I am pretty ferocious.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Brody poured chips onto a napkin. “What about your music? You ever think about letting people hear it?”

My instinct was to clam up and change the subject. Instead, I took a deep breath before answering. This was a friendship. A back and forth. An opening up. “I used to. There was no greater high.”

“Why’d you stop?”

I rolled my lips together as I considered how to answer that without lying. “Life got…complicated. I lost the joy in playing. I stopped altogether for a while. And when I picked it back up again, I needed it to be for me. Someday, I’d like to play for other people again. But I’m not rushing it.”

Maybe that made me a wimp. Or perhaps it simply made me smart. Any time I played in front of another soul, it was a risk. The same as continuing to write letters to the aunt who had cared for me after my parents’ deaths. As calling Michael’s doctors to check on his progress for so many years, just to see how he was. But I couldn’t resist these small ties to my old life. Couldn’t give up the things that were as much a part of me as my own marrow.

“Maybe you could start by playing for me.”