Between Breaths (The Seattle Sound Series Book 2) Read Free Page B

our relationship. My last memory of her was a blurred image of her being loaded into a police car.
    My dad was a quiet, introspective man. Almost a caricature of an artist from an era long past. But he’d been dead-set serious about two things: always treat women with respect and never, ever have sex with a woman I didn’t plan to spend my life with. He’d learned the second lesson the hard way when he was forced to marry his pregnant college girlfriend.
    She’d lost the child two weeks after the wedding, but divorce wasn’t common in the sixties, making the marriage much harder to dissolve. He spent nearly twenty unhappy years with a woman he not only didn’t love, but didn’t respect. Thankfully for my father, his ex-wife didn’t like the music-teacher salary and upgraded to a financial executive sometime in the eighties.
    Several years later, Dad met my mother when he flew to Seattle for a guest lecture series. She’d been a promising concert pianist, and he one of her teachers. I’d never understood their relationship and not just because my dad was her father’s age at least. Neither had my mum, it turned out.
    I’d missed her for the first couple of years after my dad and I moved to Melbourne, expecting her to show up laughing as she ran toward me for a hug. Her laugh—that’s what I remembered. A fairy’s laugh that made me believe in the magic she spoke of so often.
    But she never came; she never even called.
    So I stayed in Australia, through uni. Dad held on, through one illness after another, pleased with my growing knowledge of music theory and expanded musical capabilities.
    I’d hit college hard because I had something to prove after my too-quiet youth spent with a kindly, puttering piano teacher who wore cardigans over his stooped shoulders in the heat of summer. Even Ets didn’t approve of my media-loving, bad-boy-off-the-rails actions during our first small Aussie tour. After one of our concerts, I met Asher Smith, one of my heroes and an all-around fabulous bloke. He’d pointed out I’d fallen for all the vices of fame without the trappings of success. To some degree, I owed Asher a debt.
    I’d read in an online paper he’d reconnected with the woman he’d loved years before. The woman we talked about during our late-night philosophical ramblings. I couldn’t be happier for him.
    I turned back toward the hotel, my sneakers pounding against the rain-slicked pavement. My stride was long, confident—the one thing I could control in this city of my childhood. A small flash of excitement bubbled through my melancholy as The Edgewater, my hotel—one that had hosted a long list of rocker guests—came into my field of vision. I loved the view, the illusion I could reach out and touch the crisp, navy waves so different from the ones in Wollongong, my favorite Sydney beach.
    I slowed to a jog, then a walk, shocked by the crowds pushing through the narrow streets that led to Pike Place Market. I ducked into a coffee shop, asking for a latte as the crowd eddied and boiled with early-morning commuters stopping for breakfast and a paper.
    As a young mother strapped her child onto her body in some sling contraption, a memory bubbled up, breaking past my normal defenses. I stared up into my mum’s face, her brown hair swinging forward, covering us both. She’d liked to play outside, no matter the weather. “I breathe out here, Hayden. Don’t take the connection with nature for granted. It grounds us.”
    I’d loved our hours-long rambles, the swish of her skirts through the grass. Her sun-warmed hair when she picked me up and carried me, exhausted, back to the house.
    But my mum ditched me. Not the other way ’round. I gripped my latte and trudged back to my hotel.

Chapter 4
    B riar

    G oing back to Seattle meant facing the reason I’d left in the first place, and the long drive left too much time for my mind to conjure the months-old memories that caused me to break off my relationship with