Page 115 of My Three Billionaire Rockstars

I left the stage before the fire went out.

I let the ghosts wear all the names.

I built a house from wires and locked doors.

Still wake up hearing you in the rain.

That last line lands so hard I stop.

The strings ring out once and fade.

My breathing sounds too loud in the room.

I stand there with the guitar hanging off me and the aftershock of it moving through my chest, ugly and undeniable.

That line isn’t just about Josiah.

It’s about Dylan, too. About all the years I’ve spent hearing him in every unfinished argument and every news story I pretended not to read and every song someone else wrote trying to sound half as honest as we used to be. It’s about the way I left the stage and then kept building performance into everything else. A compound. A label. A life with enough gates around it to feel safe.

And now Willow walks into it in worn jeans and sarcasm and looks at all of it because she can see exactly where the walls are.

I set the guitar down carefully.

Then I sit.

Then I don’t.

The stool feels wrong under me. I’ve got too much adrenaline in my blood to stay still without breaking something.

I pace across the studio. Back again.

My fingers drum against my thigh.

There’s more in the song. I know there is. Another verse, maybe. Or something after the chorus that names the part of me I don’t let near anybody. The part Willow seems to drag into the light without even meaning to.

Because she does.

That’s what she’s done from the beginning.

She spills coffee on my jacket, tells me I’m unbearable, runs out on a date I couldn’t stop thinking about, then ends up in the lake, naked and laughing, because she doesn’t know she’s every bad decision I’ve wanted to make all at once.

And somewhere in between all that, I’ve started writing again.

I stare at the notebook.

I close it.

If I stay in here, I’m going to keep going until I’ve gutted the whole thing open, and I’m not sure I can take that tonight.

I need air.

I need something ordinary. Noise that isn’t music. People who don’t know what’s in my head.

By the time I’m out the side door and onto the drive, the afternoon has shifted toward evening. The light over Redemption Falls has gone softer, gold cutting around the trees and the old stone walls. The town sits just beyond the hill as it always has, stubborn and unimpressed by the scale of what we’ve built out here.

That’s part of what I enjoy about it.

The town doesn’t care how much money I have.