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Madison Square Garden.

The night everything stopped.

We’d just come off stage. Still riding the high. Then Thorin’s phone rang.

And nothing was the same again.

I think about that moment. The silence. The shock. The way his legs gave out and none of us knew how to catch him.

I think about what came after—Eli’s tiny body wrapped in a hospital blanket. Thorin’s shell of a voice asking who would take him.

And Mya.

How she’s woven into this record now, like a thread we didn’t know we were missing. How she walks into rooms with that haunted kind of grace and makes all our noise feel like something holy.

The music swells, and I open my mouth.

Let it wreck me.

Let it ache.

When the track fades, the silence that follows is thick. Heavy. Holy.

Carson turns around slowly. “That’s it.”

Benji lets out a long, low whistle. “I felt that in my fucking teeth.”

I drop my head, chest still tight, lungs full of ghosts. “Yeah,” I rasp. “Me too.”

Carson saves the take, fingers shaking just slightly.

“Two more tracks,” he says. “We’re almost there.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

MYA

If heaven had a zip code, it would be this spa.

I’m wrapped in a white robe so plush it could double as a cloud, lying back in a velvet chaise with a mimosa in hand and the distant echo of trickling water lulling my brain into static. The Ritz-Carlton Dallas, Las Colinas, isn’t just luxury—it’s obscene. Even the air smells expensive. Like eucalyptus and tax brackets.

Reese is beside me, her feet tucked under her like she owns the place, one perfectly sculpted brow raised like she’s about to interrogate me on a witness stand instead of a spa lounge chair.

“So…” she drawls, fingers swirling the condensation around her glass. “How are things with Fletch?”

I freeze mid-sip. The citrus hits the back of my throat like guilt dressed in orange. “They’re…fine.”

Reese snorts. “You say that like someone describing a first date with a guy who brought his mom.”

I sigh, slumping into the chaise like it might absorb my confusion if I sink low enough. “It’s been a little weird,” I admit, my voice barely above a whisper. “We visit the boys every day, he heads to the studio after, and then at night…”

“You sleep beside each other in your shared grief and unspoken maybe-love?” she finishes for me, her tone teasing but her eyes sharp.

My mouth quirks up in a grim sort of smile. “Something like that.”

She’s not wrong. There’s a weight in the air between us every night. A liminal space I don’t know how to cross. I thought I’d moved on—really thought it, believed it. But the moment I saw him again, the real him, the one who stayed, who never left my side even when I couldn’t speak his name…

I exhale shakily. “It’s hard. I think I told myself I let go of him while I was in the coma. Like I had to. I thought if I just survived, if I started over, it would mean I’d moved on.”