Luc leans forward slightly. “He’s an idiot.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“He’s also not hopeless,” Luc adds. “He just needs someone who sees past all the noise.”
My throat tightens. I don’t answer. I don’t trust my voice.
Luc doesn’t push. He taps the recorder lightly. “Is that enough for today?”
I nod. “More than enough.”
I close my laptop and watch as Luc strolls to the back of the bus to join Lily and Larkin in the bedroom. I move to the couch and fall into it. Breathing. Processing. My chest aches, and not from last night anymore, but from everything I never knew until now.
Dean isn’t cold. He’s wounded. He doesn’t avoid feelings because he doesn’t have them. He avoids them because he has too many. And somewhere between Lincoln and Memphis, somewhere between everything I thought and everything I now know, I whisper into the emptiness of the bus, “What am I doing?”
No answer comes. Just the quiet hum of the road. And the overwhelming truth that I’m already in deeper than I planned.
Chapter Eighteen
Dean
Hurt
Johnny Cash
Memphis hits different. It’s sticky heat and barbecue smoke baked into the air, neon bleeding against brick, music crawling out of every alley like the city itself is a living amp. Even the venue lot feels loud, as if the asphalt has its own pulse. I step off the bus and the humidity wraps around my throat like a hand.
Good. Bad. Both. I should feel the buzz. The pre-show charge. The calm before we turn a stadium into a riot. Instead, I feel Lincoln, Nebraska and what happened there sitting quietly under my skin, the kind that keeps scratching at the back of your skull until you either drown in it or crack.
Sadie’s already out here. Of course she is. Camera strap tight across her chest, lens pointed toward the stage rig while crew hauls cases like ants moving a house. She’s talking to Cherry, nodding, focused, doing her job like she didn’t get her heart stepped on three states ago. It’s impressive. Annoying. Dangerous. I don’t go near her. That’s become my religion lately.
Mikey bumps my shoulder as he passes, sweat already on his forehead. “Yo, you alive?”
“Barely.” I skate my gaze over the lot, pretending I’m scanning the setup and not scanning her.
“Cool. Keep doing that.” He smirks like he knows everything I won’t say out loud. I flip him the bird without looking. He laughs, disappears into the chaos. Hayden is with the tech team by the loading dock, checking the new cable run. Luc’s not far from him, hands on hips, calm in that giant-mountain way he is when he’s trying to be normal. He glances at me, sees my face, and doesn’t ask. Best friend code.
We move through load-in like muscle memory: cases to the wings, guitars to the stands, monitors to their marks. I take my own gear inside, shoulder brushing through black curtains and stage dust and the smell of last night’s smoke effects still clinging to everything.
The stage in Memphis is bigger than Lincoln. Higher. More steel in the air. More weight hanging overhead. More ways for shit to fall. A crew guy climbs the truss, shouting down to another. Chains clink. A motor whirs as a lighting bar rises inch by inch.
I should be thinking about setlist order, about the solo in track four, about my hands. Instead, my brain is too busy doing that thing it does when it wants to punish me. Counting dangers. Seeing ghosts.
I shake it off, head down, guitar on my knee, fingers rolling the strings in a quiet check. One note, then another. The sound is clean. I should feel relief. I don’t.
I look up without meaning to. Sadie’s onstage. Not center, but close enough. She’s crouched near the upstage riser, snapping shots of a tech balancing on a ladder while another man below feeds cable through a pulley. She’s got that focused face on; eyes sharp, mouth set, hair shoved into a bun that’s already coming loose at the edges. She adjusts her angle, stepping back onto a taped mark that is absolutely not meant for a person to stand on right now.
“Camera girl,” I mutter to myself. “Move.”
As if she can hear me, she shifts, lifting the lens toward the ceiling rig to catch the bar as it glides into place. She tilts her chin to follow it, the curve of her throat exposed in this stupidly casual way that has no business tugging at my attention. I tell myself to look away. My brain doesn’t listen.
A shout cracks through the air. “Hold!” someone yells. “HOLD!”
The winch above us stutters. Metal shrieks high and awful, like something is tearing open. Time does that elastic thing. It stretches, then snaps. I see the lighting truss jerk sideways. A chain lurches. A bolt pops. The whole bar dips at a wrong angle. And Sadie is right under it.
“No-” The word doesn’t even make it out of my mouth before my body is moving. The truss drops. Not all the way. Not a free fall. But enough. Enough to rip a scream of metal through the space and send a fifty-pound spotlight swinging like a wrecking ball. It slams down hard three feet from her shoulder, sparks bursting where it hits the steel stage.
Sadie freezes, the camera still up, caught between shock and instinct. I’m there before I know I ran. My hands clamp onto her arms. I yank her backward so hard she stumbles into my chest. I spin us away from the impact zone, my back to the rig, my body between her and what’s falling.
