The Unsinkable Greta James(50)

She nods in their direction. “Should we…”

But Conrad doesn’t answer. Instead, he walks up and lays his bare hand flat against the ice. It looks like a piece of abstract art, its curves not governed by any sort of logic except for the water streaming down in rivulets, forming muddy pools along the base of it.

“Listen,” she says, “I’m sorry about…”

“What?” he asks, turning to her, his eyes shadowy beneath the brim of his cap.

“I know it bothers you when people recognize me,” she says with a shrug.

He squints back up at the ice. “Not everything is about you, you know.”

“I know,” she says. But then, after a pause, she can’t help adding: “Though, in fairness, it feels like most things are. When it comes to you, anyway.”

He turns to her again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that we obviously have our differences.”

“And?”

“And you like to point them out.”

There’s a pause, and then a funny smile appears across his face. “I think I preferred your sullen teenage years.”

Greta can’t help laughing at this. “That’s because I hadn’t discovered therapy yet,” she says. “I just put all my feelings into terrible, overwrought songs.”

“Which you played incredibly loudly at all hours.”

“Come on,” she says with a grin. “You have to admit that ‘Life Sucks Hard’ was kind of a classic.”

Conrad shakes his head. “For a comfortable suburban kid, you sure had a lot of angst.”

“Well, the good news,” she says, “is that I figured out how to make a living off it.”

Right away, his face shifts. And right away, Greta feels herself bristling in response.

“Just because I don’t sit behind a desk all day,” she says in a hurry, forever on defense, “doesn’t mean it’s not hard work.”

“Hard work?” he repeats in a voice heavy with scorn.

“Yes.”

“You play the guitar.”

Greta balls her hands into fists at her sides. “Yeah, Dad, I play the guitar. Every single day. For hours and hours. I also write my own songs. And produce them too. I’m in the recording studio, and I deal with the business end of things, the branding and the publicity, not to mention that I’m on the road two hundred days a year and—”

“Not anymore.”

She narrows her eyes at him. Her nose is running from the cold, and she swipes at it with the back of her hand. “What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “You’re not on the road anymore.”

There’s a knot in her stomach, and it winds itself tighter now. She didn’t think he’d noticed. She didn’t think he’d been paying attention.

“I know you canceled your shows for the past few months,” he continues, raising his voice over the wind. “And that you postponed your tour.”

Greta swallows hard. “So?”

“So,” he says with infuriating patience, “if this dream job of yours is to play music, and you’re not even doing that, then what are you doing?”

“That’s not…” she begins, then realizes she isn’t sure how to finish the sentence. “That was…temporary. I’m playing Governors Ball on Sunday.” Before he can ask what that is, she adds, “It’s a festival. In New York. A big one.”

He studies her for a moment. “And what happens,” he says eventually, “if this doesn’t go well either?”

It’s bad enough, thinking about that last show she played.

It’s a million times worse hearing about it from her dad.

She assumed he was at least generally aware of what happened. It was hard not to be. But up until now, she had no idea if he’d actually seen the video.

Now she knows.

“The last one didn’t go well,” she says, choosing her words carefully, “because it was a week after Mom died. And because she wasn’t there that night, which just about killed me. And because I wrote that song for her, and that was the moment I realized she would never hear it.” Greta shakes her head, trying to tamp down her frustration. “I know you don’t get it. How could you when you’ve never even been to one of my shows?”

He looks offended by this. “That’s not true. I came out for the—”

“The album release? Yeah. But only because Mom insisted.”

“We both know that’s not exactly my scene,” he says with a shrug.

“You think it was Mom’s scene? She came to all those shows because she wanted to support me. Not because she was some huge closet indie music fan.”

His face softens a little. “Yeah, but she loved it.”

“That’s because she loved me,” Greta says, half-shouting at him over the wind. “How do you not get that?”

“I do,” he says, surprisingly contrite. “That’s why I went.”

“Well, it was hard to tell. You spent the entire night in the corner of the bar, looking like you’d rather be anywhere else.”

He gives her a level look. “Can you blame me?”

Greta opens her mouth, then closes it again. The wind is like static all around her. She’s tempted to pretend not to understand what he means, but she knows that’s not fair. That this conversation was inevitable. Even so, she doesn’t feel ready for it.