Kylie Cantrall's Arc

Chapter 1 of 78

Kylie Cantrall had three days to find the girl before the tour bus left the coast, and she had lost her in a pile of paper. The letters covered her hotel floor in drifts. Pink envelopes. Notebook pages. Glitter she would be picking out of the carpet for weeks. Somewhere in the mess were the ones she needed. The ones that had made her cry twice on the flight in, then a third time when she read them back and understood that whoever wrote them meant every word. She knelt in sweatpants and dumped another mail bag onto the rug. Her assistant had offered to sort it. Kylie had said no. After what her old best friend did with her ex, she wasn't handing this over to anyone. She wanted a person who wouldn't cross a line. The letters had promised that person existed. Now she couldn't prove it. Her plan was simple. Find the handwriting. Match it to a return address. Show up. She worked for two hours. She sorted by envelope color, then by paper size, then by the loop of a lowercase g. Her back ached. Her phone buzzed with label calls she ignored. Halfway through the third pile she found a page that started, "I've never told anyone this," and her chest went tight. Wrong hand. Close, but wrong. She set it aside and kept digging. A soft weight pressed against her knee. The hotel's therapy animal had wandered in through the door she'd left cracked — a white fox on a thin leash, no handler in sight down the hall. It sat on the corner of a stack and stared at her with pale, steady eyes. Kylie almost shooed it off. Then she saw what its paw was pinning. A cream envelope. No stamp. No postmark. Just her name in the handwriting she'd been hunting for an hour. She slid it free. Inside were three pages, folded tight, and a small photograph of a girl she had never seen, holding a notebook against her chest like a shield. On the back, in the same careful hand: Arianna. A phone number. A city two states away. One line under it. "I'm done writing. If you want to meet me, call." Kylie sat back on her heels. Her hands shook. The fox stood, stretched, and walked out the way it had come. She read the letter twice. The writer knew the EP. Knew which song was about the betrayal and which was about the aftermath. Knew Kylie liked guys. Said it anyway. Said she'd waited a year for an answer that never came and wouldn't wait another. Kylie picked up her phone. She didn't call the label back. She dialed the number on the photograph. It rang twice before a girl answered.