Page 16 of Fractured Destiny

Neither is the OB appointment I haven’t scheduled or the meetings I need to keep attending.

First, I have to stop hiding in the wreckage.

There’s no time to waste. I need help.

I stand and leave the pool house through the French doors. Cross the stone path in my socks.

The kitchen door is unlocked. My mother sits at the island in workout clothes, hair twisted up in a clip, peeling a tangerine with careful fingers. She looks up when I open the door, and her face does the thing it has been doing since I returned from college.

Softening. Bracing. Trying not to want too much from me and failing.

I sit on the stool across from her. Place my hands down on the counter. The marble is cold under my palms.

For the past eight years, I’ve given her versions of me. None of them the whole truth.

“Mom.”

She sets the tangerine down.

Waits.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

Here goes nothing.

five

Six Months Later

Couldn’t have fucking predicted the show in Wichita would go this well.

All tour we’ve opened for local bands with local fan bases.

Nobody outside Seattle knows my name in any real way. Not yet.

Our nights usually consist of playing to an indifferent room and hauling our gear through alleys slick with spilled beer and rainwater. The four of us sleep piled together in the van or, if we’ve saved enough, in one dingy motel room where the carpet smells like mildew and the towels scrape our skin.

Tonight, though, a guy near the bar wore one of the shirts I sell at the merch table. When I stepped up to the mic, a woman pressed against the front rail and screamed my name loud enough to make Mason grin at me from behind the kit. A few people even sang along to the chorus of the last song.

It inspired me. By the time we finished, sweat cooled beneath my shirt and my fingers ached from the strings. A crowd formed by the backstage door to tell us how great we were.

I had to pretend not to hear it.

Can’t get too comfortable.

“Good set.” Evan glances up as he sets his bass in the case.

Coming from Evan Price, those two words are a parade. He’s quiet unless something needs saying, which makes him the exact opposite of Mason Cole, who barrels into the dressing room behind us talking about a drum fill, a cracked cymbal stand, and the blonde at the bar who mouthed “call me” during our second song.

“Maybe she meant me” I twist the cap off a bottle of water.

Mason looks me over with great pity. “Brother, she absolutely did not.”

I laugh and drain half the bottle while the headliner’s crew starts shoving their cases past ours in the hall. Everything feels loud and cramped and alive. For a few minutes, I let myself enjoy it. The shit motels. The cheap food. The van. The tiny dressing rooms.

All of it.

A year ago, I would have done almost anything to be exactly here.