Six months earlier

Ronnie slouched in the front seat of the car, wondering why on earth her mom and dad hated her so much.

It was the only thing that could explain why she was here visiting her dad, in this godforsaken southern armpit of a place, instead of spending time with her friends back home in Manhattan.

No, scratch that. She wasn’t just visiting her dad. Visiting implied a weekend or two, maybe even a week. She supposed she could live with a visit. But to stay until late August? Pretty much the entire summer? That was banishment, and for most of the nine hours it had taken them to drive down, she’d felt like a prisoner being transferred to a rural penitentiary. She couldn’t believe her mom was actually going to make her go through with this.

Ronnie was so enveloped in misery, it took a second for her to recognize Mozart’s Sonata no. 16 in C Major. It was one of the pieces she had performed at Carnegie Hall four years ago, and she knew her mom had put it on while Ronnie was sleeping. Too bad. Ronnie reached over to turn it off.

“Why’d you do that?” her mom said, frowning. “I like hearing you play.”

“I don’t.”

“How about if I turn the volume down?”

“Just stop, Mom. Okay? I’m not in the mood.”

Ronnie stared out the window, knowing full well that her mom’s lips had just formed a tight seam. Her mom did that a lot these days. It was as if her lips were magnetized.

“I think I saw a pelican when we crossed the bridge to Wrightsville Beach,” her mom commented with forced lightness.

“Gee, that’s swell. Maybe you should call the Crocodile Hunter.”

“He died,” Jonah said, his voice floating up from the backseat, the sounds mingling with those from his Game Boy. Her ten-year-old pain-in-the-butt brother was addicted to the thing. “Don’t you remember?” he went on. “It was really sad.”

“Of course I remember.”

“You didn’t sound like you remembered.”

“Well, I did.”

“Then you shouldn’t have said what you just said.”

She didn’t bother to respond a third time. Her brother always needed the last word. It drove her crazy.

“Were you able to get any sleep at all?” her mom asked.

“Until you hit that pothole. Thanks for that, by the way. My head practically went through the glass.”

Her mom’s gaze remained fixed on the road. “I’m glad to see your nap put you in a better mood.”

Ronnie snapped her gum. Her mom hated that, which was the main reason she’d done it pretty much nonstop as they’d driven down I-95. The interstate, in her humble opinion, was just about the most boring stretch of roadway ever conceived. Unless someone was particularly fond of greasy fast food, disgusting rest-stop bathrooms, and zillions of pine trees, it could lull a person to sleep with its hypnotically ugly monotony.

She’d said those exact words to her mother in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, but Mom had ignored the comments every time. Aside from trying to make nice on the trip since it was the last time they’d see each other for a while, Mom wasn’t one for conversation in the car. She wasn’t all that comfortable driving, which wasn’t surprising since they either rode the subways or took cabs when they needed to get somewhere. In the apartment, though… that was a different story. Mom had no qualms about getting into things there, and the building super had come by twice in the last couple of months to ask them to keep it down. Mom probably believed that the louder she yelled about Ronnie’s grades, or Ronnie’s friends, or the fact that Ronnie continually ignored her curfew, or the Incident-especially the Incident-the more likely it would be that Ronnie would care.

Okay, she wasn’t the worst mom. She really wasn’t. And when she was feeling generous, Ronnie might even admit that she was pretty good as far as moms went. It was just that her mom was stuck in some weird time warp in which kids never grew up, and Ronnie wished for the hundredth time that she’d been born in May instead of August. That was when she’d turn eighteen, and her mom wouldn’t be able to force her to do anything. Legally, she’d be old enough to make her own decisions, and let’s just say that coming down here wasn’t on her to-do list.

But right now, Ronnie had no choice in the matter. Because she was still seventeen. Because of a trick of the calendar. Because Mom conceived three months earlier than she should have. What was that about? No matter how fiercely Ronnie had begged or complained or screamed or whined about the summer plans, it hadn’t made the tiniest bit of difference. Ronnie and Jonah were spending the summer with their dad, and that was final. No if, ands, or buts about it, was the way her mom had phrased it. Ronnie had learned to despise that expression.

Just off the bridge, summer traffic had slowed the line of cars to a crawl. Off to the side, between the houses, Ronnie caught glimpses of the ocean. Yippee. Like she was supposed to care.

“Why again are you making us do this?” Ronnie groaned.

“We’ve already been through this,” her mom answered. “You need to spend time with your dad. He misses you.”

“But why all summer? Couldn’t it just be for a couple of weeks?”

“You need more than a couple of weeks together. You haven’t seen him in three years.”

“That’s not my fault. He’s the one who left.”

“Yes, but you haven’t taken his calls. And every time he came to New York to see you and Jonah, you ignored him and hung out with your friends.”

Ronnie snapped her gum again. From the corner of her eye, she saw her mother wince.

“I don’t want to see or talk to him,” Ronnie said.

“Just try to make the best of it, okay? Your father is a good man and he loves you.”

“Is that why he walked out on us?”

Instead of answering, her mom glanced up into the rearview mirror.

“You’ve been looking forward to this, haven’t you, Jonah?”

“Are you kidding? This is going to be great!”

“I’m glad you have a good attitude. Maybe you could teach your sister.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“I just don’t see why I can’t spend the summer with my friends,” Ronnie whined, cutting back in. She wasn’t done yet. Though she knew the odds were slim to none, she still harbored the fantasy that she could convince her mom to turn the car around.

“Don’t you mean you’d rather spend all night at the clubs? I’m not naive, Ronnie. I know what goes on in those kinds of places.”

“I don’t do anything wrong, Mom.”

“What about your grades? And your curfew? And-”

“Can we talk about something else?” Ronnie cut in. “Like why it’s so imperative that I spend time with my dad?”

Her mother ignored her. Then again, Ronnie knew she had every reason to. She’d already answered the question a million times, even if Ronnie didn’t want to accept it.

Traffic eventually started to move again, and the car moved forward for half a block before coming to another halt. Her mother rolled down the window and tried to peer around the cars in front of her.

“I wonder what’s going on,” she muttered. “It’s really packed down here.”

“It’s the beach,” Jonah volunteered. “It’s always crowded at the beach.”

“It’s three o’clock on a Sunday. It shouldn’t be this crowded.”

Ronnie tucked her legs up, hating her life. Hating everything about this.

“Hey, Mom?” Jonah asked. “Does Dad know Ronnie was arrested?”

“Yeah. He knows,” she answered.

“What’s he going to do?”

This time, Ronnie answered. “He won’t do anything. All he ever cared about was the piano.”

Ronnie hated the piano and swore she’d never play again, a decision even some of her oldest friends thought was strange, since it had been a major part of her life for as long as she’d known them. Her dad, once a teacher at Juilliard, had been her teacher as well, and for a long time, she’d been consumed by the desire not only to play, but to compose original music with her father.