Sarah had always had his back.
The thought was a hard one to bear—because Abe knew he hadn’t had hers. Not the way she deserved. Not the way she needed. If he could go back in time, he’d pound himself bloody, but he couldn’t. He had to live with the consequences of his actions, live with the fact that he was the one who’d made Sarah leave. It was all on him. No one else.
Music in the air, faint and quiet, a melancholy backdrop to the words Noah began to sing. The guitarist had a good voice, and this song, it needed that smooth, powerful voice, not Fox’s gritty edginess.
The song he sang was about a sparrow with a broken wing, and it fucking tore Abe’s heart right out of his chest, left it bleeding on the floor.
A stunned silence was Noah’s applause after the final word faded from the air.
Then Abe and David blew out their breath almost at once while Fox just looked at Noah in a way that made it clear exactly how deeply the song had impacted the lead singer.
“Goddamn. That’s powerful, man,” Abe said, his voice thick with a bucket load of emotions. “It made me think of Tessie, like she’s flying free same as that bird in the song.”
Noah’s dark gray eyes held Abe’s, his throat moving as he said, “Yeah.”
Nothing more needed to be said. Abe didn’t talk about Tessie, not even to his closest friends, men who’d all known and played with his baby sister and who’d stood beside him at her funeral. Sarah had pushed open that door with the raw honesty of her own grief and now “Sparrow” had shoved it open wide.
A deep but gentle rhythm, David beating it out on the drums.
Nodding, Fox picked up the guitar he’d set aside and began to weave his music with David’s.
Abe wasn’t even aware of moving from his keyboards to Tessie’s piano.
It just felt right to pull off the dustcovers, to take a seat on the piano stool and add the beauty of the keys to the music his blood brothers were creating. “Sparrow” wasn’t a song for keyboards or fancy arrangements. It was pure and beautiful, and it needed the same accompaniment.
When Noah began to sing again, Abe knew they’d gotten it right.
And as he played, he knew Sarah’s heart would break when she heard this song… but that she’d love it too. Because heartbreaking as it was, “Sparrow” also held a deep vein of hope of which Abe wasn’t sure Noah was aware.
Abe wanted to grab on to that hope, use it to feed his hunger to fix the worst mistake of his life, but he knew the hope didn’t belong to him. Sarah had told him to go. He had no right to challenge her decision, to fight to be allowed back in. He’d given up that right the day he’d lied to protect himself.
The day he’d told her he didn’t love her.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 9
ALMOST EXACTLY THREE WEEKS AFTER THE HOT, sweet, passionate hour that had haunted her thoughts no matter how many times she told herself to forget it and move on, Sarah braced herself to see Abe again. There was no way to avoid it, not when, in approximately twenty hours’ time, she’d be attending the wedding of Schoolboy Choir’s lead singer.
She still couldn’t believe she was about to spend the night at Molly and Fox’s house prior to the other woman’s wedding. After her and Abe’s drawn out and bitter divorce battle, a battle fueled by pain and hurt and a love that refused to die, she’d never expected to be invited back into the band’s world.
Then the men had sent her flowers after Aaron was stillborn.
And Sarah had realized for the first time that maybe Fox, Noah, and David did see her as a person, not just as the woman who’d been Abe’s arm candy for a few years. The fact that Abe had sent her flowers too? Sarah still wasn’t sure she’d truly processed that. Her ex-husband would’ve never done such a thing… but her Abe would have.
But this, tonight, it wasn’t about her and Abe. It wasn’t about the boys at all.
It was Molly who’d invited Sarah to a coffee date not long after Sarah left the sanctuary Molly and Fox had provided after Jeremy hit her. Sarah had offered to go to a hotel, or to Lola’s empty apartment, but Molly wouldn’t hear of it given Sarah’s shocked and shaken state and her need for protection from the paparazzi. Sarah had expected it to be a one-off kindness, their paths never crossing again; with Molly engaged to one of Abe’s closest friends, she’d figured the other woman’s loyalties wouldn’t permit her to be friends with Abe’s ex.
Then Molly had reached out.
That first coffee meeting had been followed by others where Sarah got to know Kit and Thea better too. They—as well as Molly’s best friend, Charlotte—had all had the best time at Molly’s “Cake-Testing Fiesta” a couple of weeks earlier.