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of Emily Trenden.
    This would render them useless for anyone but me, for sure.
    I picked up the laminated cards for the hundredth time and turned them over in my hands, feeling for seams or cracks in the plastic. I had read about doctoring IDs, but these seemed tamperproof. They were laminated and embossed. Even if I managed to get the passes out and magically fiddle with the names, maybe Photoshop the lot and make another set of passes with different names… Even if I could accomplish this, there was no getting around the embossed laminate. No way I could recreate that.
    Experimentally and on a complete whim, I put my pass around my neck. The thick red cotton band lay soft against my skin, and the pass itself dangled just so in the dip between my boobs. I got a little jolt, as though a door had slammed somewhere or the ground shifted under my feet.
    In a daze, I rose and took a few slow steps towards the fireplace. As though seeing myself for the first time, I examined myself in the mirror above it. My eyes were irresistibly drawn to the VIP pass around my neck. It seemed to glow. The pass, and my neck. In fact, all of me seemed to glow. If I had been in a cartoon, the artist would have drawn flashing red ziggedy-zag arrows all around me. I could practically see them.
    Look here. Emily Trenden, high-flying career girl turned wanton rock chick.
    I laughed, and the bizarre vision dispersed.
    ‘What a ridiculous notion. Me, a rock chick? And a wanton one, at that? Where on earth did that come from?’
    But the idea stuck in my head like the sweet memory of a chocolate truffle on my tongue. The hint of possibility was tantalising and mesmerising. Emily Trenden, wanton rock chick .
    I laughed at myself some more, but another idea formed in my head. A concrete, obvious, possible one.
    ‘I suppose… I suppose I could simply go.’
    The words hung in the air, and I shrugged uncertainly.
    ‘I could go on my own. It would be better than letting the tickets go to waste. It would be better than selling them or giving them to someone who…who…’ I paused, reluctant to finish my thought but forcing myself to do so anyway. ‘Who doesn’t mean anything at all to Nate. And maybe…well, maybe he’ll come to his senses and come along. And if he doesn’t, at least I can tell him, one day, that I honoured his gift. Maybe that’ll mean something to him. Who knows?’
    I paused in my musings, dizzy with the implications of this plan. Going to a rock concert, and by myself at that, was so unlike me that I might as well have decided to scale Mount Everest or run the London marathon, or perhaps volunteer for a mission to Mars.
    I had absolutely no idea what it was like to go to a rock concert. I didn’t even know what to wear to a rock concert. I had nothing but bad preconceptions: noise, long-haired rockers and bikers in leather jackets, women in leather bras with tattoos on their chests and wild greasy hair, drugs—yes, drugs, lots of them, everybody did them at these events, it was practically the law, right? Drugs, and booze, and vomit, and vulgar language, and violence, and more noise…
    I shuddered. It sounded like a living hell. And yet people went, even relatively normal people. Teenagers. Heck, kids, even, if the news were to be believed. Maybe I had got all this wrong. Perhaps my prejudiced disdain for all things rock and the demise of the best relationship of my life were causally related.
    ‘No “maybe” about it.’
    Might as well face the facts.
    ‘Well. Here’s a chance to see for myself.’
    I held the tickets up to my face and nodded. I was a desperate woman, and the idea rooted, grew and blossomed, looking more and more reasonable with every heartbeat.
    ‘I’ll go. With or without Nate. I’ll go, and I’ll make good use of these tickets. I’ll go to see MonX.’

 
     
     
     
     
     

    Chapter Nine
     
     
     
    The idea stayed with me and became a distracting reality. It carried me through a hectic lunch