chapter one
MACK
If you think your love life is a disaster, I’m here to make you feel a whole lot better about yourself. Mine wasn’t just a disaster, but an international one. As in, anyone on the planet with an internet connection can read up about me and the parade of cliché bad boys, cheating nepo babies, and textbook narcissists I dated while I was touring the world with Thunder Hearts in my early twenties.
Tonight was supposed to be the night I turned the story around. I was already crafting the imaginary headline as I made my way to the bar: MACKENZIE WATERS ON FIRST DATE WITH NICE, SECURE, 401(K)-OWNING MAN WHO TEXTS BACK IN A TIMELY MANNER! I was the kind of proud that bordered on smug.
And now I’m propped up on a magenta barstool in the middle of happy hour at Lightning Strike, panic sweating through my pink satin tank top, and shouting, “Can I borrow literally anybody’s phone?”
Nobody can hear me over the chorus of pop sensation Serena’s catchy hit, “Kickstart My Heart.” I turn to see if one of the bartenders can lend me theirs, only to meet a familiar pair of dark, perfectly winged eyes on the other side of the bar, blinking at me in alarm.
“You good?” asks Hannah, one of my best friends and former bandmate.
Even with the bar half hiding her from the crowd, she’s unmissably stunning in a sleek purple slip dress that hugs the pale curves of her body, her glossy black hair catching the sparkles from the disco ball in the dim light. I’m never not happy to see her, but right now I could kiss her on the damn mouth.
“I thought you were uptown!” I say, hopping off the stool.
“I’m about to be,” she says. “Why do you look more freaked out than that time we accidentally ate those brownies at Coachella?”
Ah. It was after that particular performance that Rolling Stone dubbed Thunder Hearts a “force to be reckoned with,” and me specifically a “shiny ball of chaos.” The high may have worn off mid-set, but the photo of me singing through a wild tangle of blond hair as I pluck an open bag of Goldfish crackers out of my crop top will last for eternity.
I grab Hannah by the shoulders. “I need your phone.”
Hannah doesn’t hesitate. “It’s charging in the back.”
She leads me to the back office, which is littered with pictures of us in our Thunder Hearts prime. The three of us napping on top of each other on a tour bus in our glittery matching unitards. The three of us holding our Grammy Awards with wild grins. The three of us onstage at what would be our last show, huddled reverently around one mic for the final song.
I tear my eyes off them when Hannah puts her phone in my hand. I open her Tick Tune app to see an artist called Seven taking up all the top slots on her daily queue, with ominously sad songs like “Ghosted” and “Cracked.”
“It’s for the bar,” Hannah says gleefully, squeezing my arm. “We’re having a Seven night tomorrow. The tickets sold out in five minutes.”
Damn. More New Yorkers need therapy than I thought.
“How on earth did you have the time to set that up?” I ask as I tap through the app.
When Thunder Hearts called it quits, Hannah wasted no time pivoting from the stage to running her own small empire. Now Hannah Says includes a size-inclusive, retro-inspired clothing line, a full 1950s-style Target cookware set, and a set of nostalgic coffee table books full of Thai-American-fusion cocktails and dishes she and her sisters grew up with as their parents launched restaurants and bars in every borough in New York City.
On top of all that, she owns this bar. If Hannah sleeps, I sure as hell have never seen it.
“What happened to your phone?” Hannah asks.
“It got into a fight with your floor,” I tell her, waiting for the logout page to load. “The screen is more broken than—well, our brains that day at Coachella.”
“You dropped it?” asks Hannah.
“Dropped” is an understatement. That thing went down like it was in a damn pinball machine—straight into my cocktail, which then toppled onto the bar, ricocheting the phone in slow motion to the floor like it was going for a dramatic Oscar.
In my defense, I was already on edge. This date Hannah helped set up tonight is my first proper date not just in years, but possibly in my life. Hannah was trying to distract me from my nerves by watching the most recent video I scheduled to put on Tick Tune, where I’ve been posting songs anonymously as I figure out what to do with the black hole that is my current career.
Turns out Tick Tune is the ideal place to go for that. It’s like if Snapchat and TikTok created a strange little not-for-profit music baby. Musicians post their songs with undownloadable videos that can only be streamed once per day. After that, the song disappears from the user’s account for twenty-four hours—which means if you really love an artist and want to listen to the high-quality version of the audio, you better go find other friends who will let you listen with them, stat.
Because it’s so fleeting, listening parties are popping up in major cities for popular artists on the app. And because it’s so murky in nature, the app has attracted a lot of artists who want to stay anonymous.
But thanks to my idiocy, I might not be anonymous much longer. It took Hannah two seconds to point out that the frame of the video included a tiny edge of the lace dress she gifted me from her line, which she delayed the launch of last week.
In any other universe that wouldn’t matter. But we exist in a universe where eagle-eyed fans would make the connection between the unreleased Hannah merch and an anonymous singer and start posting my identity in two seconds flat.
And in the span of those two seconds I’d be professionally, emotionally, and existentially fucked.
The obvious next step was to delete it from my phone as fast as possible. My brain got the “delete” memo and my hands got the “fast as possible” memo, but their wires got crossed, which is how I accidentally smashed my phone screen into smithereens.
“It’s seven fifty-six,” says Hannah.
The service is so bad that it’ll be a miracle if I log into my account by this time next year.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I chant.
Hannah raises her eyebrows at me. “What’s the actual worst that happens if the video goes live?”
There is such a menagerie of consequences that it’s hard to pick just one. The first is, of course, that it would complicate the tentative new contract with the record label. I told them I wanted to launch a solo career a few months back, and they’ve had me in “former girl band member” purgatory ever since. According to my manager, Isla, they’re at odds with how to fit me in the market, but their instructions were explicit: sit tight and don’t post anything.
I can’t even blame them for the hesitation. My voice changed massively after Thunder Hearts broke up. While Serena immediately vaulted into superstardom and Hannah launched her lifestyle empire, I was holed up in my apartment, trying to relearn an instrument I’d been playing my whole life. The songs I spent the last year posting on Tick Tune—they were never meant to go viral. They were just meant to practice, and to get some less-than-welcome feelings about some less-than-deserving men out of my system.
Which leads me to the next consequence, which is that if anyone knew I was behind these songs, they’d know exactly who I wrote them about. And I’d rather eat my recording mic than let any of those men know they left a mark.
But in some ways neither of those things compares to the worst consequence of my alter ego being revealed to the world tonight. I deflate against the wall of the office, turning my grim gaze from the phone screen to Hannah’s expectant face.
“Serena would never forgive me,” I say quietly.
Hannah’s eyes flicker in confusion. “Serena doesn’t know?” Off my wince, she deflates, too. “You two still haven’t worked things out.”
Not for lack of trying. I have called enough times since Serena left for her tour that “Incoming Call from Mack” might as well be her phone lock screen. The few times I manage to get her on the line she’s always rushing off for an interview or a workout or a page spread, talking through her teeth with a steely politeness you’d give a guy who rear-ended you in a grocery store parking lot, not a best friend and former bandmate.
Which is to say, I haven’t told her about the Tick Tune videos, or even that I’m trying to start a solo career. I wanted us to be on more solid ground before we talked about it, but we haven’t reached it yet.
Copyright © 2025 by Emma Lord For the Record by Emma Lord (Excerpt)
chapter one
MACK
If you think your love life is a disaster, I’m here to make you feel a whole lot better about yourself. Mine wasn’t just a disaster, but an international one. As in, anyone on the planet with an internet connection can read up about me and the parade of cliché bad boys, cheating nepo babies, and textbook narcissists I dated while I was touring the world with Thunder Hearts in my early twenties.
Tonight was supposed to be the night I turned the story around. I was already crafting the imaginary headline as I made my way to the bar: MACKENZIE WATERS ON FIRST DATE WITH NICE, SECURE, 401(K)-OWNING MAN WHO TEXTS BACK IN A TIMELY MANNER! I was the kind of proud that bordered on smug.
And now I’m propped up on a magenta barstool in the middle of happy hour at Lightning Strike, panic sweating through my pink satin tank top, and shouting, “Can I borrow literally anybody’s phone?”
Nobody can hear me over the chorus of pop sensation Serena’s catchy hit, “Kickstart My Heart.” I turn to see if one of the bartenders can lend me theirs, only to meet a familiar pair of dark, perfectly winged eyes on the other side of the bar, blinking at me in alarm.
“You good?” asks Hannah, one of my best friends and former bandmate.
Even with the bar half hiding her from the crowd, she’s unmissably stunning in a sleek purple slip dress that hugs the pale curves of her body, her glossy black hair catching the sparkles from the disco ball in the dim light. I’m never not happy to see her, but right now I could kiss her on the damn mouth.
“I thought you were uptown!” I say, hopping off the stool.
“I’m about to be,” she says. “Why do you look more freaked out than that time we accidentally ate those brownies at Coachella?”
Ah. It was after that particular performance that Rolling Stone dubbed Thunder Hearts a “force to be reckoned with,” and me specifically a “shiny ball of chaos.” The high may have worn off mid-set, but the photo of me singing through a wild tangle of blond hair as I pluck an open bag of Goldfish crackers out of my crop top will last for eternity.
I grab Hannah by the shoulders. “I need your phone.”
Hannah doesn’t hesitate. “It’s charging in the back.”
She leads me to the back office, which is littered with pictures of us in our Thunder Hearts prime. The three of us napping on top of each other on a tour bus in our glittery matching unitards. The three of us holding our Grammy Awards with wild grins. The three of us onstage at what would be our last show, huddled reverently around one mic for the final song.
I tear my eyes off them when Hannah puts her phone in my hand. I open her Tick Tune app to see an artist called Seven taking up all the top slots on her daily queue, with ominously sad songs like “Ghosted” and “Cracked.”
“It’s for the bar,” Hannah says gleefully, squeezing my arm. “We’re having a Seven night tomorrow. The tickets sold out in five minutes.”
Damn. More New Yorkers need therapy than I thought.
“How on earth did you have the time to set that up?” I ask as I tap through the app.
When Thunder Hearts called it quits, Hannah wasted no time pivoting from the stage to running her own small empire. Now Hannah Says includes a size-inclusive, retro-inspired clothing line, a full 1950s-style Target cookware set, and a set of nostalgic coffee table books full of Thai-American-fusion cocktails and dishes she and her sisters grew up with as their parents launched restaurants and bars in every borough in New York City.
On top of all that, she owns this bar. If Hannah sleeps, I sure as hell have never seen it.
“What happened to your phone?” Hannah asks.
“It got into a fight with your floor,” I tell her, waiting for the logout page to load. “The screen is more broken than—well, our brains that day at Coachella.”
“You dropped it?” asks Hannah.
“Dropped” is an understatement. That thing went down like it was in a damn pinball machine—straight into my cocktail, which then toppled onto the bar, ricocheting the phone in slow motion to the floor like it was going for a dramatic Oscar.
In my defense, I was already on edge. This date Hannah helped set up tonight is my first proper date not just in years, but possibly in my life. Hannah was trying to distract me from my nerves by watching the most recent video I scheduled to put on Tick Tune, where I’ve been posting songs anonymously as I figure out what to do with the black hole that is my current career.
Turns out Tick Tune is the ideal place to go for that. It’s like if Snapchat and TikTok created a strange little not-for-profit music baby. Musicians post their songs with undownloadable videos that can only be streamed once per day. After that, the song disappears from the user’s account for twenty-four hours—which means if you really love an artist and want to listen to the high-quality version of the audio, you better go find other friends who will let you listen with them, stat.
Because it’s so fleeting, listening parties are popping up in major cities for popular artists on the app. And because it’s so murky in nature, the app has attracted a lot of artists who want to stay anonymous.
But thanks to my idiocy, I might not be anonymous much longer. It took Hannah two seconds to point out that the frame of the video included a tiny edge of the lace dress she gifted me from her line, which she delayed the launch of last week.
In any other universe that wouldn’t matter. But we exist in a universe where eagle-eyed fans would make the connection between the unreleased Hannah merch and an anonymous singer and start posting my identity in two seconds flat.
And in the span of those two seconds I’d be professionally, emotionally, and existentially fucked.
The obvious next step was to delete it from my phone as fast as possible. My brain got the “delete” memo and my hands got the “fast as possible” memo, but their wires got crossed, which is how I accidentally smashed my phone screen into smithereens.
“It’s seven fifty-six,” says Hannah.
The service is so bad that it’ll be a miracle if I log into my account by this time next year.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I chant.
Hannah raises her eyebrows at me. “What’s the actual worst that happens if the video goes live?”
There is such a menagerie of consequences that it’s hard to pick just one. The first is, of course, that it would complicate the tentative new contract with the record label. I told them I wanted to launch a solo career a few months back, and they’ve had me in “former girl band member” purgatory ever since. According to my manager, Isla, they’re at odds with how to fit me in the market, but their instructions were explicit: sit tight and don’t post anything.
I can’t even blame them for the hesitation. My voice changed massively after Thunder Hearts broke up. While Serena immediately vaulted into superstardom and Hannah launched her lifestyle empire, I was holed up in my apartment, trying to relearn an instrument I’d been playing my whole life. The songs I spent the last year posting on Tick Tune—they were never meant to go viral. They were just meant to practice, and to get some less-than-welcome feelings about some less-than-deserving men out of my system.
Which leads me to the next consequence, which is that if anyone knew I was behind these songs, they’d know exactly who I wrote them about. And I’d rather eat my recording mic than let any of those men know they left a mark.
But in some ways neither of those things compares to the worst consequence of my alter ego being revealed to the world tonight. I deflate against the wall of the office, turning my grim gaze from the phone screen to Hannah’s expectant face.
“Serena would never forgive me,” I say quietly.
Hannah’s eyes flicker in confusion. “Serena doesn’t know?” Off my wince, she deflates, too. “You two still haven’t worked things out.”
Not for lack of trying. I have called enough times since Serena left for her tour that “Incoming Call from Mack” might as well be her phone lock screen. The few times I manage to get her on the line she’s always rushing off for an interview or a workout or a page spread, talking through her teeth with a steely politeness you’d give a guy who rear-ended you in a grocery store parking lot, not a best friend and former bandmate.
Which is to say, I haven’t told her about the Tick Tune videos, or even that I’m trying to start a solo career. I wanted us to be on more solid ground before we talked about it, but we haven’t reached it yet.
Copyright © 2025 by Emma Lord