If I stopped to breathe.
If I stopped for anything.
Keep moving, Lucky. The industry never waits. You stop working, you’re old news.
Thirteen mental breakdowns later, I finally realized he didn’t mean the world.
He meant his bank account.
Lily studies my face. Quiet. Observing.
“Was your mom happy you became famous?” she asks.
The question cracks something I didn’t expect.
“She died when I was little,” I say. My voice is too tight. “So… she never saw any of it.”
“Oh.” Lily’s voice softens. “Was she sick?”
“Yeah.” I stare down at my guitar. “She was.”
I don’t explain. I can’t. Not today.
I breathe in and push the spotlight off me. “What about your mom?”
Lily picks at a thread on her sleeve. “She died in a car accident. I was… really little too.”
Our eyes meet, and a quiet shock of shared sadness passes between us—two kids who lost their mothers too early, two girls forced to grow up without a compass. I glance at her again. She’s small, determined, honest, and at least she has Ethan, a father who would put himself in the line of fire for her.
Something settles between us then—not pity, not grief, but recognition.
And maybe—God help me—something liketrust.
The sun hangs low, melting gold and rose into the lake until the whole world feels dipped in honey. The water shifts in slow ripples, catching light like broken glass. The air smells faintly of damp earth, pine, and that clean nothingness you only get near water at dusk.
I sit on the edge of the back porch, bare feet dangling above the grass, my guitar warm against my thigh. The journal lies open beside me, the paper waiting, patient, accusing. My pen hovers uselessly above the page.
Nothing comes.
I hum a line.
It breaks.
I try a chord.
It clatters in my chest like loose metal.
Every note sticks in my throat.
My fingers feel stiff and wrong, like they belong to someone else—someone clumsy, someone untrained. I’ve played through colds, migraines, fevers, heartbreaks, stages bigger than anything, studios colder than death. I’ve created songs in moving vans, airport lounges, and hotel bathrooms at 3 a.m.
But I’ve never felt this.
This emptiness.
My chest tightens, sharp and hot. The one thing that has always been mine—music, my pulse, my blood—feels like it evaporated the moment I stepped out of the world I knew.
My throat clogs with panic. I grab my phone and type with shaking fingers:
