Page 114 of My Three Billionaire Rockstars

I sing the first verse quietly.

My voice catches on the second line, because it’s there, still there, after all this time, buried under boardrooms and contracts and silence and the kind of self-control that calcifies if you leave it long enough.

I start again, this time louder.

The room gives it back to me.

I can feel where the song wants to go. Not toward him, exactly. Not only. Toward everything that happened after. The wreckage that didn’t look bad from the outside. The fiancée who stopped trying to understand me before I even realized I’d stopped trying to let her. Dylan stepping into the space I abandoned and blowing the rest of it apart.

The betrayal never hit cleanly because it came at the wrong time.

If Josiah hadn’t died, maybe I would’ve gone after Dylan with both hands and no hesitation. Maybe I would’ve broken his face and forced us to drag the truth into the light right there where it belonged.

Instead, I was too hollow to do anything except absorb it. Let it rot in me. Let it become proof of every suspicion I already had about people leaving when things stopped being easy.

That part’s harder to write.

I know exactly how it felt to walk into a room and realize my brother had taken the thing I’d been too broken to hold onto. I know what it did to me to see pity in other people’s eyes afterward. My humiliation was somehow secondary to my grief and that should’ve made it better.

It didn’t.

It just made me meaner.

I drag a hand over my mouth and stare at the page, then I write anyway.

You took my silence as an open door.

That line sits there for a long second.

I hate it.

I leave it.

The chorus comes next, rougher than the verse, less elegant, which is right. Choruses shouldn’t explain. They should wound cleanly enough people recognize themselves in it before they know why.

I play it through once.

Twice.

On the third pass I’m not thinking anymore. I’m standing now, guitar strap digging into my shoulder, voice stronger, the notebook forgotten on the table because the song’s out in front of me and I’m chasing it with both hands.

The sound tears out of me harder than I expect.

I can hear the old band in the shape of it, in the bones. In the way the rhythm wants to kick harder than the lyrics. In the way the melody drags against the words because they don’t want to go the same direction. That was always where the good stuff lived for us.

Josiah drove everything forward. I held it back just enough to make it hurt.

My throat goes rough by the bridge.

Good.

It should.

The bridge is where the truth is, anyway.

The thing I’ve spent years refusing to say because saying it would mean I hadn’t moved on nearly as well as I pretend.

I close my eyes and sing it out into the empty room.