the 1 | chaennie

17. Treacherous

Two headlights shine through the sleepless night And I will get you, and get you alone
Your name has echoed through my mind
And I just think you should, think you should know
That nothing safe is worth the drive and I would Follow you, follow you home

I'll follow you, follow you home

-

"The European leg of my tour came next. I played in Australia in March, and you have no idea how good it felt to be home. I'd never really thought of Miami as home, and London was, in some respects, but Melbourne ... it was where I truly felt peaceful and normal, and it made me so happy to be home. I was in London a few days later, which was just as comforting, and it was good for me, to be around so many things that reminded me of home. Of course, I wasn't really okay, and I missed Jennie more than ever." Rosie laughed as she frowned slightly, a confused look on her face. "Do you know how much you have to miss someone to be on world tour for a critically acclaimed album, to be home in Melbourne, at all the places you'd played at before you'd even so much as been looked at by a record label, to realise that you had everything you'd ever wanted, and feel ... nothing."

"You went back to her," Nayeon guessed, her voice a low murmur as she gave Rosie a pitying look.

Giving her a half-hearted smile in return, Rosie shrugged, "not until May."

"What happened in May?"

-

The second leg of the Speak Now World Tour ended late March, and Rosie was offered a two-month reprieve before the North American leg began. Her last show had been in London, and she lingered for another week in the city, going for tea with her mother, played tennis with her father and had lunch at his golf club in Wimbledon. After a week, she went back home to Miami.

With nothing to do and weeks of spare time on her hands, Rosie found herself restless in her penthouse. She spent hours pacing back and forth, cooped up and irritable because paparazzi were camped across the street, she wrote a few songs and made homemade jam, she spent hours on the phone with friends, making plans to see them when their schedules lined up. It was all boring. To compensate, Rosie bought herself a new house.

House was a generous term because the Cape Cod Colonial stood on an acre and a half of land with a long, gated driveway and a guest house out back. It was all white clapboard with French doors that opened out onto vine-draped pergolas shading balconies, porches and patios. It even had a tennis court.

She spent hours shopping for furniture, filling the farmhouse-style kitchen with vintage crockery and expensive kitchenware, the glossy countertops lined with cookbooks and small potted plants, copper saucepans hanging over the industrial stove and fresh flowers standing in a vase each day. Her orange tree stood in the corner, in the patch of sunlight that streamed in through the windows, and she would drink coffee at the breakfast bar in the mornings and stare at it deep in thought.

Rosie bought books for the cypress wood built-in bookshelves, oriental rugs for the living rooms and antique lamps for the end tables in her bedroom. At dawn, she sat out on the patio, staring out at the view of the canyon, and at night, she lit a fire in the stone outdoor fireplace, breathing in the woodsmoke as she drank wine and softly strummed her guitar in the comforting orange glow of the fire. But with four bedrooms and bathrooms, the place felt empty and removed. She was lonely.

Weeks slipped by in peaceful isolation, and there was a sense of peacefulness in her new estate in the hills. Nobody bothered her, the paparazzi were held at bay behind a long driveway and thickly treed surroundings. It wasn't that Rosie didn't have any friends - she had an endless list of people to spend her time with - it was the fact that she didn't feel close to them. They would meet up at red carpet events or fashion shows, movie premieres and glamorous parties, but most of the time they were all off working on their own careers. The singers were on tour or bust recording new music, the actors were all around the world filming for TV and film, and the models were at the fashion capitals of the world, opening runways and posing in the latest styles.