"For the other shoe to drop," Julian said. He stood up, the movement fluid and controlled. "I have to play the second set. Stay for it?"
"I'm not going anywhere," I promised, and it felt like a confession. I watched him walk back to the piano, my eyes tracing the line of his back, the way he carried himself with a quiet, lonely dignity.
Julian sat on the bench, but he didn't start immediately. He sat with his eyes closed for a long minute, his hands resting on histhighs. The room seemed to grow colder, a sudden draft licking at my ankles despite the closed doors. I felt a prickle of unease. Then, his posture shifted. His shoulders tightened, pulling into a rigid, almost pained line. He reached for the keys, and the first three notes made my breath hitch in my lungs.
It was a minor-key progression, obscure and hauntingly familiar. It was the melody. Dominic's melody. The one he used to hum on Sunday mornings while the coffee was brewing, those slow, gray mornings back in our old house when he thought I wasn't listening. It was personal and private, a secret language he'd hummed under his breath while he poured over those leather-bound books he'd started hiding from me. Hearing it here, played by a man who had never met my husband, felt like having my chest cracked open with a dull blade.
I couldn't move. I was pinned to the bar stool by the sheer impossibility of the sound. Julian played it with an intensity that bordered on violence, his fingers striking the keys as if he were trying to exorcise a spirit. The tune spiraled, twisting into itself in a way that mimicked the decay of the buildings outside, a warped geometry of sound that shouldn't have existed. I could almost smell Dominic's sweet, floral cologne. I could almost feel his hand on the back of my neck, possessive and heavy.
Julian's eyes were clamped shut, his head tilted back as if he were listening to a voice I couldn't hear. The music sounded like a scream being muffled, beautiful and absolutely wrong. The shadows in the corners of the bar began to pool, deepening into ink that seemed to pulse in time with the rhythm. I felt a wave of existential vertigo, a sense that the floor was no longer solid beneath my feet.
When the final note faded into the air, vibrating until it was nothing but a ghost of a sound, Julian didn't move. He sat there, his chest heaving, his eyes still closed. The silence in the bar was absolute. Nobody clapped. Nobody even seemed to breathe.It was as if the music had stripped the room of its air. Slowly, Julian opened his eyes and looked down at his hands. He stared at them like they were foreign objects, like he'd woken up to find someone else's blood on his skin.
"I don't..." He trailed off, his voice trembling. He looked over at me, and the confusion in his eyes was so raw it was terrifying. "I don't know where that came from. I've never heard that before in my life."
His fingers were shaking so violently they rattled against the wood of the piano. I stood up, my chair screeching against the floor. I didn't say anything. I couldn't. If I opened my mouth, I was afraid I'd either scream or vomit. The numbness was gone, replaced by something cold and sharp. I turned and ran for the door, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm that matched the melody I'd just heard.
The fog was waiting for me outside. I didn't stop until I reached the alleyway beside the bar, my back hitting the damp brick wall with a force that knocked the wind out of me. My legs gave way, and I slid down to the pavement, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to shut out the image of Julian at the piano, but the melody was already etched into my brain, a permanent scar.
I was alone in the dark, but it didn't feel like it. It felt like Dominic was standing right there in the mist, watching me realize that there was no such thing as leaving him. I stayed there on the ground for a long time, listening to the silence of Hollow Vale.
eight
ROWAN
The morning after Julian told me about the melody, neither of us talked about it. That was how we worked, Julian processed in silence, I processed in motion. He sat at the kitchen counter with a book he wasn't reading. I cleaned a knife that was already clean. The apartment felt smaller than usual, the walls pulling in around the thing we weren't saying: that the man I'd fucked and the man Julian had played for was carrying something neither of us knew how to fight.
"Walk?" Julian said, without looking up.
I grabbed my coat.
We left the apartment and headed toward Main Street. The fog was low today, clinging to the ankles of the buildings likea white shroud. We walked in a synchronized rhythm we'd perfected over the years, our shoulders occasionally brushing, but the quiet between us was loaded with everything from the night before.
Julian broke the silence first, which was unusual. He usually let me be the one to crack.
"The melody," he said, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. "When I played it, my hands weren't doing what I told them to. It was like something else was steering."
"Something from him?"
"Something through him. There's a difference." Julian slowed his pace, his brow pulling tight. "Rowan, I've studied music my entire life. I know every piece I've ever played. That melody doesn't exist in any catalogue, any composer's archive, anything I've ever heard. But my fingers knew it like they'd been practicing for years."
I didn't like the way that sounded. It reminded me too much of the way the town operated, slipping things into you so quietly that by the time you noticed, they'd already taken root. I'd felt it the night I was with Oleander, the cold pressing in at the edges of the room, the shadows leaning closer. I'd told myself it was Hollow Vale being Hollow Vale. But Julian hearing music that didn't belong to him was different. That was the town reaching through someone.
"You think it's connected to whatever he's carrying?" I asked.
Julian was quiet for half a block. "I think whatever his husband opened, it's not just sitting in that apartment. It's looking for instruments. And I don't mean pianos."
The thought settled into me like a stone dropped into deep water. I thought about the way Oleander smelled like cologne that wasn't his, the way the temperature in his apartment had shifted the moment I touched him, the way his grief seemed to have a physical weight that pressed against everything around it.I'd been treating him like a man who needed protecting. Julian was suggesting he might be the thing we needed protecting from or at least, the thing that was using him might be.
"So what do we do?" I asked.
Julian looked at me, and the expression on his face wasn't fear. It was the focused, almost clinical look he got when he was working through a difficult piece, measuring the distances between notes, looking for the pattern underneath the chaos.
"We stay close," he said. "If that melody is trying to reach me through him, then I need to understand what it wants. I can't do that from a distance."
I wanted to argue. Every instinct I had was screaming that getting closer to Oleander meant getting closer to whatever had turned the air in his apartment into something predatory. But Julian wasn't asking for permission. He was telling me what he'd already decided, and in our relationship, that was the one thing I'd never overruled.
We kept walking. The fog thickened as we moved toward the center of town, and the buildings seemed to lean in closer, their Victorian facades tilting at angles that made my head ache if I looked at them too long.
