Her lips weren’t moving.
The brush swept in a glissade through her hair. Her voice traveled up the scale and down. But her lips didn’t move. Only the hairbrush.
She spotted him in the mirror. A smile flickered across her face for a fraction of a second before it froze. She dropped the hairbrush, made a dash for the door, and pushed it shut, leaving him out in the cold on the other side.
9
Thad took a step back. The closed door told him everything. He pushed it back open.
She stood in the center of the room, hairbrush stalled in midair, her vocalizations playing in the background. “I’m on vocal rest,” she declared. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand, all right, and I’m calling bullshit.”
Her head came up. She looked snooty as all hell. At the same time, vulnerable. “Which is meaningless since you don’t know anything about the human voice.”
“Maybe not, but I know when somebody’s pulling a scam.”
Her chin stayed high. “It’s not a scam!”
Her arrogance was an act. He could feel it, but he didn’t care. “Is that even you singing?”
“Of course it’s me singing!” Her chest heaved as she drew in one of her long breaths. “Even on vocal rest, it’s helpful keeping to a regular routine.”
“That’s crap. And I should have figured it out days ago. Serious singers like you who are on vocal rest aren’t supposed to talk much, isn’t that right? Hardly the case with you.”
She turned her back to him and moved away from the mirror. “I’m not discussing this.”
He was furious. They were friends. Good friends, despite the short time they’d known each other. They’d shared things about themselves. They’d laughed together, insulted each other, nearly frozen to death. The fact that she would mislead him like this felt like the worst
kind of betrayal.
“Suit yourself,” he retorted.
Her shoulders sagged.
He turned on his heel and left the room. He was done with her.
* * *
Heartsick, Olivia sank onto her bed. She’d lost her voice. Not from laryngitis, allergies, polyps, or nodules—nothing was physically wrong—she’d lost it from guilt. And now Thad knew the truth about her.
You let me believe we were forever. You meant everything to me and I meant nothing to you. Why should I keep on living?
The email Adam had sent before he’d killed himself had laid it out, and despite what Rachel said and what the psychologist she’d visited had told her, despite Thad’s opinion on the subject, Olivia knew she was responsible.
Rachel had witnessed the scene at the funeral. She knew Olivia’s singing was suffering, but she didn’t know how badly. Only the doctor she’d seen and Thad knew the truth.
Technically speaking, she had a psychogenic voice disorder. She couldn’t get a full breath when she tried to sing. Her heart would begin to race, and an unnatural, gritty quality distorted the full, rich tones that were her hallmark. Her reliable vibrato had grown unsteady. Without her customary breath support, her tongue fell back, and she strangled her high notes. Worst of all, she sometimes went flat.
She was Olivia Shore. She never went flat. But now she did, and in exactly twenty-five days, she was scheduled to sing Amneris in Aida at the Chicago Municipal Opera.
She jumped up from the side of the bed, the thought of the looming deadline filling her with panic. She was doing breathing exercises and yoga, trying to meditate, and drinking copious amounts of water. After the disastrous drunken night when she’d attacked Thad, she’d restricted herself to a single glass of wine each evening. She’d never smoked, she avoided carbonated beverages, and she drank so much lemon and honey in warm water that she’d forgotten what plain cold water tasted like. She’d hoped this tour would be the distraction she needed to break the cycle she was trapped in, but it only seemed to be making things worse.
Everyone in the opera world understood medical issues could cause a singer to temporarily lose her voice, but her career would be impacted in all the wrong ways if word got out that she’d lost her voice for psychological reasons.
Each morning since the funeral, she’d played a recording of her daily vocalizing, hoping the familiarity would ease her breathing enough so she’d naturally begin to sing, but it wasn’t working. Her guilt was literally choking her.
* * *