As she came through the door, she was surprised to find her father still in the studio. He was sitting on the floor, a fan of albums spread around him.

“Looking for something?”

“I’m doing the Laurel Canyon sound tomorrow night.” There seemed to be an order to the scattered albums, and he kept swapping them out. He looked like a teenager on his bedroom floor.

“Not enough David Crosby?”

“Too much Crosby,” said Jason, his face stern. “Not enough Joni Mitchell.”

Lara made a face behind his back. She wasn’t as big a Joni Mitchell fan as her father. “How about Buffalo Springfield? Maybe ‘Expecting to Fly’? Haven’t heard that one in a while.”

From the corner of her eye, she could see him smile. He was always proud when she knew her music.

Jason stood up, knees cracking, and plunked himself heavily in his desk chair, which faced hers.

Housed in the old Main Street pharmacy, 99.7 K-ROCK’s focal point in the office was a giant stained-glass mortar and pestle that had once been centered over the bar. At some point, the glass at the top of the pestle had fallen out and been replaced by a wad of kelly-green tape.

Their desks sat in what used to be the candy aisle. As a kid, Lara and her friends raced to this very spot to grab a small paper bag and fill it to the top with Swedish Fish, salty pumpkin seeds, SweeTarts, and her favorite, the now unpopular fake Winston candy cigarettes.

Growing up, it had been nice having a somewhat famous father. His band, Dangerous Tendencies, had cut two studio albums in the late 1970s. He still had a lot of fans who wrote him, so they’d created a weekly syndicated radio show on music of the ’70s across twenty-seven radio stations in the US, Europe, and Japan. It was a lucrative contract and gave her father a new fan base. Advertising was up and between the two of them, the radio station venture was beginning to work. The station still hadn’t turned anywhere near a profit yet, so she was making payroll with the money she had left from her grandfather’s inheritance. She calculated how long she had to turn around the business—about fifteen months.