My stomach clenches before I even open it. I tap it anyway.
The video loads quickly. Different backdrop again. This one looks more polished—branded wall, better lighting, a host with a carefully sympathetic expression. The lower third identifies her by name.
Tammy Deacon.
I don’t like seeing it written out. I don’t like how neatly it fits into a chyron.
The clip begins mid-sentence.
“…and he’d sing them to me like they were just ours,” she says. “He told me what they meant. He said I understood him in a way no one else did.”
The host leans forward. “So these weren’t just public lyrics to you.”
“No,” she says softly. “We talked about them. Face-to-face. He’d say them directly to me.”
The screen cuts to a still frame of album art. A familiar line scrolls beneath it.
So touch me slow, before you go, make forever fit inside one night
My vision narrows. “What the fuck?” I say out loud to the empty apartment.
They’re my lyrics.
I wrote that in a hotel room in Chicago when Ollie and I were still trying to balance our new love and the distance of games and concerts. I remember the carpet pattern. The smell of the coffee maker. The way I sat on the edge of the bed and recorded the first draft into my phone because I thought if I didn’t capture it immediately, it would disappear.
She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere near my life when that song existed.
“She’s delusional,” I mutter.
But delusion doesn’t matter when it’s packaged cleanly. And fuck, the woman must have been a child when I actually wrote those lyrics. Fucking journalists who don’t do their research need to be held accountable.
The clip continues.
“He would say, ‘You’re the only one who really hears it,’” she adds. “Like I was part of it.”
My teeth grind so hard it hurts.
That line—you’re the only one who really hears it—was something I said once, years ago, into a mic during a live showwhen the crowd went quiet enough that I could hear myself think. It wasn’t whispered in some private room. It wasn’t shared over candlelight.
It was a throwaway comment into a thousand bodies and a sea of noise.
She’s stitching together fragments and calling it intimacy.
My phone buzzes again.
Miles: Call Rachael. Now.
I don’t hesitate, and she answers on the second ring.
“I’ve seen it,” she says before I can speak.
“What the hell is she doing in another interview?” I demand. “Who keeps booking her? Who’s feeding this?”
Her tone remains even. “Rafe.”
“She’s talking about my lyrics like they’re private conversations. They’re not. They’re songs. They’re public. And they’re really fucking old.”
“I know.”
