Chapter 6
SIX
The headphones are heavier than they should be.
I’ve worn monitors on stages in front of twenty thousand people.
Custom-molded in-ears that cost more than most people’s mortgage payments.
I’ve had drum fills shake through my rib cage while Harrison drove the kick through four-on-the-floor at a hundred and thirty beats per minute. None of that ever made my hands shake.
These headphones make my hands shake.
They’re standard-issue studio cans, padded, black, unremarkable.
Bex picked them because they’re flat-response, no coloring, which means I’ll hear my own voice the way the listeners hear it.
No reverb to hide in. No band to carry me.
Just my voice, bare and close, pushed through a condenser mic into however many living rooms, cars, and kitchens are tuned in tonight.
Thirty years I had a band and a wall of amps to stand behind.
Tonight it’s just me, and I don’t have the first clue whether anybody wants to hear me talk instead of sing.
Bex is behind the glass in the newly constructed producer’s booth.
She has her headset on, her board lit and her call screener software open on the monitor beside her.
Her notebook is open on the console, already half-full of tonight’s prep notes in her tight handwriting.
She looks at me through the window and gives me that wide smile, the same one that caught me off guard the first day she walked into the studio.
Then she points at me, points at the mic, and mouths: You’ve got this.
She turns to her board before I can respond. She’s calm. That makes one of us.
Paige is in the far corner of the studio, cross-legged on the floor with her laptop balanced on her knees and her phone propped against the wall beside her.
She has three apps open, her editing software loaded, and she’s recording.
She’s wearing a Sinful Distraction hoodie she stole from Quinn’s merch box, and her hair is pulled back in a knot that makes her look older than she is.
She catches me looking and gives me a grin that is so much like Josie I feel it in my chest.
“You’ve got this, Dad.”
“Don’t talk to me right now.”
She grins wider and goes back to her phone.
The ON AIR light above the booth door is dark.
In forty-five seconds, it will go red. Bex has a countdown on her screen.
I can see the numbers from here if I squint, but I don’t squint.
I look at the mic instead. It sits on a boom arm six inches from my mouth, foam windscreen on, cable running down through the desk to the patch bay beneath.
I’ve spent three decades behind microphones.
This one feels different. On stage, the mic is a weapon.
You grip it, you own the room, you push sound into a space and the space pushes back.
This mic is a conversation. It wants me closer.
Quieter. It wants the version of me that exists at two in the morning when Josie asks me what I’m thinking about, and I tell her the truth.
Her. The kids. This career I built.
The countdown hits zero. The light goes red.
I wait until Bex gives me the hand motion to get things moving. I clear my throat, close my eyes, and tell myself I can do this.
“Good evening,” I say. My voice is too loud. I pull back an inch. “This is The Love Line with Liam, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Bex’s expression does not change behind the glass. Paige’s fingers stop moving on her keyboard.
“I’ve spent thirty years singing about love.
Writing about it, performing it, screwing it up in ways that would take more than one show to cover.
I know what love sounds like set to a bridge and a chorus.
I know what it sounds like at a hundred and twenty decibels with pyro going off behind me.
What I don’t know is what it sounds like when it’s just this: a microphone, a phone line, and whatever you’re carrying tonight that you need someone to hear. ”
I pause. The silence is different from stage silence. On stage, silence is a tool, a held breath before the downbeat. Here it’s a gap, and I’m the only one responsible for filling it.
“So here’s what I’m offering. Call-in. Tell me what’s going on. I’m not a therapist. I’m not a counselor. I’m a guy who walked away from his whole life for a decade, came back, and somehow convinced the best woman I’ve ever known to keep me around.”
Bex points to the first blinking line on the call board and holds up one finger.
Holy shit, someone called in. My first thought is, it’s one of the guys, Harrison or JD to give me a rash of shit for doing something like this.
But then I think it’s Josie, she’s going to tell me that she loves me, that she’s proud of me.
Because who in the hell would call-in so quickly to talk to someone like me?
My fingers shake as I press the button and clear the lump from my throat. “You’re on The Love Line. What’s on your mind tonight?”
“Hi, Liam.” The voice is female, warm, a little shaky. “I’m—oh God, I can’t believe I’m actually calling. I’m sixty-two years old, and my husband forgot our fortieth wedding anniversary.”
“Forgot it completely?”
“Completely. Went to work, came home, ate dinner, watched the news, went to bed. I sat across from him at the table waiting for him to say something. He talked about the weather.”
“The weather?”
“The weather.”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out. Not nerves, exactly.
More the sudden awareness that this woman called a stranger for help and the stranger is me, sitting in a converted studio room in Beaumont with no degree, no training, and no clue what the right thing to say is.
Scared shitless, if I’m being honest. I look at Bex through the glass. She gives me a small nod.
“I, uh—have you told him it bothered you?”
“Of course I have. He said he’d make it up to me. That was three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks?”
“Three weeks.”
And then I stop trying to say the right thing and say the true thing instead.
“I forgot my wife’s birthday once,” I say into the mic. “I was on tour. I was in a different time zone. I had every excuse you can think of, and none of them mattered. What mattered was that she spent the whole day waiting for me to remember, and I didn’t.”
“What did you do?”
“I came home three days later with flowers and an apology and a reservation at her favorite restaurant. She forgave me before I finished the sentence. But she remembered. She still remembers. And every year since, I make sure I’m the first voice she hears that morning.”
The woman on the phone is quiet for a moment. “So what do I do? Just wait for him to realize?”
“No. Don’t wait. Don’t sit on the other side of the table hoping he’ll catch up. Tell him. Say, ‘You missed it, and it hurt.’ Give him the chance to make it right. The gesture matters more than the date. But he can’t make a gesture if he doesn’t know he needs to.”
“Forty years,” she says softly.
“Forty years is worth a conversation. Go make one.”
She thanks me. The line clicks off. Oddly, I feel relieved.
Not only that the first call is out of the way, but because I think I actually helped.
I relax in my chair and look at Bex. She’s writing something on a notepad.
She does not look up or give me the satisfaction of knowing I did well. Bex expects it.
I take the next call.
“Yeah, hey.” The voice is male, young, with background noise behind it.
A TV, maybe a roommate. “My girlfriend wants me to delete all the women off my social media. Like, all of them. Friends from college, coworkers, everyone. She says if I love her, I shouldn’t need other women in my life, even online. ”
“How long have you been together?”
“Eight months.”
“And were these women in your life before she was?”
“Most of them, yeah.”
“Here’s the thing. Trust isn’t built by deletion.
You can wipe your entire phone clean, and she’ll still feel the same way tomorrow because the problem isn’t your contact list. The problem is she doesn’t trust you.
That’s the real conversation. Ask her what she’s afraid of.
Not what she wants you to remove. What she’s afraid of. ”
“She’ll just say she’s not afraid of anything.”
“Then ask again. Because nobody makes that kind of demand from a place of confidence.”
He goes quiet. I hear the TV in the background, canned laughter from a sitcom.
“Thanks, man,” he says.
“Good luck.”
Bex switches to the next line and holds up three fingers.
“Hi, Liam. Longtime fan. First-time caller.”
Aren’t they all tonight?
The woman laughs at her own joke, nervous. “Okay, so. My sister is engaged to a guy who is, frankly, a nightmare. He talks down to her in front of people. He controls the money. He told her she couldn’t come to our mother’s birthday dinner because he had tickets to a game. She went to the game.”
“And she’s happy?”
“She says she is.”
“But you don’t believe her.”
“No. I don’t.”
I pull the mic closer. Half an inch. Bex taught me this. When the subject gets heavier, get closer to the mic. Drop the volume. Make the listener lean in.
“You say it once,” I tell her. “You say it with love, and you say it clearly, and you say it knowing she might not hear you. You tell her what you see. Not what you think of him. What you see happening to her. Then you let her make her choice.”
“And if she chooses him?”
“Then you hold her when it falls apart. Because if it falls apart, she’s going to need someone who told the truth and stayed anyway.”
The woman’s voice catches. “That’s—yeah. Okay.”
“You’re a good sister for calling.”
She hangs up. I sit with it for a second longer than I should. Bex taps the glass. Keep moving.