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say, “It’s all right, sweetheart. You’re allowed to be jealous.”
    Her head shoots up, and I get all the indignant anger. “As if.”
    “Then prove it.” I flash a smile that’s more fangs than teeth and add, “Contract signed and in my dressing room tout suite, or it’s time to polish up that résumé of yours.”
    As I back up, she throws her clipboard at my head, but I manage to get out the door without her doing any damage. My ears are still ringing as I head down the hall, not with Reille’s voice, but the Fuzzy Bunny’s.
     
    My every wrong set right,
    You show me there’s still light—
     
    Except it’s all bullshit. There’s no setting my wrongs right, and the only light in this life is sold by the kilowatt hour. Stalking down the hall, I feel like I’ve entered into the world’s most risky game of Truth or Dare, and I wonder which one of us is going to break first. I’d like to put my money on Fuzzy Bunny, but with the way my hands are shaking and Reille’s temper is flaring, there’s no telling how this hand is going to pan out.
    My phone buzzes with an incoming text; this time, it’s my lawyers, giving me the rundown on the ongoing police investigation and what I need to do in order to appear cooperative.
    And innocent .
    Trouble is, I’m not exactly a solid bet when it comes to either of those things.
    Good thing we’re not in Vegas.

CHAPTER THREE
Lore
    It’s a little hard to breathe, following Reille Reece up to her office and sliding into the chair opposite her massive desk. The entire room is crammed with little personal effects, travel souvenirs, vintage knickknacks; god help the poor cleaning staff that actually has to dust this space. Reille doesn’t look like the kind of woman who spends weekends digging through rusty bits at the Pasadena Flea Market, but if this last year has taught me anything, looks can be very, very deceiving.
    For the first few minutes, she mutters under her breath, pulling out boilerplate contracts and Perrier waters. Her whole body is at an anxious fidget when she stops, spins toward me, and asks yet again, “Are you certain you don’t want to retain a lawyer before signing anything? A deal on the table… you could get an agent like that .” And she snaps her immaculately French-manicured nails.
    “I’m not worried about the legalities.” It’s the truth, edging closer to my real reason for being here. As much as I love it, the music has been a means to an end, so I pull the papers toward me and start signing on the dotted lines. All the dotted lines, everywhere she points with that one, perfect fingertip. In between scrawls, I flick curious glances at the woman seated across from me.
    For a while, the doctors had me convinced I’d imagined her. Imagined everything. Then one afternoon, I’d been sitting in the psych ward common room, flicking through the channels without really watching. Then… boom . There she was. The redhead who supposedly didn’t exist, on the arm of the world’s most infamous rock star. It was a red carpet clip of Xaine headed into the Grammy awards.
    That was the day I started to “recover.” That was the day I started lying to the doctors, to the shrinks, telling them I understood, that I really had hallucinated the whole thing. That my mind had played tricks on me, bending fantasy over memory until I’d pieced together an entire alternate reality from snippets of life and TV. They say that admitting to the problem is half the battle, and my battle couldn’t even begin until I was out of that hospital. That became my new goal: to tell them whatever they wanted to hear for as long as it took to convince them.
    But no matter what I said to those people, I knew I had to come here, find her.
    Find answers .
    My hand is shaking by the time my last John Hancock is in place, but Reille just sighs heavily and drags the papers out of my grasp.
    “Well, I suppose that is that,” she says.
    “Yeah, it really is.” I lick