Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

disturbingly foreign to me. My nerves jangled like the silver bangles on Ava’s arm. I would not throw up, though; that would be very bad. Ava and I pretended not to glare at each other, but we spoke through gritted teeth under our smiles.
    “Where you been?” Ava asked.
    “What do you mean, where have I been? I’m here right when you told me to be. In fact, I’m early,” I retorted.
    “I leave you a voicemail! They change our time. I give you the new time and our song list in my message.”
    My bad. I’d forgotten to listen to my voicemail. But Ava had been a no-show for practice, which was why I’d come early: to hook up with her for a quick run-through of whatever songs she intended us to perform.
    “If you had shown up to rehearse today, it wouldn’t be a problem,” I said.
    “Something come up and I can’t make it.”
    Lord help me. With Ava, something came up more often than not. Last year, when she house-sat Annalise while we were off-island in Corpus Christi, she’d left to meet a record producer in New York without telling us. Then, when the producer was only interested in our duo, not Ava’s solo, she ran off on a whim to Venezuela with her (now) baby daddy. Burglars stripped Annalise bare with her gone and our friendship had never quite regained its footing. Ava still resented me for messing up the record deal with my absence, and I couldn’t get over her casual abandonment of Annalise.
    “Well, I’m here now, and it’s our turn to sing next. So what are we going to do?”
    “Do you think you can start with ‘It’s My Party’?”
    I looked out into the audience at the Yacht Club’s annual Memorial Day Fling fundraiser. Most of the partygoers were continentals in the sixty-plus age range, so it made sense to perform something they could relate to.
    “Of course,” I said.
    “If you not comfortable, I can do it by myself.”
    “I’m fine with it,” I snapped.
    “Good,” Ava snapped back.
    Time to chill. I concentrated on Ava’s best qualities and fast-forwarded through “It’s My Party” in my head.
    Ava handed our background music to the young guy manning the sound system, who looked like he was barely out of his teens. His youth only served to emphasize my age to me, although I could still say I was thirty-seven for a little while longer. Luckily, I exuded youthfulness in comparison to the Yacht Club’s patrons tonight, most of whom were probably so liquored up they wouldn’t be able to tell if I was nineteen or ninety. From their forte rumble and staccato peals of laughter, it seemed they were well on their way. I watched a woman of about my mother-in-law’s age teeter toward the bar, listing dangerously to one side. If her stagger didn’t give her condition away, the fuchsia lipstick she had applied unevenly to her mouth did. Not a pretty sight.
    I had grown accustomed to singing to drunken tourists with Ava when we performed together, pre-babies. Ironically, it did not bother me to be around all this alcohol. Sure, the smell turned on my central nervous system, but the buffoonery turned it right back off. I never wanted to be like these people again.
    I searched the room for Nick. We had left the kids with his parents and driven the winding island roads for forty-five minutes to get here, and he’d dropped me off at the door before going to park the car. I picked my way around the big stones that littered the dirt lot, trying not to break my heel or twist my ankle in my dress-up shoes. I wore a figure-hugging blue and purple dress with spaghetti straps and a deep V neckline. It had been a favorite of mine before I had kids, and tonight I added Spanx power panties to achieve the right “hot enough to wear in front of a crowd” look. If people had compared me to Nicole Kidman before, I would count myself lucky if I rated Lucille Ball tonight.
    Upon making my grand entrance, I had caught the frantic “get over here” gestures of Ava and gone straight to the stage. She,