I was twelve years old and safely at home with my grandma the night Luke Weston met my mom in a Philadelphia alleyway. (It’s not as skanky as it sounds, I swear.) At that time, Luke was a singer/songwriter/guitar player who had so far scored only one moderate and esoteric hit, which played occasionally on a few alternate-rock stations and was loved by a very small handful of music geeks. That song had gotten him some early afternoon small-tent gigs at music festivals and the occasional booking as the opening act for better-known musicians.

That’s what he was doing in Philadelphia that summer—opening for a Portland band that had a lot more fans than he did. He had finished his set and was wandering out back into the alley to smoke a cigarette when he spotted a pretty, petite young woman with chin-length black-brown hair squinting down at her phone a few feet away. He assumed she was a fan, since she had chosen to duck out after he had left the stage, so he approached her with a cocky grin.

“Like the set?” he asked.

She stared at him blankly. “The set?” She was simply on a break from her job slicing onions and mushrooms at the hibachi restaurant next door.

A little sheepishly, Luke explained that he’d just been performing at the club, and she said, “Oh, I heard a little through the walls! That was you?” Later, when she told me the story, she admitted she hadn’t heard a thing, but she thought he was cute, so she figured it was worth pretending.

Luke found himself trying to prolong his conversation with the tiny, delicate woman with the surprisingly deep laugh and large, lively eyes. And I can’t imagine Mom wasn’t equally interested in spending the rest of her break with the thin, long-limbed, wavy-haired musician who had appeared out of nowhere. Still, they’d been flirting for only a few minutes when she spun her phone in her hand and casually mentioned that she had been in the middle of texting her twelve-year-old daughter. The defiant dare in her eyes and the lift to her chin both said, If you have a problem with that, don’t waste my time or yours.

He didn’t have a problem with it.

They talked until she had to go back inside, and by then they’d agreed to meet up after the restaurant closed.

He lingered in Philadelphia as long as he could, days after his gig had ended, meeting Mom for after-work dates and before-work lunches at our apartment, where he entertained us both with silly songs on his guitar. Eventually he had to return to LA, where he lived and performed semiregularly at a few small clubs, but he and Mom continued to talk and text and video-chat every day, and he flew her west a month or so later to come see him headline at his biggest venue so far, a club on the Sunset Strip.

That was the night that a hit-making music producer named Michael Marquand signed Luke to his label.

It was also the night Luke promised to quit smoking forever if Mom would agree to marry him. (Technically it was the next morning when he proposed, but they hadn’t gone to sleep, so it counted as that night.)

My grandmother and I flew to the West Coast in time to join Mom and Luke at a ridiculous little chapel tucked in between two huge casinos in downtown Las Vegas.

“Tell me I haven’t made a huge mistake,” my mother whispered to me as she pulled off the veil Luke had bought her in the gift shop and gulped at the air as if the veil had been made out of lead instead of lace.

“You definitely haven’t,” I said. Not that I was a reliable adviser: I was as caught up in the excitement of the sudden wedding as she was, and totally in love with the idea of having this handsome rocker with the mildly devilish smile for my dad.

Mom and I moved into Luke’s rental house in LA (small as it was, it was still twice as big as the studio apartment we’d been living in, and I had my own room, which was tiny and miraculous), and Grandma went back alone to Philadelphia, where she worked as a nurse. Her last words to Mom were, “He’s got to be better than that last one.”

She was referring to my father, a wildly romantic and brilliant older man who had said to the teenage Cassandra, “I love you madly and want to be with you forever.” His sincerity and enthusiasm rang true, and Mom had no training in identifying a manic episode. By the time he came crashing down, she was pregnant.

I was born shortly after he had gone missing, but Mom used his last name on my birth certificate, so I was named—and remained—Ellie Withers.

She thought he’d come back. He never did. Total disappearing act. No paper trail, no way for even the child support system to track him down.

Luke was definitely better. For one thing, he stayed. For another, he worked hard. The first album he made for Michael Marquand generated two decently successful singles. They became good friends during the process, and Michael arranged for Luke to be featured on songs with a couple of major rock stars, which bumped him into a higher level of fame and exponentially increased his gigs.

It was around then that Michael decided to move into television producing. The show he cocreated, We’ll Make You a Star, combined a singing contest with an image makeover. While Michael planned to appear on the show as a mentor and judge, he didn’t want to commit to a full-time television job. He needed someone else to work with the contestants on-screen every week. Someone with real musical talent, who could also bring a little sex appeal to the show. Someone likable, but not TV slick. Someone with a hit or two to prove his music credentials but not so huge he was unaffordable. Someone teenage girls could drool over, but who wouldn’t drool back.

And Michael knew just the guy.

Luke agonized for a while over the decision. It meant he’d have a lot less time to write and record music, and that his life would be far more tightly scheduled than he was used to.

On the other hand, he and Mom wanted to have a baby, and Mom was eager for me to go to a private high school. The money would come in handy. Mom was uncertain, but I was totally in favor of his being on TV. (I was thirteen—of course I was.) And what were the odds the show would actually be a hit? Next to nothing, he and Mom assured each other. He’d probably end up working just a few short months for a fair chunk of change. Then life would go back to normal.

So he said yes. And life never went back to normal.

Luke went from mildly respected musician to A-list TV star in less than a year. He started to be recognized everywhere we went, and audiences packed his concerts, which became a lot less frequent—taping We’ll Make You a Star took up a lot of time, as did the ten million events a week the show’s publicist wanted him to make an appearance at.

We’ll Make You a Star was a huge hit, and his agent renegotiated his contract for A Lot of Money.

We moved into our current, much bigger, house the year after that.

“I didn’t sign on for this,” Mom said one night, after she and Luke had gone out for a quiet dinner and emerged from the restaurant to find a mob of screaming teenage girls gathered there, desperate for a glimpse of him. Some of them were sobbing.

“Believe me, I didn’t either,” he said.

The loss of privacy was hard to adjust to.

We got used to the money and the perks much more easily.

Being rich was a big change for all of us. Mom and Luke had both had tough childhoods. In the neighborhood Mom was from, having a baby at seventeen—like she had done—was virtually a rite of passage. But she was smart and scrappy and wanted something better for her daughter, so she had gotten us a tiny apartment in a neighborhood with a good school system, even though it meant she had to share a bed with me every night and had no room of her own.

The only thing Luke ever said about his childhood was that it had been rough, and he didn’t like to think or talk about it. Which was pretty typical of Luke—he preferred to keep things cheerful, even if it meant actively avoiding certain thoughts and subjects. His father was in the military and had moved his family around from army base to army base. Music was Luke’s salvation: alone with his guitar, he could create his own beauty, his own world.