"I'm Julian," I said, reaching out a hand. I usually avoided contact with the patrons. They were customers; I was the atmosphere. But this felt different. This felt like a collision that had been planned by the town itself.
"Oleander," he whispered, his hand sliding into mine. His skin was cold, but the touch sent a jolt of heat up my arm that made my vision swim for a second. "Oleander Voss."
"A name like a warning," I murmured, the words out of my mouth before I could censor them. I saw him flinch, just a tiny movement of his shoulders, and I immediately regretted it. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean..."
"No," he said, a small, painful laugh escaping his throat. "You're right. It is a warning. I'm just not very good at following them."
We talked in fragments for a while. He told me he was new to town, that he'd moved into an apartment on the east side. He didn't mention a husband, but he mentioned a loss that had the shape of a person. He spoke about the fog and the buildings that decayed in spirals, and he spoke about the silence of his flat. Every word he said felt like a note in that melody, a piece of a puzzle I was terrified to solve.
I had to go back for my second set but I wanted to stay on that stool and listen to him talk until the sun came up, until the shadows in Hollow Vale retreated back into the cracks in the pavement. But the job was the job. I stood up, and for a second, we just looked at each other, the urge to tell him he shouldn't be alone tonight on the tip of my tongue but I didn’t get there.
"Stay for the next set?" I asked. It wasn't a command. It was a plea.
"I'll stay," he said. He kept his eyes on me as I walked back to the piano.
When I sat back down on the bench, the keys didn't feel cold anymore. I ignored my setlist and played the melody, letting my fingers go where they'd been wanting to go for three days. I played it for him as I watched him from across the room, and I saw the moment he seemed to recognize it. I saw him go still, his whole body turning to stone as the music filled the space between us.
He disappeared soon after, my routine dragging me home after a silent wave to the bartender. Rowan was awake, sitting up in the armchair near our bed with the lamp on, which meant he'd been waiting. He took one look at my face and his expression shifted.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I played it," I said. I sat on the edge of the bed, my hands still trembling. "The melody. The one that's been in my head for days. I didn't choose to play it, Rowan. My hands just went there."
Rowan smiled, standing up and crossing the space to sit beside me. “What changed?”
"He was there," I said. "Oleander. He was sitting at the bar, and the second I started playing that melody, it was like he recognized it and then he left."
Rowan's grip tightened. "What do you mean, recognized it?"
"I mean, he knew it. Not like someone hearing a familiar song. Like someone hearing a voice they thought was dead."
seven
OLEANDER
The air inside the bar was cooler than the night outside, thick with the scent of unwashed glasses and a sweet, heavy musk that I couldn't quite identify. I took my usual seat at the far end of the bar. The amber glow from the pendant lights overhead made the whiskey in front of me look like molten gold, but I didn't touch it. I just watched the stage.
Julian was already there. He sat at the piano with a posture that suggested he was carved from the same dark mahogany as the instrument. He didn't look at the crowd, which was sparse even for a Tuesday. His fingers moved across the keys with a tentative grace, like he was testing the air for a storm. When the first notes of his set drifted through the room, the noise ofthe patrons became irrelevant. The music was a physical thing, a tide that pulled at the edges of the numbness I'd been cultivating since Dominic's funeral.
It hurt, a dull, persistent ache like a bruise being pressed. The melody was haunting, something classical that I should have recognized but didn't, layered with a melancholy so profound it felt like a mirror. I watched the way his throat moved when he swallowed, the way his dark skin caught the light as he leaned into a particularly difficult chord. I was watching him too closely, the way he seemed to be breathing the music rather than playing it. I tried to look at the bottle of rye behind the bar, then at the exits, but my eyes kept snapping back to him.
When he finished the first set, the silence that followed was heavy, almost suffocating. He stood up, his broad shoulders shifting under a dark sweater, and walked straight toward me. My hands tightened around the cold glass of my untouched drink. He occupied the seat next to me, bringing with him the scent of cedar and something clean, like rain on pavement.
"You came back," he said. His voice was low, the kind of sound you felt in your chest.
"I like the music," I said, my voice coming out smaller than I wanted. "It's better than the silence in my apartment."
He turned his head to look at me, his expression serious and turned inward. "Silence is a dangerous thing in this town. It fills up with things you didn't mean to keep." He signaled the bartender for a glass of water. "What brought you here, Oleander? Truly. People don't just stumble into Hollow Vale by accident."
I traced the rim of my glass. "My husband died. Dominic. He left me an apartment here. I didn't even know he owned it. I didn't know he owned anything in this part of the state." I looked up, meeting Julian's gaze. "I'm here because I didn't haveanywhere else to go where people wouldn't look at me like I was a tragedy in progress."
Julian nodded slowly, a small, knowing movement. He didn't offer me a platitude. He didn't tell me it would get better or that Dominic was in a better place. He just let the truth of it sit between us. "People come to Hollow Vale when they need somewhere that won't ask them to be okay," he said. "The town doesn't care about your healing. It just cares that you're here."
The accuracy of it hit me hard, a sudden constriction in my throat that made it hard to breathe. I'd spent months nodding through Liliana's worried check-ins and the polite, empty sympathies of our friends back home. Nobody had ever just told me I didn't have to be okay. For a second, I thought I might actually cry, right there under the amber lights with the smell of cheap whiskey in my nose. I looked down at my hands to hide the way my eyes were burning.
"Rowan said you were different," Julian murmured, his voice so soft I almost missed it over the hum of the refrigerator behind the bar. "I see what he meant now. You're not just grieving. You're waiting."
"Waiting for what?" I asked, my heart doing a strange, fluttering dance against my ribs. I thought of the shadows in my room, the scent of cologne that wasn't there, and the way Rowan had looked at me, like he was seeing a ghost through my skin.
