Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
MYA
B y the time the final chord crashes and the house lights flare like the sun after a storm, my spine feels like it’s been welded straight and my knees are two seconds away from staging a full-blown rebellion. Three hours. Three sets. Six costume changes. A sold-out Garden and enough sweat, light, and sound to short-circuit the entire eastern seaboard.
I’m wrecked.
Every cell in my body is humming. Every emotion stretched thin. And still—I wait.
The band trickles off stage, high on adrenaline and validation. Carson’s grinning like a lunatic, a towel slung over his neck. Benji gives me a sweaty half-hug in passing and tells me I “crushed the content game.” Thorin nods at me, all sharp angles and sweat-soaked gratitude, Reese trailing beside him like a flame softened by ash.
They all pass me.
Except for one.
Fletch doesn’t even come this way.
I see it just before he disappears—him veering offstage to the left, alone, silent, a ghost wrapped in black.
And suddenly, exhaustion has nothing on the ache in my chest.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I mutter, handing the rig off to Penelope and ignoring her raised eyebrow. “You don’t get to disappear again.”
I take off down the hallway, legs screaming in protest, Converse sticking slightly to beer-slick linoleum. The lights back here buzz overhead like they know something I don’t. My heart’s pounding, adrenaline ping-ponging between my ribs as I round the corner and?—
There he is.
Fletch.
Back to me, shoulders tense, hands on the wall like it’s the only thing holding him up.
He doesn’t hear me at first. Or maybe he does and just doesn’t move.
“Hey.”
His head lifts.
Slowly.
Like he’s underwater and it takes effort just to exist.
When he turns around, my breath catches. His eyes are the same deep, stormy gray I remember—only tonight they’re glazed. Off. Like he’s here and not here all at once.
“Mya.” His voice cracks like old vinyl. “You found me.”
“No,” I say quietly, “you left me.”
We stand there, suspended between silence and something heavier. Three months since I saw him. Ninety-one days of absence carved into my bones like tally marks. And now he’s here—but he’s not.
“I’m right here,” he whispers.
His eyes are wild. Frantic. Haunted. “Come back to me.”
My spine stiffens. “What are you talking about?”
But he doesn’t answer. Just takes a shaky step forward, eyes locked on mine like I’m the only solid thing left in a crumbling world.
“I tried to hold on,” he says, voice hollow, gutted. “But you—you stopped showing up.”
“Fletch…”
“I’ve been waiting,” he murmurs, reaching out, fingers brushing mine. They’re warm. Too warm. “You stopped singing. You stopped seeing me.”
Something cold and oily slithers down my spine.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He exhales a laugh. It’s broken. Bone-deep. “You don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what?”
He steps closer. And now that he’s in front of me, I notice things I shouldn’t.
His skin’s too smooth.
His lips don’t move quite right.
His eyes flicker—literally flicker—like light struggling through static.
And then the hallway glitches.
Just for a second.
The ceiling ripples like water.
The lights blink.
The floor blinks.
Fletch blinks.
And I blink so hard it hurts.
“What is this?” I whisper.
He takes my face in both hands, and they feel real. He feels real. But none of this makes sense.
“You need to wake up, Mya.”
My blood turns to ice.
“What?”
“None of this is real,” he says, voice low and steady now. Like it’s a lullaby. A dare. A prayer.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “No, this is real. You walked away. You left me. You didn’t call. You didn’t reach out. You just disappeared and now you’re?—”
“I never left,” he says.
His thumbs stroke my cheeks, like he’s memorizing the shape of me. “You did.”
And just like that, the hallway dissolves.
Flickers like a film reel unspooling mid-scene.
The walls stretch.
The light pulses.
I hear the distant echo of machines—steady beeping, somewhere far off. Too far to make sense. Too loud to ignore.
“Come back to me,” he begs. “Please. I can’t do this without you.”
I look up at him, heart in my throat, a scream lodged somewhere behind my ribs.
“Where am I?”
Fletch steps back, eyes shining. “Somewhere between goodbye and not yet. But you don’t belong here anymore.”
The hallway begins to fade. Like dust in a shaft of light.
And then?
So does he.
My knees buckle.
Not dramatically. Not like a slow-motion scene in a war film. No violin crescendo or gasping breath. Just… a quiet collapse. Like a building with its supports ripped out.
The kind of fall you don’t see coming until the floor meets your skin.
I blink, hard, trying to steady the world—gripping the cold cement wall like it might hold me here, root me to what’s real. But it’s no use. The backstage corridor, the chaos of cables and crates and distant laughter—it’s gone. Evaporated. Like steam from a cracked mug.
Everything smells different now. Not of sweat and stale beer and electricity.
No.
Now it smells like memory.
And I know that makes no damn sense. But somehow, in my bones—in the deepest, unspoken marrow of who I am—I know it’s true.
The lights shift. The air warps. Reality unspools like thread from a spool held too tightly.
Because I’m not in Madison Square Garden anymore.
I’m somewhere else.
I’m somewhen else.
And there, in the middle of the nothing, he reappears.
Fletch.
But not my Fletch. Not the one who ghosted me. Not the one who’s been avoiding me like I’m contagious. This Fletch looks younger. Softer, somehow. Like the version of him I met in Horseshoe Bay, before the walls went up. Before the firestorms and fallout and everything in between.
He’s wearing the hoodie I used to steal in winter. The one that still smells like cedarwood and cheap cologne and late-night kisses in the dark.
He’s barefoot.
And when he sees me, his face fractures. Not with confusion. Not even with guilt.
But with grief.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he says, voice hoarse.
I shake my head. “Fletch—what is this?”
“You’re slipping,” he murmurs, stepping closer. “And I don’t know how to stop it.”
Slipping?
My hands go to my belly on instinct. The bump beneath my sweater feels solid. Real.
But everything else? Everything else feels like a dream I can’t wake up from.
I swallow hard. “This isn’t real.”
His smile is cracked glass. “No, Mya. This is the only thing that is.”
And suddenly I understand what the twist means.
Nothing that’s happened up until now—New York, the penthouse, the tour, the MSG show—none of it is real.
Because I’m not awake.
I’m not here.
I’m somewhere else.
And Fletch?
He’s not speaking in riddles.
He’s trying to bring me back.
Fletch steps closer, the hallway around us dimming into something dreamlike—half shadow, half static. The edges of the space pulse like a heartbeat, and each beat threatens to swallow him whole.
“Stop,” I whisper, voice cracking like old vinyl. “You’re scaring me.”
His eyes shatter. “I should scare you, Mya.”
“Why?” I choke, backing up until my spine hits what used to be a wall and now feels like smoke.
“Because you’re losing yourself in here.” He lifts his arms like he wants to hold me, but he doesn’t close the distance. “And I don’t know how much longer I can hold the door open.”
The words don’t make sense.
None of this does.
But something inside me—some ache stitched into my ribs—believes him.
Because how else do you explain the seams in the world coming undone?
How else do you explain a pregnancy that never added up? The moments that felt too perfect. The silence between heartbeats. The way the Garden dissolved like fog. The way Fletch is here but not here.
“How long?” I whisper.
His brows knit. “How long what?”
I lift a hand to my chest. I swear I can feel it now. The weight. The pull. The disconnect.
“How long have I been… gone?”
Fletch hesitates.
And in that silence, my stomach turns to lead.
“Fletch,” I plead, voice thick and aching. “How long have I been under?”
His shoulders sag.
“Eighty-four days.”
The number knocks the wind out of me. Like I’ve been sucker-punched by my own unconscious.
I press a palm to the center of my chest, trying to steady the swirl in my head.
“This whole time…” My voice is a whisper, brittle and breaking. “I’ve been in a coma?”
He nods once. Just once.
And I break a little.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. There’s no scream or sob or shattering glass. Just this quiet internal undoing—like thread being tugged from a hem until everything I’ve stitched together starts to unravel.
Eighty-four days.
Three months of my body lying still while my mind built a world made of borrowed light and soft lies.
“I don’t understand,” I whisper. My voice sounds far away. Warped. Like it’s coming from underwater.
“I know,” Fletch says, voice rough with regret. “Your brain’s trying to protect you. That’s what it does. It gives you something safe when the real world hurts too much to hold.”
My hands hover over my belly.
The bump is still there.
Full.
Firm.
Heavy.
“Are they—” I stop, throat constricting. “Are the babies… real?”
His eyes close like the question hurts him. “By some miracle, they survived.”
The world tilts on its axis.
“I didn’t lose them,” I breathe, as the truth crashes in like a rogue wave.
He nods.
Tears spring to my eyes, stinging and sudden, hot as lightning. “How?”
“You got in the Uber,” he says, voice rough, like each word scrapes his throat on the way out. “You never made it to the airport.”
My breath stills.
“There was a head-on collision,” he continues, quieter now. “The other driver crossed into oncoming traffic. No warning. No chance to stop.”
He doesn’t mention the blood. The sirens. The call that shattered everything. He doesn’t have to.
“I didn’t call you,” I murmur, more to myself than to him. “You didn’t know.”
His eyes darken. “Reese called me. She—she was the one listed on your emergency contact forms.”
A beat of silence falls between us.
“I was alone?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. My heart does. It’s breaking around it.
The floor disappears beneath me.
And I fall.
But Fletch catches me.
Arms solid and warm and shaking as he holds me against him like I’m the only thing tethering him to this moment.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes out. “I wanted to be there sooner. I should’ve been.”
I cry into his chest, the dream splintering around us like ice beneath our feet. I cry for the babies I never held, for the months I believed a lie because it hurt less, for the man in front of me who was once mine and maybe still is and maybe never will be again.
“Why now?” I whisper against him. “Why is this happening now?”
“Because,” he breathes, lips brushing the top of my hair, “you’re getting stronger. Your body’s healing. And your mind… it’s trying to decide whether it wants to wake up or stay in the lie.”
I lift my head slowly.
“Which one do you want?”
His gaze meets mine.
And I swear I’ve never seen anything as raw.
“You.” His voice breaks on the word. “I just want you.”
He holds me like he’s afraid I’ll vanish. Like I’m the dream and he’s the one desperate to stay asleep.
But we both know that’s not true.
“I don’t want to go,” I whisper, voice trembling like the rest of me. “Not if it means losing them… this.”
His arms tighten, but not possessively. Not to keep me here.
To say goodbye.
“I know,” he murmurs, voice thick with everything we never got to say. “But you have to.”
The dream shifts again—growing softer at the edges. Hazy. Like it’s giving me one last moment before it fades.
“You don’t belong here, Mya.” Fletch leans back just enough to cup my jaw. His thumb brushes beneath my eye, catching the tear that falls like a star dying. “You were never meant to stay. Not in this lie. Not in this half-life.”
I nod, but it’s not a yes.
It’s a goodbye.
A slow, soul-deep surrender to the truth waiting on the other side.
He studies me for a moment, like he’s memorizing my face. Like he’s trying to burn it into whatever part of himself still dreams of us.
Then he leans in and presses the softest kiss to my forehead.
It’s not romantic.
It’s everything
“I’ll stop loving you when the sky falls,” he says, voice low and reverent, like he’s carving the promise into the stars.
And then?—
He lets go.
His warmth vanishes.
His body flickers.
And before I can speak—before I can say it back?—
He disappears.
And I’m alone.
Floating in the space between memory and waking.
Grief and breath.
The world isn’t dark.
It isn’t light either.
It’s weightless.
Like I’m floating in the breath between thunder and lightning. That charged moment where the air crackles with something ancient and electric and inevitable.
I can’t feel my body.
But I can feel… something.
A distant echo of warmth near my hand. The softest brush of fabric. A beep. Rhythmic. Familiar.
Steady.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Like a metronome ticking off the seconds of a life I haven’t stepped fully back into.
The dream is gone, but it’s left fingerprints all over me. I can still feel Fletch’s lips on my forehead. Still hear the promise he carved into my bones.
I will stop loving you when the sky falls.
And maybe it already has.
Maybe that’s what this place is. The hollow after the crash. The space where love and loss bleed together until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
Something shifts.
Not inside me—around me.
A flicker.
Like a radio tuning into a new station.
“…think she squeezed my hand just now…”
The voice is blurry. Familiar. Like a memory dipped in fog.
“…no change in the scans…”
Another flicker.
“…don’t give up on her, okay? She’s stubborn as hell. She’s just… resting.”
A breath catches in my chest.
Not a real breath. Not yet.
But it feels like one.
The sound of someone pulling a chair closer. The rustle of paper. A soft exhale.
A palm—warm and calloused—wraps gently around mine.
And I know that touch.
It’s Fletch’s.
A tear slips from the edge of my dream.
Not in the real world. Not yet.
But somewhere deep in this limbo, a tether tightens.
Because even in the dark, someone’s waiting for me.
And maybe the sky has fallen.
But maybe there’s still something worth waking up for.