Chapter 4
June, Now
Liam.
Song number twelve is about Liam.
It’s not kind of about Liam. It’s not vaguely about Liam. It’s really, one hundred percent, no mistaking it about Liam.
Which is why I wasn’t planning to let anyone ever hear it.
Nobody besides me even knows that song exists.
It was never workshopped at school, never played for my friends or sisters.
Because, for the sake of my threadbare sanity where he’s concerned, Liam Bishop is the last person I should be writing songs about.
And anyway, I wrote that song four years ago at the very beginning of my musical education.
I was only a month into school when our teacher sent us home with an assignment to practice in minor key.
I wrote it in one head rush of a session, then put it away and promised myself I wouldn’t write about Liam again.
I return to work in a daze, letting my mind finally spin out as I perform the rote tasks of waiting tables.
Our manager forces a Pepto Bismol and a Midol on me.
Folly shoots me loaded looks every chance she gets.
When she clocks out at two thirty, I promise to tell her what happened when I get home.
The problem, I reason to myself, wiping down a table, is the song about Liam is possibly my best song.
It’s angry and bitter and viscerally different from the rest of my music.
Less simmered, more boiling—the lyrics are, anyway.
But the melody might be the sweetest thing I’ve ever written, like whispering your hatred into someone’s ear packaged in sweet nothings.
If I had played it for Paul Friedman, I think he might have even been moved.
Flat. Unemotional. Derivative. The more I consider those adjectives, the more I can’t get away from the harsh truth of Paul’s pronouncement.
I was so embarrassed by how raw and vulnerable that first song came out that for the rest of my time in college, I locked my big emotions away.
As I drive home, I look at the problem from all angles, breaking it down, detangling it until I come to the barest, most core of conclusions.
When realization finally hits, I’m opening the door to our townhouse, and I say the words right to Folly, who’s waiting in the living room with a bottle of red wine on the coffee table.
“I don’t have any songs about having my heart broken.”
Several moments elapse. Folly crisscrosses her legs on the couch. I notice there are two wineglasses beside the bottle just as the pop of a floorboard has my gaze cutting to the corner of the room—where Harry stands.
Harry Rivera, my classmate from Belmont, is a nepo baby to boot, but at least one of the good ones.
His father was a drummer in three separate bands over the course of his storied career.
Folly must have invited Harry over because she thought I would need a nonpregnant, musically inclined drinking buddy tonight.
“He hated your lyrics,” Harry guesses.
I all but launch my keys at the wall. “The only way you could have guessed that is if you also hate my lyrics.”
Harry raises his palms and cocks a hip. “I don’t hate them—”
“You’ve been lying to me all this time?” I flick the front door closed and flee inside, tossing my keys on the kitchen counter. Harry sighs, and Folly gets to work on the cork.
“Look, if we’re being honest, honey, your lyrics could use some work.”
I aim a brittle laugh at the ceiling. “Funny. That’s exactly what Paul said.”
“What else did Paul say?” Harry asks, sitting beside Folly on the couch.
“He wants them to be … rawer. Realer. About something.” I shake my head, trying to rattle out the white noise. “I can’t believe I spent money on demos with those lyrics.”
“The songs are good!” Folly chimes in. “I love your songs, Paige.”
“They are good,” Harry adds, “and they were ready to be demoed.”
“But you think the lyrics are weak?” Harry’s silence is his answer. He accepts a glass of wine from Folly. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
He shoots me a fatherly look, crossing his legs. “Didn’t I, Paige?”
“When?”
“Every time I asked you what one of your songs was about, and you could never give me a straight answer, and I still kept asking?”
“Too subtle!” I shout.
“You’re delicate!” Harry shouts back. He stands and grabs the wine bottle, sloshing liquid into a fresh glass for me. His voice softens as he pours. “You were already so far outside your comfort zone all through college. You told me so right from the beginning, remember?”
I do remember. I latched onto Harry, who was two years my junior but wise beyond his years, because he reminded me of Folly. Freethinking, bighearted, nebulous, untamable.
Ever since swapping song ideas in one of our first classes as freshmen, Harry and I have been best friends.
And while I’ve seen him through a myriad of men who’ve broken his heart over the past four years, he’s watched me go on two limp first dates.
Only two men, with whom my chemistry fizzled out, the tiny sparks dimming until they went permanently dark.
“When you say you don’t have any songs about having your heart broken,” Folly says.
“Is that on purpose? Or do you actually feel like you’ve never had your heart broken?
” Her face is comically confused, like suffering from a broken heart is as inherent to the human experience as breathing or a bad haircut.
“Oh, it’s been broken,” I murmur quietly. “I just didn’t write much about it at the time. If I tried now, I don’t know that I’d have the words. It’s all gone numb.”
“Why didn’t you write about it then?” she asks. Folly doesn’t have to clarify who I’m referencing. She knows.
I cross my arms, squeezing myself. “He wasn’t my boyfriend.”
Liam and I never made things official or got to a stable point in our relationship. In the grand scheme, my claim to him is microscopic. Even writing one breakup song about him felt too greedy, like I overindulged in my feelings for him.
“Technicality,” Folly says, waving her hand. “You and Liam were in earth-shattering, heart-pounding, overwhelming, twin-flames, fated-in-the-stars love. How could you have never written about the way it ended?”
Now would be the time to tell them about the song.
To tell anyone about the song. I’m actually considering it when Harry chimes in.
“What you need is a fresh, piping-hot breakup. Someone who makes you feel like Liam did. And this time, when it ends, Folly and I will make sure you don’t avoid writing about it while the feelings are recent. ”
My laugh is all nerves. “You’re suggesting I fall back in earth-shattering, heart-pounding love, then get the guy to break my heart?”
In sync, their heads tilt.
“I wasn’t serious about that.”
“Why not?” Harry asks. His eyes turn mischievous.
“Having your heart broken is nearly the end stage of an entire relationship cycle. By that point, you’ve been through all of it.
The initial excitement. The flirtation. The honeymoon phase.
The comfort of knowing a person, of implicitly getting their humor and quirks.
Then the tension, the pull away, or sometimes the total blindsiding.
And finally, the heartbreak.” He glances back at Folly, who’s watching him thoughtfully, nodding along.
“I don’t know, Paige. Sounds like a damn good way to make your songs about something to me. ”
“For starters,” I say, “I don’t think it’s as simple as asking the first single man I come across on the street to do the job of getting me through, as you phrased it, an entire relationship cycle.
I’d have to be invested in him. I’d have to really be in love, and if it were a situation with an expiration date, he’d have to mean it when he crushed me. ”
“People have done stranger things in the name of art,” Folly comments dryly.
“True,” Harry agrees.
Something about that raises my hackles. I don’t like the idea of my music being fabricated. Is it even possible to do this and for it to be genuinely authentic?
“What’s Liam up to these days?” Folly asks softly.
My blood is simmering. “You can’t actually think he would—that we could—”
“Oh, now we’re getting somewhere.” Harry smirks, sipping his wine.
I’ve only told Harry the sparsest details about Liam, and only when prompted.
Who he was, what he meant to me, how things ended between us (badly).
Harry was working on this song of his, “Discontinued,” which was about a relationship that ended abruptly right when things were getting good.
He asked me if I’d ever had a person like that.
To which I said yes, but he hadn’t cut me off like Harry’s person had.
I’d forced Liam out.
Folly, on the other hand, met Liam back in Knoxville. She more or less knows him, knows what our relationship was like back then.
I haven’t seen or spoken to Liam Bishop in four years. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t kept up with him. Last I heard, he was working for Live Nation as a concert manager for several big-name touring bands. And yes, maybe I’ve seen on Instagram that he’s helping operate CMA Fest this weekend.
He likes my posts. I like his. It’s the only way we acknowledge each other’s existence. But every time I see his username in my notifications, my head clouds with anger and my heart thrums with pulsing want.
I have lain in bed so many nights and thought at him, I’m not done fighting with you. But I never did find the courage to call.
Before I know what I’m doing—before I can process the emotional transparency of it—I whip out my phone, find the rough recording of my song about Liam, and play it for Folly and Harry.
I slip the phone onto the coffee table and swap it for the glass of wine, glugging mouthfuls as the song plays out.
I prefer shadows, because maybe they’re you
Back from the gallows, but that isn’t true—
About halfway through, I muster the bravery to glance at Harry. He’s staring at my phone in rapt awe, his eyes glazed.