Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Alec
Great. Just fucking great.
The universe just threw a couple of Care Bears at me.
The automatic door hisses shut behind the tiny pink umbrella and the woman carrying ninety-nine percent of the building’s available sunlight in her smile.
And then it’s just me again—alone in the silence they left behind, my pulse caught somewhere between fight or flight, still trying to figure out which one to pick.
I scrub a hand over my mouth.
“This is fucking fantastic,” I growl under my breath. “I should’ve stayed in Los Angeles instead of walking into this . . . this torture. Now I get to figure out who let this woman in and how the hell Mrs. Lafferty allowed this circus.”
Though . . . technically, this could be growth. Or whatever twisted version of it my therapist keeps preaching. This is exactly what he’d call an “opportunity.” This will open emotional gateways—whatever the fuck that means.
All I know is, gateways shouldn’t come with glitter and questions about whether I’m broken like a malfunctioning Elmo.
Okay, they didn’t exactly say I was a broken Elmo, but they definitely made me feel like one.
I’m still trying to get my breathing under control when Martin steps back behind the concierge desk.
He doesn’t greet me right away.
He watches me and it’s not with surprise, but something else . . . suspicion, maybe? Probably just confusion. Or maybe . . . cautiousness? He hasn’t seen me lose my shit yet, but everyone knows Alec from Dead Moth Parade had a very short fuse.
That’s the old me, though. The guy who used to explode at the slightest thing—some called it anger issues. There’s that saying about fame and lions sleeping or whatever. I should probably remember how that goes. But people believe I flip easily.
No one really understands why I was like that—even before the band broke up.
Though things got a lot worse when they imploded between us.
It was a toxic mix of drugs, alcohol, and terrible decisions from people who couldn’t get their shit together.
Yeah, that included me. I’m not trying to excuse it, but in my defense, I didn’t realize I was carrying all that anger and baggage from my childhood until it started leaking everywhere.
And by then . . . well, it had become my branding.
I’m not proud of it, but . . . shit happened. It was the eighties, well, and the nineties. But now? I’m chill. I’ve worked on it. But I’m not exactly in the business of showing people who I really am. I don’t care about rebuilding any reputation.
“Mr. Horvath?” Martin nods and inhales as if he’s bracing for something he knows I won’t like. My stomach tightens.
He looks like a man about to deliver bad news, and suddenly I’m back in that place. The memory of Roderick, the frontman, announcing the band was over flashes in my head, the crash of him breaking everything we’d worked for, like it was all some fucking joke. Yeah, those were good times.
Reporters and radio personalities still ask me why I knocked him down—gave him a black eye and a broken nose.
It wasn’t my best moment, but in my defense, I told him a year before that if he couldn’t grow the fuck up and transcend with the times, to get his ass out of the band and let the rest of us move on.
Did he do it? No. Too full of himself, too full of drugs, and too convinced he was the only talented one in the band, he basically told me to fuck off. I should’ve quit back then, but shoulda-woulda-coulda doesn’t do much besides remind you that you were an idiot.
We’ve worked things out since then.
Now we’re brothers from another mother and all that shit. Even his siblings are close to us—two of them, Julian and Rhodes,moved into the new building across the street, as if we’re running a commune or something. They visit sometimes and I drop by when they invite me.
The point is, the way Martin’s standing there—his face set, his whole posture pinned in place—drags that memory straight to the front of my mind. And whatever’s coming next feels like it’s going to crash into me the same way that moment did.
Maybe he’s going to tell me that some punk in the building set my penthouse on fire. That’d be karma biting me on the ass for making fun of Dexter for the cherry bomb incident at his place.
“What’s going on?” I ask, my voice more clipped than I meant it to be.
“Well . . . there’s something I need to tell you.” He hesitates, just for a breath, but it feels like an eternity. “Mrs. Lafferty passed away last month.”
I blink. Once. Twice. My brain has to catch up with his words. Mrs. Lafferty passed away.
“What?” The word comes out cracked, raw, too loud in the empty lobby. “No. You’re wrong. She’s . . . perfectly healthy.” I rub the back of my neck because I must’ve heard him wrong. “How . . . are you sure?”
I’m not making sense, I know that, but how could she be gone? She was the picture of health. She was the person who made everything work—the one reliable thing in this entire place.
Martin’s expression softens. “I’m very sorry, sir. It was unexpected.”
A dull thud goes off behind my ribs. It’s slow. Heavy. Sneaking up before the real hit. I feel it before I fully understand it. “How?”
“She . . . they think it was cardiac-related or a head injury or—” He looks down for a moment, then back at me, steady but careful. “I don’t remember well. Her niece arrived this morning to settle things.”
Her niece? The words still aren’t making much sense as I try to process everything. They tumble around in my head like a gibberish language I’m supposed to understand but can’t translate. I do recall Mrs. Lafferty mentioning nieces a few times, but it had been years since she’d actually seen them.
There’d been distance there—something she never explained, something I never asked about because she constantly shifted the conversation toward everyone else’s life instead of her own.
It was quite humorous to have a conversation about our families because we both deflected and ended up talking about music or other unrelated things.
She’d tried to help one of her nieces after she became a widow. I remember that. If I’m recalling it right, her husband’s passing came only a couple of years after Mr. Lafferty’s.
Mrs. Lafferty lost a lot, and I’m not sure how much that changed her. She never said it outright, but there was a quiet ache beneath the few stories she shared—little hints about wanting to fix things she couldn’t fix, wanting to be present for someone who wouldn’t let her.
Still, losing her doesn’t make sense. Her niece being here . . . that’s another detail that shifts everything in a way I’m not ready for.
“So . . . she’s really gone?” I say. The words leaving my mouth before I realize the question doesn’t make sense or maybe it’s just me being in denial. “The niece will settle things and . . .” My mouth feels dry. “Fuck, I can’t believe Mrs. Lafferty is gone.”
Martin just nods.
The world lost a good one. She was the kind of neighbor who checked in when everyone else kept their heads down.
She brought homemade cookies to your door when she sensed you needed them.
For me, it usually happened after she caught me slouching around the hallways like a man who’d survived a week, determined to take him out at the knees.
She wasn’t perfect—nobody ever is—but she made people feel like they mattered. People like that, they shouldn’t just vanish.
I remember the time she told someone their plants looked “emotionally neglected,” then watered them herself for a month to get them back on track.
That’s when she gave me that plant—the one I wasn’t supposed to kill.
She said I needed to “talk to it.” Every time I went out of town, I’d hand it to her so she wouldn’t feel “emotionally neglected.”
I never thought I’d miss something so simple.
“She helped everyone,” I say, my voice barely audible. “She gave a shit about people . . . the world’s already short on people like her.”
Martin’s voice goes low, measured. “We all are going to miss her.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “I was gone,” I whisper. “I didn’t know. I wish—” I stop myself. Because I don’t know what the hell I’m wishing for. What can I wish for in a situation like this?
Martin steps a little closer, something in his expression tightening in a way I can’t quite place. “I . . . it took me a couple of days to check on her. If I had . . .”
Oh, there it is, guilt. I’ve seen it. I’m familiar with it.
“You couldn’t have known,” I interrupt, my words coming out automatically.
“She was alone,” he adds, quietly. “I should’ve checked on her daily.”
She always said that was her fault, being alone. She felt like she deserved it. Never explained why, though. That wasn’t right. No one deserves to be alone, not because of guilt.
I try to pull in a breath, but my lungs don’t cooperate—they flutter, catch, then stall like they’re waiting for permission I don’t know how to give.
My thoughts spiral back, to those long therapy sessions where I finally understood that I pushed people away by choice.
I wasn’t exiling myself, but I could’ve ended up there.
At some point, I had to admit to myself that my bandmates were the closest thing I ever had to a real family. Sure, they drove me fucking insane, but they were mine.
And now? Now I realize that even when I’m close, I still cut them off sometimes. It feels easier, but easier can fuck me over at times.
“Thank you for telling me,” I manage.
But even as I say the words, part of me already knows—things are going to change. And I’m not sure where to start or what to change.
He nods.
I go still, pulling in a few careful breaths. My lungs drag in air like they’re trying to cool something too close to burning.
Only when it settles—barely—do I move toward the elevator.
The ride up feels longer than usual.