I Have Lost My Way(35)

Mom looked astonished, as if she didn’t quite recognize the song or the person singing. “Well,” she said. “It’s certainly different.”

“It’s not arranged, but I was going for a more stripped-down sound,” I said. “Maybe just percussion and some piano.”

“It is unique,” Mom said, “with the Ethiopian melodies in there. I imagine Hayden hasn’t heard anything like that.”

She was warming to the song. I could tell. So could Sabrina. She put her foot down. “I’m not singing that.”

“Honey,” Mom said. “Let’s be professional about this.”

“Professional? How is airing Freya’s daddy issues in front of Hayden Booth professional?”

“What are you talking about?” I yelled.

“It’s been seven years,” she said, tapping her chest. “Get over it.”

“You get over it!” I shouted.

“Maybe I will. Maybe I’m tired of taking care of you.”

“That’s what you call it? Because I’d call it undermining me. Or back-drafting off me.”

When I got angry, I boiled. When Sabrina got mad, she froze. It was one of the millions of things that differentiated us. But at that moment, the weather changed. Sabrina blazed with a fury that set the whole room on fire, before it sucked in on itself and her face went blank, her voice went icy.

“If you sing that song,” she told me, “you sing it alone.”



* * *



— — —

We agreed to sing “The Space Between” and practiced all night without actually speaking. We were still not speaking when we drove down to Hayden’s offices the next day. But the minute the elevator doors opened, my anger evaporated and I was left with a weirdly homesick feeling. I wanted to take it all back. To sing as we had that night in bed or to clasp hands as we’d done last time we’d faced Hayden. But Sabrina stood with her arms rigid, her fists balled, her face statue-still.

Mom checked in with the assistant. Sabrina and I sat down.

“Sabrina,” I whispered. “About ‘Little White Dress’ . . .”

“Don’t!” she hissed. She swiveled around to me, her eyes hard little kernels, and opened her mouth to continue, but at that moment Hayden’s assistant called her name. She stood up. I stood too.

“He wants you separately this time,” the assistant said.

A feeling of dread came over me. It was like watching the girl in the horror movie descending the stairs into the basement alone. You wanted to yell, but even if you did, she never listened.

Sabrina went into the office, and I sat down next to Mom, my knees bobbing up, down, up, down. Mom put her hand on them, but it didn’t help. Through the door I heard Sabrina sing “The Space Between,” the song we were meant to sing together. After she finished, she stayed in a long time, the low tones of their murmured conversation impossible to decipher. Mom started to look nervous. “Wonder what they’re talking about?” she said, staring endlessly at her phone, as if Sabrina was going to mentally text her the news.

I told myself Hayden was giving her another lecture about fame. I told myself Hayden was asking her about our videos, or our brand strategy, or inquiring where she saw herself in ten years.

But I couldn’t shake the bad feeling that we’d walked into this building as the Sisters K but were going to leave as something else.

I heard Sabrina singing again. But not “The Space Between” or any of the other songs we’d written together. She was singing “Tschay Hailu.” The song my father sang to me. The first song we’d ever sung together.

And that’s when I knew. She’d betrayed me.





4





YOU MUST DO THINGS THE PROPER WAY



When they leave the diner, something’s different. None of them can say what. But Nathaniel knows he’s heard Freya’s song before, even though he’s never watched a YouTube music video in his life. And Freya remembers Harun’s boyfriend, even though she gets hundreds of thousands of comments. And Harun is here today, with Freya, even though she is Freya.



* * *



— — —

As they walk aimlessly, Nathaniel asks shy questions about what happened to Freya’s voice.

She has asked herself the same questions, but she still can’t explain the loss. She tells Nathaniel and Harun about the day before it all went sideways, how she’d sung hard, too hard, pushed herself past her boundaries, so when she came in the next morning, unable to sing, everyone thought it was strain. She was given the morning off and a massage courtesy of Hayden’s personal masseuse. But that afternoon it was even worse, and the next day worse yet. And she knew it wasn’t a strain—that, she would feel. This was an absence. This was the thing she’d always done, always known how to do, vacating her, like a soul leaving a body after death. “Don’t overthink it,” her mother advised her, but that assumed Freya had ever thought about how to sing in the first place. She’d sung her first note when she was one minute old. Singing was something she’d done as automatically as breathing. And suddenly she couldn’t sing. Some days, she could barely breathe.

“When did all this happen?” Harun asks.