The sound is atrocious. Three strings are flat, one is sharp, and the action is high enough to qualify as a war crime. I twist the tuning pegs fast, muscle memory taking over while my ears make rapid corrections. It takes maybe fifteen seconds to get it within shouting distance of playable.
“Hey, Dominic.” I pitch my voice to carry. “Mind if I play a few?”
Dominic stops halfway to the man in the doorway, reads my face, reads the room. A flicker of understanding crosses his features.
“Knock yourself out.”
I settle onto a barstool near the window and position the guitar across my knee. The body is cheap laminate, the neck slightly warped, and the sound hole has a sticker residue ring that suggests it once wore a price tag from a pawn shop.
It’s the worst instrument I’ve ever held.
I play the opening chord of “Paper Bones”—my first single, the one that went platinum before I was old enough to rent a car—and the attention of the entire bar pivots.
“Holy shit.” A woman at a nearby table grabs her friend’s arm. “Is that Atticus Sloan?”
Phones come up. Screens glow blue. The hush that had settled over the room cracks and reshuffles, attention redirecting from the drama at the bar to the celebrity with the guitar. People press forward. Bodies fill the space between Judah and Mason like a human dam.
The man—Judah, it has to be Judah—stops. Blocked. His jaw tightens, blue eyes still searching over the gathering crowd for Mason’s face.
I start singing.
FOURTEEN
PHOENIX
I’mmid-sentence with a lobsterman named Frank when the chord cuts through the noise.
My mouth stops forming whatever word was next. Frank’s face blurs. The bar, the laughter, the clink of glasses—all of it drops away like scenery falling off a stage, leaving nothing but that sound.
I know this song.
Not in the casual way you know something that plays on the radio while you’re stuck in traffic. I know it the way you know the songs you listen to alone, in the dark, with your headphones in and no one watching. “Paper Bones” lives in a playlist on my phone labeled “workout mix” so Mason will never open it and discover it’s actually forty-three tracks of music that makes me cry.
I turn.
Atticus sits on a barstool by the window, the battered guitar balanced on his knee like it belongs there. His head is bent slightly, eyes half-closed, and his fingers move across the fretboard with the unhurried confidence of someone who learned to play before he learned to read.
He doesn’t look up. Doesn’t scan the crowd for reactions. Doesn’t do any of the things performers do when they want you to watch them.
Something in my chest shifts. Physically. Like a piece of furniture being dragged across a floor I thought was level.
The artist on Spotify is for some one-hit-wonder band that never produced more than one record. For a moment, I wonder if Atticus just decided to acoustically cover someone else’s song, but that husky vibrato is too distinctive. This is definitely the same voice I’ve listened to a hundred times on repeat.
How did I have no idea this was his song?
His voice fills the bar until I feel it swell inside my chest. Not the way it sounds on recordings, where every note has been polished and compressed and layered until it gleams like chrome. This is rawer. Rougher at the edges, with a grain to it that catches in the low registers and frays slightly at the top. The cheap guitar buzzes on the D string, and he doesn’t try to hide it. Doesn’t compensate. Just lets the imperfection exist alongside the melody like it was always supposed to be there.
I’m moving before I decide to.
My feet carry me through the crowd, weaving between bodies without registering them. Someone holds up a phone, screen bright. A woman whispers to her friend, hand over her mouth. I don’t process any of it. There’s only the music, pulling me forward like a current I forgot I was standing in.
You built me up with paper bones
Said I was strong enough alone
But paper burns and bones will break
How much weight can hollow things take?
