"Are you sure you aren't taking me to the moon?" I say to Mom, while peering out the airplane window at the night sky. We're above the clouds, and the constellations shine so brightly that it's like being one with the stars.

"I wish, kiddo. There are fewer people there." Mom looks up from the book she's reading on her tablet and gives me a wistful smile.

Neither of us expect crowds or a media firestorm where we're going, which I'm told is a cottage we've rented for the entire summer on a lake in Northwestern Ontario, Canada, somewhere outside of a city called Thunder Bay. The lake sounds like it will be secluded, but I get what she means. People lately have meant intrusions and emotions, drama and trauma. It would be nice to have a world to ourselves for a few weeks, but this will be a lot closer to that dream than anywhere we could retreat to in southern California.

At first I thought we were staying a couple thousand miles closer to home. I was only half-listening when Mom mentioned a lake and part of Ontario, but it wasn't until she dug out our passports and unearthed a few suitcases from a closet that I realized she meant the province in Canada, and not a fast getaway to a resort or spa in the Inland Empire, outside of Ontario, California, like at Lake Arrowhead or something. My mind was otherwise occupied the first time she filled me in on our vacation plans, so I missed the finer details.

All I could think about was the venom Bowie and his fans could be spreading online at that very moment, on top of what they'd already achieved in twenty-four hours, and what my own fans might believe. Would they be upset or angry, or think I didn't care about the lengths some of them went to for tickets or to book travel to a show? Would they think I'm ditching them, or buy into anything Bowie might claim to be true? A small part of me wonders if my music career will be destroyed after this, if I ever find a way to get on a stage again without being paralyzed by panic and fear.

My mentions on Twitter and Instagram have been a cesspool of spite since Bowie beat our record label and my publicist to announcing I'd dropped out of the tour. There were carefully-planned statements designed to frame this in the best possible light, and those went out the window the second everyone had to shift to damage-control mode. I'm sure Bowie got an earful about that, or more likely, his management did. I doubt anyone but Bowie's parents would call him out on something short of felony activity these days, since he's a money-making machine for the music industry. Everyone else in his sphere probably fears losing their job if they make him mad.

Elton took the heat on behalf of Team Cayden, which I only know from eavesdropping on Mom's end of a phone call with him. I sent him a text, apologizing for how it all played out. Elton told me not to worry about it, and to forget about all of this while I'm on vacation.

I wish I could.

As it is, I've been fighting with fidgety fingers for the entire day. Our flight from LAX to Toronto had WiFi, but I couldn't have connected to it and gotten to my social apps without Mom noticing and confiscating my phone. I've already been told I need to disconnect or my time away will be pointless. I even handed over my passwords to Elton, who said he'll post updates for me while I'm away.

It's for my own good, but looking at social media is a hard habit to break, especially when there's a ton of swirl around the topics of me canceling on the tour and if Bowie and I have called it quits. I haven't seen anything new reported about Portia and him, although I'm tempted to leak the news of their hook-up and his cheating myself and let his people deal with it. All that's stopped me so far is knowing I'd just be giving Elton and my publicist more to deal with.

I fight back a sigh, then lean forward to peek through the mesh panel on Alfie's travel carrier. He has been as good as gold today, both on our first flight and this one. He's used to this, since he travels with me a lot when I have shows in the US and Canada. The hardest part about touring overseas is not having him with me.

Alfie stirs inside of his carrier and sniffs a couple of times, then resumes his nap. I envy his ability to sleep on planes. As often as I travel these days, it's something I have yet to master, and today's travel day has been long. With traffic, it takes close to an hour to get from our house to LAX, adding to the nearly five-hour flight to Toronto, the time in between at Pearson airport, and the almost two-hour connecting flight to Thunder Bay.

"How long do you think it will take us to get to the lake once we land?" I ask Mom.

"It should be a forty-five minute drive, but we aren't going there tonight," she answers. "I booked us a hotel. We can pick up the keys for the cottage in the morning, and then get some groceries before we head out there."

I perk up at the thought of wandering through the aisles of a supermarket and loading up a cart with food. It's a symbolic return to something more normal for me, even if it's only for a little while. I don't think I've been inside of a supermarket in close to two years—not since I became famous enough to make tabloid headlines, although that's only part of the reason why I don't go. So much of my time these days is spent rehearsing, recording, playing shows, or being tutored and doing homework. Mom goes on her own sometimes, but most of the time we get our groceries delivered.

"Can we get ketchup chips?" I give her a hopeful look.

She wrinkles her nose. "Yes, but those sound gross."

"Nope! We had them once, remember? I think it was after a show in Vancouver. The chips made my fingers all red right before I had a meet and greet, and Brynn gave me heck for getting ketchup crumbs stuck all over my lips." I pause, smiling at the memory.

"You had them," Mom reminds me. "I watched. There's something wrong about potato chips being that color."

"I guess that means more chips for me." I grin, then think of something else. "How about bagged milk?"

"I draw the line at bagged milk. How do you even open or pour that without it going everywhere?"

"There are videos on TikTok and YouTube," I inform her. "You just need a pitcher to put the bag in."

"We'll stick with what I know."

Mom returns to her book, and I occupy myself with creating a mental list of snack food I want to sneak into the shopping cart. My daydreams of Smarties and Mars bars are soon interrupted by an announcement that we've started our descent and will be landing in Thunder Bay in twenty-five minutes.

The rest of the flight is uneventful. The terminal we walk out to after deplaning has a few gates we pass on our way to the exit, and then we take an escalator down one level to the baggage claim. This airport doesn't look familiar to me, but that doesn't mean much. I've been in more airports than I can remember over the last several years, and some of my flights have been on private jets chartered by my record label to make tight performance-to-performance or performance-to-talk-show bookings, with a chauffeur picking me up at locations that don't require going inside of a terminal.

"Have we been here before?" I ask, while we wait for our luggage to be unloaded from the plane. Mom hasn't told me how she decided on the lake we're going to as our vacation spot.

"We have, but you were a baby. You wouldn't remember being here. We came here with your dad."

One of our suitcases makes an appearance on the baggage carousel as Mom finishes her sentence. She lunges for it, and I go in search of a luggage cart.

The great thing about this airport is how close together the baggage claim and the car rental counter are. After we have all of our suitcases, it takes only a few minutes to get the key fob for a Jeep Grand Cherokee that Mom reserved before we left Los Angeles. Once we're finished loading our suitcases and are seated inside the Jeep, Mom takes a few minutes to master the GPS.

A pleasant-sounding voice responds to the destination Mom requests. "Starting route to 2240 Sleeping Giant Parkway: Turn left onto Round Boulevard and drive for 400 meters, then turn right onto Princess Street."

A giggle escapes me. I must be overtired from the travel day since the street names strike me as funny for no other reason than, put together, it sounds like we've been dropped into the middle of a fairy tale.

Mom sends an amused glance my way. "What's so funny?"

This only makes my giggles worse. "A sleeping giant and a princess," I manage to say. "I can't decide if it should be a story in Grimm's Fairy Tales or the basis for a video game."

Mom is laughing now, too, enough that she waits to regain some of her composure before starting the Jeep. This reminds me of how things used to be with her and me, before the night at The Domino, and also before I started dating Bowie. If I'm honest, nothing has truly been the same since before I skyrocketed to the top of the charts and found myself with a serious career and a whirlwind schedule. I gained millions of fans in the blink of an eye, and yes, I've made millions of dollars. All of this happened without me considering what's been lost in the process, including pieces of who I used to be.

"It's too dark to show you the Sleeping Giant tonight, but you'll see it tomorrow," Mom promises. "You can't miss it."

"Wait, that's really a thing? What is it?"

"I'm not spoiling the surprise." She turns her attention back to the idling vehicle and shifts it out of park.

We're out of the airport parking lot before long, and turning on to what seems to be a main road in the city, judging by the amount of traffic. The drive to the hotel takes less than twenty minutes. It's on the waterfront, facing Lake Superior, but the night time darkness obscures my view of most of the lake beyond the shore.

We take Alfie on a quick walk by the marina after we park the Jeep. I shiver at the breeze coming off the water and pull my sweater closer around me. It's a relief when we finally bring our suitcases up to the hotel room, and I waste no time tossing my carry-on bag beside one of the two queen-sized beds and flopping onto the mattress. It's almost midnight here, which means it's only nine o'clock in L.A., but I'm ready to drop.

"I'm going to have a shower," Mom declares, more to our surroundings than to me. Her hunched shoulders and fatigued eyes show that the travel day has also worn her out.

"Okay, I'm going to watch some TV," I tell her. This is a lie.

I wait until she starts running water in the bathroom before diving for my bag and fishing out my phone. In a flash, I connect to the hotel's WiFi, so my phone won't log roaming data use in case Mom checks the account. It's easy enough to get an international data plan, but since our phones are on the same account, Mom would find out on the next billing cycle. If that happens, I won't hear the end of it.

After a moment of hesitation, I start with Instagram. It's usually the lesser of evils, since fewer of Bowie's more hateful fans tag me in their comments there. As it turns out, this isn't the case today. Or it could be—I haven't yet looked at my Twitter mentions, so I can't compare the volume of mean-spirited comments from there to here. My Instagram notifications are nothing short of a malice-filled disaster.

I could ignore everything like I usually do, but morbid curiosity gets the better of me. I begin reading through my mentions and the comments left directly on my posts. Some of these are good wishes and concern from fans who want to know if I'm okay. The rest are the opposite of that.

One thread in particular catches my eye. It's on my most recent post, and it starts off with a well-meaning comment from a fan I met at a meet and greet last year, named Violet.

It's okay to take time off, @CaydenIndigo! Please take care of yourself. Sending you lots of love!

Her comment has thousands of likes already, but it also has quite a few replies. The first one is pretty nasty.

Don't bother sending her love, you fool. What a joke. I always knew @CaydenIndigo would show her true colors, it was just a matter of time. What a conniving little narcissist, only thinking of herself. Don't want to tell everyone that I told you so, but I kind of did. @RealBowieNelson is right to be ticked off. She isn't worthy of him.

Violet clearly wasted no time in responding to this, because her reply is right below.

Who are you to judge her? Think about what @CaydenIndigo has been through. She can do SO MUCH better than @RealBowieNelson if he can't understand why she needs a break and deserves time to heal. His post yesterday made him sound like such an insensitive creep. (No offense if you're reading this, Cayden!)

I almost laugh at that. If she only knew how much I agree with her. I tap Violet's name to go to her profile page, then send her a quick thank-you note and ask how she's doing. When it seems like some of the world is against me, it lifts my spirits to know people like Violet exist.

The rest of my notifications are pretty much the same. There are kind words from some, and comments attacking me from others. But there's one comment that catches my eye as I scroll, and it makes me stop cold.

What are all of you complaining about? I'm over the moon that @CaydenIndigo won't be playing with @RealBowieNelson this summer. She should have died at her concert. I'm sure Dallas Fernsby was there because of something she did to him when they went to high school together. Her fans should have lived, not her.

I don't know if the comment pierces through me because a complete stranger wishes I was dead, or because somewhere, deep down, I agree if anyone had to die that night, it should have been me. Nothing will ever justify so many innocent people losing their lives at my show.

I'm still staring at the screen, motionless, when the water stops running in the bathroom. The shower door opens and closes, which means I'm only a couple of minutes away from being caught doing the one thing I promised to take a break from. As quickly as I can, I turn the television on with the remote, then press my finger over the power button on my phone and wait for the screen to go dark.

My phone is back in my bag by the time Mom emerges from the bathroom, and I'm in bed, propped up against the pillows and pretending to be absorbed in a late night talk show. I have no idea who the guests being interviewed are, because looking at a TV and actually watching it are two different things. My mind is still consumed by the words I read on Instagram.

She should have died at her concert.

I can't help but wonder how many others have said or thought the same thing, and the contempt I might have been met with on tour this summer if I'd been capable of performing in front of a crowd. Taking time off and getting away were both excellent calls on Mom's part. The problem now is, I'm not sure I'll ever be ready to go back.