She winced. “I need to fix this.”
“I’m afraid your idea of fixing it might be different from his.”
“I won’t know that until I talk to him. Please. Call him on your phone.”
“Exactly how self-destructive do you think I am? I need him.”
The stubborn set of his jaw told her no amount of pressure would make him agree. Who else would know where he was? Maybe his friend Ritchie Collins, the Stars’ wide receiver she’d met that night in Phoenix? “Ritchie! How do I find him?”
“Ritchie’s on a mission trip to Haiti with his church.”
“Shit. Who are his other friends on the team?”
“Most everybody, but if you think I’m handing over a roster, you’re wrong.”
“His agent, then. He has to talk to his agent, right?”
Clint gave her an oily smile. “A guy named Heath Champion. The top sports agent in the business. And a word of advice: they don’t call him ‘the Python’ for nothing.”
*
Superagent Heath Champion’s office was all intimidation with lacquered walls, luxury leather, and a set of silver-framed family photos to give it a human touch—a pretty auburn-haired woman and some children. The man himself—rugged, hard-edged, handsome in an intimidating way—regarded her with cool politeness. “That would be a violation of agent-client privilege.”
“I’m not going to kill him!” she exclaimed. “I just want to talk to him.”
He gazed at her over his desk. “So you’ve said. But Thad’s had some stalking incidents in the past.”
“Do I look like a stalker?”
“You do seem a little unhinged.”
And that was why they called him the Python.
She was getting nowhere, although she did contemplate the possibility of trading her own easygoing agent for this hard-edged browbeater. She planted her hands on his desk and leaned forward. “Throw me a bone, Mr. Champion. Who can I talk to who won’t care so much about your precious agent-client privilege?”
Six hours later, she was in Louisville, Kentucky.
*
Thad’s mother was the coldest, most hostile woman Olivia had ever met. Understandably so, Olivia reluctantly admitted, since Dawn Owens also believed Olivia was stalking her son.
She appeared to be in her fifties, but Olivia calculated she was older. She could have been a model for senior fashions with her slender body, light brown bob, good skin, and Thad’s perfect nose.
“I’m not a stalker. I swear,” Olivia said, which only made her seem more like a stalker. She tried to peer past Mrs. Owens’s tall silhouette into the front hallway of the Owenses’ colonial-style home: brass wall sconces, a grandfather clock, no Thad. She tried again. “I’m Olivia Shore. Google me. I’m completely respectable. Thad and I traveled together for a month promoting Marchand Timepieces. We’re friends. And I—” She knew she was looking crazier by the second, but she couldn’t help herself. “And I love him. With all my heart.”
Mrs. Owens pointed toward the street. “Leave before I call the police.”
Olivia gave it one more try. “I’ve driven all the way from Chicago. Is he here?”
Thad’s mother turned her head toward the foyer. “Greg, call the police.”
A deep, male voice—but not the one she wanted to hear—rumbled from inside the house. “Thad’s on the phone, Dawn. He says to let her in and feed her, but that’s all. Hold on. Uh-huh . . . Uh-huh . . . He says if she seems like she’s drunk, put her up in his room for the night and don’t let her drive, but kick her out first thing in the morning.”
Totally defeated, Olivia rubbed her cheek and turned away toward the front sidewalk. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”
“Wait,” Dawn Owens said from behind her. “Come in.”
*
Thad’s old bedroom was disappointingly stripped of his childhood mementos. The ivory walls displayed a series of floral watercolors instead of sports posters. There were no shelves full of Little League trophies, no abandoned Trapper Keepers, or boxes of old mix tapes. It wasn’t as though his parents had forgotten him, however. The downstairs was filled with photographs of Thad at every stage of his life.
His father, Greg, was an accountant, a good-looking one—tall and lean like his son, but with salt-and-pepper hair. Over dinner last night, he’d confessed to Olivia he had little interest in football unless his son was in the game. “I’d rather read. Dawn’s the athletic one.”
“I played division three varsity basketball all through college,” Dawn said.
Despite Thad’s directive, his parents had not kicked her out first thing this morning, but since it was already ten o’clock and she had another performance the following night, she needed to get on the road. As she packed up the toiletries she’d tossed in her overnight bag before she’d left Chicago, Dawn spoke up from her perch on the side of the guest bed. “I wish you could stay longer.”
“Me, too. You really didn’t need to put me up, you know. I could have found a hotel.”
“But then I’d have missed the opportunity to entertain a world-famous opera singer.”
Olivia smiled. “At least now you know I’m not a stalker.”
Dawn laughed, not at all embarrassed. “Or a big drinker, despite what Thad said. That boy . . .”
“Is a menace.” Last night, Olivia had told Dawn far more than she’d intended about her relationship with Thad, including an account of her drunken tussle with him on the terrace that first night in Phoenix. Thad’s mother had proven to be the perfect listener—nonjudgmental, sympathetic, and unshockable.
Olivia had to ask. “Do you have any advice for me?”
“I’d love nothing more than for things to work out between the two of you.”
Olivia heard the hesitation in her voice. “But?”
“But . . . I’m not saying this to hurt you.” She busied herself rubbing her hands along the thighs of her khaki slacks. “I’ve never known Thad not to go after something he really wants.”
The truth of those words cut right through her. If Thad wanted her, he would have talked to her by now.
*
On Friday, the day of the next performance, she took a late-morning yoga class, picked at her lunch, and nursed her pain. She wanted to cry, but she stomped around her apartment instead—livid with herself for falling for such an insensitive, arrogant jerk.
Her anger took her through another spectacular performance.
Only as she lay on Radamès’s tomb, mourning the part she’d played in his death, did the fog clear from her brain. She’d learned a lot about herself recently, things she wanted to share with him. Things he did not want her to share.
As Aida and Radamès died behind the tomb walls, she saw herself years from now, padding to her apartment door just like Batista Neri, her hair lusterless from the black dye she’d use to conceal her gray. Maybe wearing a similar pair of run-down bedroom slippers. She’d let her students in one by one, doing her best to train them, even as she couldn’t quite suppress the bitterness that she no longer possessed the voice or the stamina to sing Amneris or Azucena. That she didn’t have the agility to play Cherubino. That she’d be laughed off the stage if she attempted the sultry Carmen.