Ruin Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 10 of 32

Chapter 10: Nashville

I typed back with both thumbs.

You stole my grandmother.

Three dots. Then nothing. Then a single laughing emoji.

Marlee took the phone away from me again and blocked the new number.

"Screenshot first," I said.

"Already did. I screenshot everything. I'm a sound engineer. We hoard."

We didn't sleep.

At six in the morning I sat on the porch steps in a blanket and watched the fog lift off the rickhouse roofs.

By the time the sun was up, I was angry enough to drive to Nashville, except I didn't have a car.

"I have a car," Marlee said from the doorway.

"Your car can't back over a curb."

"It can make it to Tennessee. Probably."

Monday morning we left at seven in the silver Civic with the muffler rattling the whole way down I-65.

Velvet Hour Audio was on the second floor of an old brick warehouse near the river, over a coffee roaster.

I'd never been there. In three years I'd only met Lyman twice, both times at a hotel bar.

The elevator was a freight cage. Marlee pulled the gate shut.

"What's the plan?" she asked.

"I'm going to say it to his face."

"That's not a plan. That's a feeling."

"It's what I've got."

The doors opened on exposed brick, Edison bulbs and a long open office full of young people at standing desks wearing headphones.

On the back wall hung a framed poster six feet tall.

A woman's silhouette in gold, mouth open against a black background. HONEY VALE. RUIN ME.

And under it, a newer banner, the vinyl still curling at the corners.

HONEY VALE, LIVE. NASHVILLE. SUNDAY 6 DECEMBER.

In the middle of the room, under ring lights, a photographer was shooting a young woman on a velvet stool.

She was maybe twenty-six, very pretty, with long honey-brown hair in a loose braid.

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