She laughed, reaching out to pat his hand. “Yeah. It helped put some stuff into perspective. If you’re interested, I can give you someone’s name.”

“Ha. I’ve got my own therapist. Though I haven’t been in a while. Anyway, with performing? It’s addicting in a lot of ways. Doing something you love. Being up onstage. Hearing the cheers. You can’t so much see faces as you simply know they’re all there. For you. They clap and stomp. They sing lyrics you wrote. They...they’re into something you made. And that’s... I’m not sure I can really explain just what it is. But it’s amazing. An ego boost to get you through the days when everything else in your life is shit. It feeds your soul. But it’s dangerous, too. Because it’s easy to let that become normal. And it’s not.”

Their food came out, and they ate awhile in silence.

“Anyway, I love the road. I loved it before I f**ked everything up. And it’s not so much that I think I’m going to end up in the gutter again if I’m out there. Musicians do it every day. I’m around people who drink and to be totally honest with you, it doesn’t bug me. It’s not the alcohol that was my big problem, anyway.” He snorted.

Natalie thought about how the depth of her father’s addiction had shot down deep when he started using opiates. Wondered if Ezra ever was tempted.

Instead of asking that in a crowded restaurant, she kept it fairly safe. “Mary said it’s like a totally different reality on tour.”

He nodded. “Time is different. You don’t sleep enough. You don’t eat right.” He grinned. “Though now that Mary tours with them, that’s not an issue. But you’re off. And home is so far away. Every night you’re filled with this adulation. The rush of it is like nothing else. Normal isn’t so normal. Your life is filled with people who never question you, never say no to you. In the early days, it was worse. Backstage was like a three-ring circus of chicks, drugs, booze. It was wild every moment. So much that you start to believe your own hype machine. I’m not scared of doing heroin again. I’m scared of getting out there and losing the self I had to go to hell and back to find.”

She took his hand again, squeezing it.

“I don’t understand your journey because it’s yours. But I know what it means to find yourself and be terrified of losing it. Of fighting every single day not to lose ground you fought so hard for. If you need to not go out there, or to manage your exposure to it so you can have what you love in the way it takes to be healthy, you know your brothers support that. They love you. More than that, they respect you, and they want the best for you.”

“I can see, in so many ways, why Paddy loves you. Why you’re different from all the others.”

She needed to hear that more than she’d realized. She swallowed back the emotion the statement brought—or tried to.

She thought of all he’d just revealed to her and decided to share, too. “I needed that, Ezra. I miss him, and while I trust him, I do my best not to think on anything but what he tells me. Which seems like I’m hiding from the truth.”

“Bullshit. You’re managing your shit. That’s not hiding. You’ve been to shows now, you know what it’s like. It’s totally normal to be overwhelmed by it. Wise to be suspicious of it. You letting Paddy fill you in is a lot more an act of trust than fantasizing about what he might be doing. That’s what’s important, anyway. Not the shit outside the dressing rooms or off the stage.”

“I guess.” She blew out a breath.

“You give Paddy something real. Something heavy to hold him, and that’s not negative. He needs to be anchored. Everyone does so they won’t blow away in a storm.”

“You need to use that line in a song.”

“I will.” He winked, and she sipped the hot chocolate.

“So, if there was something in the media, and it was about you, but it would upset you, would you want to see it, anyway?”

Her happiness went sour. “What is it?”

Ezra pushed a sheet of paper across the table. “Jeremy sent it to me yesterday. He got it off a celebrity gossip website.”

The title of the article was Father’s Desperate Cry for Help for His Daughter. A picture of her father was below it as he held up one of the photos snapped of Natalie and Paddy at the secret shows Sweet Hollow Ranch had played before going off on tour.

Her father had gone off to some f**king tabloid and sold a story about her. She placed a hand over her stomach, pressing hard as she read the details of her life spilled through her father’s self-centered perspective, which painted him as a self-sacrificing single dad who only wanted a relationship with a daughter who so cruelly rejected him.

“Jesus.” Her skin had gone clammy. “I wish I could say I couldn’t believe he’d do such a thing, but I can’t. And I...” She looked up to Ezra to catch the empathy on his face. Not pity—that would have driven her away—but empathy. “Is Jeremy mad?”

Ezra shook his head. “Hell, no. Look, this is part and parcel of this whole thing. I know you have reservations about the life Paddy leads. I care about you and I like you with my brother. I could have kept it from you, but I didn’t want you blindsided with it. Chances are? No one is going to run with this story. But if it’s slow and someone wants to, the last thing you need is to have this shit shoved in your face without knowing about it first.”