Page 113 of My Three Billionaire Rockstars

I pluck the progression again. Lower this time. Slower.

There.

That’s closer.

The sound in here is clean in a way live rooms never are. Honest. No crowd swallowing the edges. No roomful of people turning a note into something bigger than it is. Just the strings, the wood, the shape of the thing as it exists before anyone gets hold of it and starts naming it.

I used to love this part, before the machine got involved. Before every song became a strategy, a schedule, a release date and a press cycle and a conversation about marketability. Before Josiah died and every sound after him felt wrong.

I press my palm over the strings to kill the vibration.

The silence after hits harder than the note did.

Josiah.

Even now, all this time later, his name still lands with an impact.

Most people talk about grief as if it’s soft and makes you reflective and sad in a way other people can tolerate. That isn’t what it did to me.

It made me violent inside my own skin.

It made every room feel too small. Every conversation too stupid. It made music a body I couldn’t look at without remembering what it had cost me.

He wasn’t supposed to die.

Simple sentence. Useless one.

Nobody is supposed to die when they’re twenty-nine and drunk on adrenaline and talent and convinced they’ve got another decade before consequence catches up. Nobody is supposed to walk out of a venue angry and not come back. Nobody is supposed to become the phone call that splits a life into before and after.

I reach for the pen.

Write one line.

Cross it out.

Write another.

I still hear your laugh in the feedback.

No.

Too clean, too aware of itself. I slash through it and try again.

You left your blood in the backbeat.

I stop.

That stays.

The chord under it comes faster now. The next line with it.

I count the wreckage by the songs we never finished.

That stays, too.

I sit back, guitar balanced against my thigh, pen tapping once against the notebook. Then again.

My fingers start moving before I think about it. Progression first. Then melody. Then the words finding the shape they want because my body remembers how to do this even if the rest of me has spent years pretending it doesn’t.