“Thank you for calling.”
The line goes dead.
“As the show progresses, I find myself starting to relax a little, the process of playing tracks between calls becoming second nature. I look at the clock above the booth window and have no idea where the time went.
“That’s our show for tonight,” I say into the mic. “Thank you for calling in, for listening, for trusting me with your stories. I don’t take that lightly. This is The Love Line with Liam, and I’ll be here if you need me.”
Bex fades the outro music. The ON AIR light goes dark.
I pull the headphones off. Set them on the desk. My hands are still trembling, a fine vibration in my fingers that won’t quit. I press my palms flat against the desk surface and hold them there, feeling the cool laminate under my skin, waiting for my pulse to come down.
From the corner, Paige unfolds herself from the floor. She holds up her phone, screen facing me. A fifteen-second clip, my voice with the anniversary answer.
“Already edited. This is going up tonight.”
“Paige.”
“Dad. This is literally why you hired me.”
“I didn’t hire you. Bex hired you.”
“And Bex is smarter than you. Can I go? I want to get this posted before midnight.”
I wave her off. She slides her laptop into her bag and tucks her phone into her back pocket. On the way past me she leans down and presses her lips to my cheek. They’re cold. She musthave had the window open during the show, the night air coming in while I talked. Sixteen years old and she already runs a room the way her mother does. I keep waiting to figure out where the time went.
Bex comes out of the booth. She has her notebook tucked under her arm and a pen behind her ear, and she’s smiling, though it’s a contained version of the full-beam one she uses when she’s excited. She leans against the doorframe.
“Good,” she says. “We can work with that.”
She taps the notebook against her thigh, nods once more, and heads back into the booth to start her post-show notes.
Six words and a nod. That’s all I get, and coming from Bex it’s enough. It feels about as good as the first time Josie heard me play and didn’t get up and leave.
I sit in the empty studio for a few minutes. The sound panels eat everything. No echo, no hum, just me breathing. On stage there’s always something after the last note. The roar. The techs tearing down the kit. Harrison spinning a stick between his fingers, asking who’s got the first beer. Here, there’s nothing. The room goes dead the second the light does, and it’s just me and the callers and the question of whether I helped a single one of them or just liked the sound of my own voice.
I replay the calls. The anniversary woman. The kid with the social media ultimatum. The sister. The man with the workshop. I think about what I should have said to the kid. I should have asked if the girlfriend had been cheated on before, should have dug deeper into why she was scared. I think about the man with the workshop and whether I pushed too hard, whether I should have validated his attachment to the house before I pulled the rug.
I grab my jacket from the back of the chair and kill the lights.
The drive home takes twelve minutes. Twelve. In the touring days it was twelve hours on a bus to a city I’d forget the name ofby morning, and here it’s twelve minutes to my own bed and my own wife. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that. I roll the windows down. The air has that late-October bite to it, cool enough to sting my eyes, carrying the smell of damp leaves and woodsmoke from someone’s fireplace a few streets over. The adrenaline drains out of me in slow waves, leaving behind the hollow, jittery feeling I used to get after arena shows. The come-down, the quiet reckoning with what just happened.
I drive past Ralph’s. The neon in the window is on, the parking lot half-full. I think about stopping in. The old version of me would have, to take the edge off with a glass of something brown. That man cost me ten years and damn near everything. The woman who took me back anyway is a few blocks from here, still awake, waiting up. I keep driving.
The house is dark except for the lamp in the living room. The porch light is on. She always leaves the porch light on.
I step inside and pull the door shut behind me. The house is warm after the cold drive, quiet except for the hum of the dishwasher finishing its cycle down the hall. These are the sounds I spent a decade on a tour bus learning to live without. I’m not doing that again.
Josie is on the couch. She’s wearing one of my old tour shirts, the faded 4225 West logo cracked across the front, the collar stretched out where she’s pulled it to one side. Her legs are tucked under her. Her wine glass sits on the side table, half-full, a ring of condensation marking the wood beneath it. She was waiting up.
“How was it?”
I drop onto the couch beside her. She shifts, swings her legs across my lap. I run my hand up her calf, over the curve of muscle behind her knee, and let it rest on her thigh. Her skin is warm through the fabric of her pajama pants.
“I think I liked it,” I say.
She reaches for her wine. Takes a sip. “Good. Because I listened to the whole thing.”
“You did?”
