“You’re such a good friend, Blythe.”
“I know, right? A regular humanitarian ready to donate my body to the cause. There should be an award.” He gave her a one-arm hug as she walked him off the bus.
She felt the shift when his demeanor changed. “I have to ask you something. Something serious.”
Kylie contemplated making a joke about one of the Tailgate Twins, but his expression said he was actually serious this time so she didn’t. “Shoot.”
“Would it be okay if I got a ride home with Mia and Lily? I think this is my last stop, Ryans. I know a few guys who can be here tomorrow to replace me.”
It should have upset her for yet another guy to walk out on her. But it didn’t. She understood.
“Yeah. That’s probably a good idea. And no worries. I can call Aiden and see if he can meet up with us at the next stop.” She couldn’t even remember where that was off the top of her head. The whole damn tour was becoming one big messed-up blur.
Steven breathed a visible sigh of relief. “For the record, whatever you decide to do or not do, I hope you and Corbin get your shit worked out.”
She smiled as he kissed her goodbye on the cheek. Me, too, she thought to herself. Me freaking too.
AFTER A long, hot shower, Kylie wanted nothing more than to crawl in bed and forget the entire disastrous day.
But that wasn’t the way her life worked.
Darla’s book stared at her from her nightstand. Mocking her. And she had to call her guitar player and let him know he was needed after all. Surprisingly, Aiden wasn’t upset. He told her that his mother-in-law had been staying with them to help with the twins and he was mostly in the way at home. She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or completely serious.
After calling Hannah and telling her to arrange his flight to the next tour stop, which Hannah informed her was in South Carolina, Kylie sat on her bed and began to read three hundred and fifty-odd pages of lies and bullshit. Twenty pages in, she seriously considered calling the publisher and suggesting they change the title.
By chapter six, she’d lost count of the twisted mistruths. Darla detailed screaming fights where Kylie called her terrible names. They’d happened, but it had been her wicked stepmother calling the names.
The passages reminded Kylie of some of the disgusting words she’d been called by Darla when her dad wasn’t around, long before she’d even known what they meant. She thought of how she’d feel if someone had called Lily or Rae those terrible things when they were that age. A sudden swell of sadness for her own preteen self washed over her.
But that was nothing compared to the scathing fabrications Darla’s story contained about Kylie’s daddy.
She’d called him an alcoholic, a liar, a cheater, and impotent—which really didn’t gel with the whole cheater thing—but clearly there was no one involved in publishing the monstrosity that actually gave a damn about fact-checking.
So far it seemed Kylie’s lawyers couldn’t technically prove that Darla had broken the confines of the NDA she’d signed.
The words on the page ran together. Tears pooled in her eyes as she read defamation after defamation.
And she didn’t miss the fact that so many of them were eerily similar to things the media had published about Trace. The fact that she’d managed to pull this off without breaking the NDA even while referring to them indirectly, made Kylie wonder if whoever had helped a woman—who, as it so happened, couldn’t read and interpret the directions to make macaroni and cheese—write a book, maybe had a vendetta and had been purposely trying to draw a parallel.
Trace’s name was never mentioned specifically—the nondisclosure agreement did made sure of that—but Kylie was accused of using her daddy issues as an excuse to sleep her way through Nashville repeatedly throughout the chapters she’d read so far.
When she couldn’t take any more, she set the book aside and pulled her knees to her chest. Pulling her daddy’s faded blue button-up work shirt around her, she let her fingers follow the thread path of his name sewn into the front pocket.
She didn’t have much to remember him by. A few old shirts, his truck, and her memories. Good memories. Memories of fishing and camping trips, ballgames, and learning to play guitar on the front porch after dinner.
The falsehoods Darla spun were just that. False.
He’d drunk a beer every now and then and he’d been tired a lot once he had a high-maintenance hag of a wife to deal with. But he was a good man. The best man Kylie had ever known.
And no one would know. Because she’d put herself in the public eye, and Darla had found a way to exploit that for her own benefit. She wondered if there was any possible way she could’ve stopped this from being published. Bribed Darla. Or called a lawyer or sued the publisher or something. Anything to keep her daddy’s memory from being tainted in this repulsive way.