10. Rocco
— ? —
Rocco
The house is quiet in a way that has a sound to it - the particular hum of absence, of rooms that are waiting for someone to fill them.
I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for three hours, staring at the ring Senna left on the counter. It’s still there. I haven’t touched it. Touching it would make it real, and I’m not ready for it to be real, even though she walked out the door two days ago and hasn’t answered any of my calls.
My phone buzzes on the table. I grab it, hoping-
But it’s just Marco.
“Rocco! Great news. The showcase coverage is everywhere. Billboard picked up the story, and there’s talk of a feature in-”
“Marco, I can’t do this right now.”
“Can’t do what? This is your comeback, man. This is everything we’ve been working toward.”
“My wife left me.”
Silence on the other end. Then: “What?”
“Senna. She’s gone. She walked out after the showcase.”
“Jesus. I didn’t - are you okay?”
“No.” I run my hand through my hair, which I haven’t washed since she left. “No, I’m not okay.”
“Do you need me to come over? We can push the press schedule, take some time-”
“I don’t know what I need.” I look around the kitchen, at the espresso machine she bought because she said the old one made coffee that tasted like regret, at the plants on the windowsill that are already starting to droop because I don’t know when she watered them last. “I think I need to figure out what the hell happened.”
“What do you mean, what happened? Did something happen at the showcase?”
“I don’t know. She was there, in the crowd, and then she left early, and when I got home she was-” I stop, because I don’t know how to explain the look on her face.
The way she said You didn’t ask like it was an indictment, like it was everything.
“She said I never asked her. That I never noticed. That I locked her out.”
Marco is quiet for a moment. “Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Lock her out.”
The question lands like a punch. “I was in a slump, Marco. I was barely surviving. I couldn’t-”
“That’s not an answer.”
I close my eyes, and the past eighteen months play back like a film I’m watching from outside my own body.
All the mornings I left before she woke up.
All the nights I came home too late to talk.
All the times she offered to help with the music and I waved her off because Fiorella had a system, because Senna wasn’t really in it anymore, because it was easier to let someone else carry the weight of my creative failure than to admit to my wife that I was drowning.
“Yeah,” I say finally. “I think I did.”
“Then you need to fix it.”
“How? She won’t even answer my calls.”
“I don’t know, Rocco. But you’re a songwriter. You’re supposed to know how to say the things that matter. So figure out what matters and say it.”
He hangs up, and I’m left alone with the silence and the ring and the dawning realization that I may have destroyed the only thing that was ever really mine.
***
The next morning, my phone rings while I’m staring at cold coffee.
Fiorella. I almost don’t answer. But some part of me needs to hear her voice, needs to test whether the wrongness I’ve been feeling has any substance or if I’m just looking for someone to blame.
“Rocco.” Her voice is warm, concerned. “I heard about Senna. Marco mentioned she seemed upset at the showcase. Is everything alright?”
“She left me.”
A pause. “Left the house?”
“Left me. She’s staying somewhere else.” I don’t elaborate. I don’t want to give Fiorella the details of my marriage’s collapse.
“Oh, Rocco. I’m so sorry.” But something in her tone doesn’t quite land right. “That must be devastating. After such a triumph, too.”
“It doesn’t feel like a triumph.”
“Of course not. But these things happen. Marriages go through rough patches. I’m sure once Senna calms down and realizes what you’ve accomplished-”
“Fiorella.” I cut her off. “The song. ‘Finding Light.’ Where did that come from, originally? Before you brought it to me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you showed up with it almost fully formed. The melody, the structure - it was too complete for something you’d just started. I didn’t question it then because I was desperate. But now I’m asking.”
Silence. Then a laugh, light and dismissive. “I’d been working on it for months, Rocco. Long before the collaboration. I just never had the right partner to finish it with.”
“And the lyrics? ‘I kept your silence like a secret’ - that’s a very specific kind of phrasing.”
“Are you accusing me of something?” Her voice sharpens. “After everything I’ve done? I dropped my entire schedule to come to Florence and pull you out of the worst creative slump of your career, and this is the thanks I get?”
“I’m not accusing. I’m asking.”
“The song is mine. I don’t know what Senna’s been telling you, but she’s always been jealous of me. Always. Even when we were children, she couldn’t stand that I had to work for things that came easily to her.”
“This isn’t about Senna.”
“Isn’t it? She walks out on you after the best night of your career, and suddenly you’re questioning where my songs come from? That’s not a coincidence, Rocco. She’s manipulating you.”
The accusation sits wrong in my chest. Senna has never manipulated anyone in her life. She’s too direct for that, too honest.
“I should go,” I say.
“Rocco, wait. Don’t let her poison this. What we built together-”
“I’ll call you later.”
I hang up before she can respond.
The conversation hasn’t answered anything. If anything, the wrongness has grown stronger - Fiorella’s defensiveness, her pivot to attacking Senna, the too-smooth explanation for a song that arrived too perfectly formed.
But I don’t have proof. I don’t have anything except a feeling and a wife who won’t answer my calls.
The divorce papers arrive by courier that afternoon.
I sign for them at the door and carry them to the kitchen table, where Senna’s ring is still sitting exactly where she left it.
The papers are thick, official, full of legal language that reduces seven years of marriage to a series of asset divisions and timeline requirements.
Filed for divorce. The coldest possible words for the warmest thing I’ve ever known.
I think about calling her. Begging her to reconsider. Promising to change, to be better, to become the husband I should have been all along.
But then I think about what she said. You didn’t ask. You didn’t notice. You locked me out.
And I think about the showcase, about standing on that stage with Fiorella while my wife watched from the back of the room like a stranger.
About all the times I talked about the collaboration without ever inviting her to participate.
About the morning after we made love and I left before she woke up, because Fiorella had an idea and I couldn’t miss it.
I’ve been so focused on getting my music back that I lost the person who made me want to make music in the first place.
I pick up the divorce papers and look at them for a long time.
Then I put them down unsigned and go to the piano.
When was the last time I wrote a song about Senna?
The question hits me like a physical blow, because I can’t remember.
I can’t remember the last time I sat down and tried to put her into music, the last time I let myself feel what she meant to me and translated it into something I could share.
The label told me to stop writing about my marriage, and I just…
stopped. Like she was a topic I could set aside, a subject I could abandon, instead of the center of my entire creative life.
No wonder she feels invisible. I made her invisible. I let someone else tell me what to write about, and I wrote her out of my own story.
“I’m going to fix this,” I say to the empty room.
The silence doesn’t answer.
“I’m going to fix this,” I say again, louder. “I’m going to earn you back if it’s the last thing I do.”
The ring glints on the counter, catching the late afternoon light.
I leave it where it is - for now - and I start to play.