"You sound so miserable."
"I'm—" I stop.
I don't say them.
"I'm just tired," I say instead. The lie is so thin I can hear Jani's silence on the other end.
"Do you want to visit me?" she asks.
"I don't know."
"You should come. I think we need to hang out."
"I know."
"I love you, you know that, right?"
"I love you too," I say.
After we hang up, I sit for an hour with my hands folded in my lap and my heart doing something that hurts.
That night, Rhonda calls around 11:07 PM. I've been sitting on the couch for hours doom scrolling on my phone.
"I just wanted to hear your voice," she says.
“Oh really?” I say before I can stop it.
“Yes, I miss you every second.”
I don’t say anything.
She tells me about the cottage—the recording sessions, the cold mornings, the frost sitting on the trees like they're made of glass. She tells me about Sandy and Erica orbiting each other. She tells me about Jeremy making breakfast and Ana teaching her a new bass line.
"The frost is really something," she says. "It makes everything feel still and like the season is resetting."
"I wish it worked that way for everything."
"Yeah. Me too." A pause. "I'm sorry about the photo. And I’m sorry about the booking agent."
"I know."
"That's not enough, is it?"
"No," I say. "It's not."
"I'm trying to figure out how to fix it."
"I know that too."
She breathes through the speaker. The distant sound of wind through trees.
"I miss you," she says.
"I miss you too."
We stay on the phone for another hour later. We talk until she falls asleep with the phone against her ear, and I listen to her breathe, and I don't hang up. I let myself feel the weight of everything I'm holding—the Jani secret, the Ravita hurt, the decision I haven't made yet.
I make a decision the next morning, standing in my kitchen with a coffee I'm not drinking and the group chat notification blinking with another Belladonnas sighting.
