Fighting for my life had nearly ruined me, and I had no idea what he thought about me now—if he thought about me at all.
I startled when there was a knock on my door.
“That’s going to be your brother,” Perlah said. “I’ll leave you two alone for a while. Just hit the button if you need more medication.”
She was gone after that, and a moment later, Tollin appeared. He was holding my four-year-old niece on his shoulder, who was dead asleep.
“Why do you look like you’re trying to take a giant shit?”
I rolled my eyes. “I can’t feel my ass. I don’t know if I’m trying to take a giant shit.”
His face did that thing—that weird, complicated thing it always did whenever the reality of my situation was brought up. But I wasn’t going to sugarcoat it for him because I couldn’t sugarcoat it for myself. I still had no idea how much feeling and movement I would regain once the swelling in my spine went down, but I needed to be prepared to accept every reality.
There was a chance I would walk again.
And there was a chance I wouldn’t.
“So, I might be losing my mind,” Tollin said as he dropped into his chair and leaned back so Sadie could keep sleeping, “but I swear I saw fuck-face in the parking lot.”
“Raleigh,” I said. “Yeah. He was here.”
His head dropped back. “Oh my god, itwashim? What the actual hell did he want?”
I licked my lips, not sure if I wanted to tell him or not. Tollin was nothing like me. He’d spent his high school years focused on weight training. He’d played football in college. He coached now, but when he wasn’t bench-pressing weights, he was bench-pressing his kids or his wife.
He was kind, and he was anxious, but he was also protective. He never took risks, but he had a hair trigger for anyone on his shit list, which meant he would come to blows if someone threatened the person he loved—whether that was blood family or the family he’d created.
Raleigh was at the top of Tollin’s list now, and probably always would be. And as satisfying as it would be to have my brother beat the shit out of him, I didn’t need him throwing his daughter on my bed and going after Raleigh and ending up with an assault charge.
“Atlas,” he pressed.
“I’ll tell you, but you have to swear you won’t do anything rash.”
He stared at me, eyes narrow. “Fine. I swear.”
I knew he wasn’t lying. He wouldn’t put himself in danger of jail time because he was a dad now, and he wasn’t going to spend time away from his wife or his kids.
I took a breath, then shrugged. “He came here to let me know the band was replacing me. He said that the label was going to be sending me a bunch of papers to sign to terminate my contract.” I left out the shitty stuff he’d said about wheelchairs and the stage, and how he’d tried to make me feel like this was all my fault—like I’d done it on purpose.
I was already struggling to accept my reality. I didn’t need to replay that dickhead’s words.
Tollin grimaced. “I swear to god, I am going to snap the neck off his guitar and shove it so far up his ass?—”
“You’re going to wake up Sadie,” I told him when his voice began to rise.
He took a breath, but his cheeks were mottled pink with his anger. “Did you tell him to get fucked?”
“I told him to leave. I don’t care if they want to replace me. I was already fucking done with them.”
He adjusted Sadie, then leaned forward toward me. “You need to care. Most of those songs—the ones that made his punk ass rich enough and bold enough to think he could step out on you—came from your brain. From your hands. You’re not walking away with nothing. If they want you out, they’d better buy you out.”
I doubted there was a disability clause in my contract that would shut me out without compensation, and Tollin had a point. Theyweremy songs. I had proof they were my songs. If they wanted to keep them, I was going to make it painful on their wallets.
The band could have the sound. It wasn’t mine anymore. It had never really felt like me anyway. But if they wanted to hurt me, they’d see that it didn’t matter what condition my body was in, I would hurt them back.
“Look, I gotta get this kid home, but don’t sign anything until tomorrow. And call your lawyer.”
That was the last thing I wanted to do, but I hadn’t spoken to anyone since I’d woken up from the accident. Tollin had been handling my agent and my PA, but I was going to have to nut up and do something now that I was more cognizant.
