Every Song He Stole Was Mine novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Tell Me to Drive You Home

By the time I got through the crowd, Kiera was gone.

I stood in the doorway looking at an empty hall and a security guard eating a granola bar.

"Who are you looking for?" Jude asked behind me.

"Nobody."

"You're white as paper, Joanna."

"She hummed something." I turned to face him. "A tune my father whistled when I was a kid. It's not in any song. I never played it for anyone but him."

"Who else could have heard it?"

"Dax. He sat in our kitchen for six years. He must have heard me hum it. He must have told her."

"Why would he do that?"

"I don't know." I pushed my hair back with both hands. "To scare me."

Jude looked at me for a long moment, and he did not say what he was thinking.

I was grateful for that.

"Come on," he said. "I'll drive you to Tilda's."

His car was an old black sedan with a cracked leather seat and a pile of cassette cases on the dashboard.

I got in and pulled the seat belt across me.

He drove, and I watched his hands on the wheel.

They were big hands with square knuckles and a faded burn scar on the left thumb.

The windshield wipers went back and forth, because it had started to rain.

I had not noticed.

"I need to say something," I said.

"All right."

"On Saturday morning, in the car, you said you were sorry about the card."

"I am."

"No. Let me finish." My voice shook. "I was twenty-three. I mailed that tape to your label with my last forty dollars for the postage and a prayer. I walked to the mailbox every day for six weeks."

He did not speak.

"The card came on a Tuesday, in the rain. I read it standing at the mailbox with my coat over my head. It said my song did not fit your needs."

"Joanna."

"I decided right then that I was never any good. I put the songs in a drawer. I met a man at an open mic who told me my songs were beautiful, and I let him carry them, because I had already decided nobody else would."

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