7. OLEANDER
seven
OLEANDER
The air inside the bar was cooler than the night outside, thick with the scent of unwashed glasses and a sweet, heavy musk that I couldn't quite identify.
I took my usual seat at the far end of the bar.
The amber glow from the pendant lights overhead made the whiskey in front of me look like molten gold, but I didn't touch it. I just watched the stage.
Julian was already there. He sat at the piano with a posture that suggested he was carved from the same dark mahogany as the instrument.
He didn't look at the crowd, which was sparse even for a Tuesday.
His fingers moved across the keys with a tentative grace, like he was testing the air for a storm.
When the first notes of his set drifted through the room, the noise of the patrons became irrelevant.
The music was a physical thing, a tide that pulled at the edges of the numbness I'd been cultivating since Dominic's funeral.
It hurt, a dull, persistent ache like a bruise being pressed.
The melody was haunting, something classical that I should have recognized but didn't, layered with a melancholy so profound it felt like a mirror.
I watched the way his throat moved when he swallowed, the way his dark skin caught the light as he leaned into a particularly difficult chord.
I was watching him too closely, the way he seemed to be breathing the music rather than playing it.
I tried to look at the bottle of rye behind the bar, then at the exits, but my eyes kept snapping back to him.
When he finished the first set, the silence that followed was heavy, almost suffocating.
He stood up, his broad shoulders shifting under a dark sweater, and walked straight toward me.
My hands tightened around the cold glass of my untouched drink.
He occupied the seat next to me, bringing with him the scent of cedar and something clean, like rain on pavement.
"You came back," he said. His voice was low, the kind of sound you felt in your chest.
"I like the music," I said, my voice coming out smaller than I wanted. "It's better than the silence in my apartment."
He turned his head to look at me, his expression serious and turned inward.
"Silence is a dangerous thing in this town.
It fills up with things you didn't mean to keep.
" He signaled the bartender for a glass of water.
"What brought you here, Oleander? Truly.
People don't just stumble into Hollow Vale by accident. "
I traced the rim of my glass. "My husband died.
Dominic. He left me an apartment here. I didn't even know he owned it.
I didn't know he owned anything in this part of the state.
" I looked up, meeting Julian's gaze. "I'm here because I didn't have anywhere else to go where people wouldn't look at me like I was a tragedy in progress. "
Julian nodded slowly, a small, knowing movement.
He didn't offer me a platitude. He didn't tell me it would get better or that Dominic was in a better place.
He just let the truth of it sit between us.
"People come to Hollow Vale when they need somewhere that won't ask them to be okay," he said.
"The town doesn't care about your healing. It just cares that you're here."
The accuracy of it hit me hard, a sudden constriction in my throat that made it hard to breathe.
I'd spent months nodding through Liliana's worried check-ins and the polite, empty sympathies of our friends back home.
Nobody had ever just told me I didn't have to be okay.
For a second, I thought I might actually cry, right there under the amber lights with the smell of cheap whiskey in my nose.
I looked down at my hands to hide the way my eyes were burning.
"Rowan said you were different," Julian murmured, his voice so soft I almost missed it over the hum of the refrigerator behind the bar. "I see what he meant now. You're not just grieving. You're waiting."
"Waiting for what?" I asked, my heart doing a strange, fluttering dance against my ribs. I thought of the shadows in my room, the scent of cologne that wasn't there, and the way Rowan had looked at me, like he was seeing a ghost through my skin.
"For the other shoe to drop," Julian said. He stood up, the movement fluid and controlled. "I have to play the second set. Stay for it?"
"I'm not going anywhere," I promised, and it felt like a confession. I watched him walk back to the piano, my eyes tracing the line of his back, the way he carried himself with a quiet, lonely dignity.
Julian sat on the bench, but he didn't start immediately.
He sat with his eyes closed for a long minute, his hands resting on his thighs.
The room seemed to grow colder, a sudden draft licking at my ankles despite the closed doors.
I felt a prickle of unease. Then, his posture shifted.
His shoulders tightened, pulling into a rigid, almost pained line.
He reached for the keys, and the first three notes made my breath hitch in my lungs.
It was a minor-key progression, obscure and hauntingly familiar.
It was the melody. Dominic's melody. The one he used to hum on Sunday mornings while the coffee was brewing, those slow, gray mornings back in our old house when he thought I wasn't listening.
It was personal and private, a secret language he'd hummed under his breath while he poured over those leather-bound books he'd started hiding from me.
Hearing it here, played by a man who had never met my husband, felt like having my chest cracked open with a dull blade.
I couldn't move. I was pinned to the bar stool by the sheer impossibility of the sound.
Julian played it with an intensity that bordered on violence, his fingers striking the keys as if he were trying to exorcise a spirit.
The tune spiraled, twisting into itself in a way that mimicked the decay of the buildings outside, a warped geometry of sound that shouldn't have existed.
I could almost smell Dominic's sweet, floral cologne.
I could almost feel his hand on the back of my neck, possessive and heavy.
Julian's eyes were clamped shut, his head tilted back as if he were listening to a voice I couldn't hear.
The music sounded like a scream being muffled, beautiful and absolutely wrong.
The shadows in the corners of the bar began to pool, deepening into ink that seemed to pulse in time with the rhythm.
I felt a wave of existential vertigo, a sense that the floor was no longer solid beneath my feet.
When the final note faded into the air, vibrating until it was nothing but a ghost of a sound, Julian didn't move.
He sat there, his chest heaving, his eyes still closed.
The silence in the bar was absolute. Nobody clapped.
Nobody even seemed to breathe. It was as if the music had stripped the room of its air.
Slowly, Julian opened his eyes and looked down at his hands.
He stared at them like they were foreign objects, like he'd woken up to find someone else's blood on his skin.
"I don't..." He trailed off, his voice trembling. He looked over at me, and the confusion in his eyes was so raw it was terrifying. "I don't know where that came from. I've never heard that before in my life."
His fingers were shaking so violently they rattled against the wood of the piano.
I stood up, my chair screeching against the floor.
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. If I opened my mouth, I was afraid I'd either scream or vomit.
The numbness was gone, replaced by something cold and sharp.
I turned and ran for the door, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm that matched the melody I'd just heard.
The fog was waiting for me outside. I didn't stop until I reached the alleyway beside the bar, my back hitting the damp brick wall with a force that knocked the wind out of me.
My legs gave way, and I slid down to the pavement, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to shut out the image of Julian at the piano, but the melody was already etched into my brain, a permanent scar.
I was alone in the dark, but it didn't feel like it. It felt like Dominic was standing right there in the mist, watching me realize that there was no such thing as leaving him. I stayed there on the ground for a long time, listening to the silence of Hollow Vale.