2. Mateo
MATEO
“Did she give you any idea what she wants to talk to you about?” my sister asks, pushing the front door closed behind us.
Crew abandons me immediately.
My kid doesn’t even hesitate. One glimpse of his cousins tearing through the living room and his hand slips from mine, already swallowed up by the noise and laughter.
I watch him go, running a hand through my hair before dragging my palm along my jaw where a few days’ worth of stubble is starting to win the fight. The ink on my forearms is on full display as I hike the sleeves of my shirt up before pulling them back into place just to do something with my hands.
I follow my sister into the kitchen, letting the house settle a little behind us while still keeping the kids in view.
“Nope,” I say to my sister, leaning a hip against the counter. “Just that it was important and had to do with Crew.”
My ex-wife has never asked me to choose between my job and my family, even when we were married.
That fact alone had me using one of my very few days off from my band’s tour to travel the nine hours from Nashville to Milwaukee when she texted me that we needed to talk about our current custody arrangement.
Mia glances at me like she’s deciding whether to push it or not. I keep my focus on the kids in the living room instead, where Crew is already fully invested in his cousins’ new set of building blocks.
“Well, it’s obviously important enough to have you renting a car and driving the nine hours here just to turn around and head back there. All on your day off,” Mia says, grabbing two bottles of water from the fridge and handing me one.
I shrug my shoulders as I sit back against the counter. “She said it was urgent, and something that required more than just a phone call.”
Mia’s brown eyes widen. “That has my anxiety spiking. How are you not freaking out?” She shakes her head, taking a sip of water before continuing. “She didn’t tell you anything else? What about when you picked up Crew from her place earlier today?”
“She wasn’t there,” I answer with a shrug. “Daniel was.”
Mia raises a brow, and I know what’s coming before she even opens her mouth. I almost say the words along with her. “It’s weird how cool you are with your ex-wife getting married two months after your divorce was final.”
I roll my eyes, sick of having to continue to explain myself. “How many times do I have to tell you? We were separated for a whole year before we finalized the divorce.”
Mia tucks a piece of her blonde hair behind her ear. She stares at me for a few seconds past comfortable. “Maybe I’m just too used to things going wrong. That’s why your easy divorce and healthy co-parenting confuses me.”
She says it as a joke, but we both know the truth between her words. Losing our parents when she was eight and having to deal with me trying to figure out how to be the legal guardian at the ripe age of eighteen was just the start of my sister’s uphill battle.
My own too.
After years of therapy, I finally understand my own trauma and how to navigate life with it. Maybe that’s why the divorce went the way it did.
No drama, no scandal. Just two people who fell out of love.
And by thirty-nine, I’ve learned that I don’t have time for anything besides my son and my band.
“Your husband says the same thing,” I say with a laugh.
“Because your drummer is smarter than he looks,” Mia replies, her gaze moving to just over my shoulder where I can hear her twin daughters and my son playing what they think is Duck Duck Goose.
“I’m surprised you were able to talk Eddie out of not making the drive with you,” she adds.
“But I’m glad you did. He FaceTimed me and the girls this morning, and I’m pretty sure he was half-asleep. ”
A chuckle escapes my throat. “Sounds about right.”
“He doesn’t bounce back from sleeping on a tour bus like he used to,” she adds. “He’s counting down the days until next summer when this tour is finished.”
My lips quirk for a moment, but the words hit me directly where it hurts—a sensitive spot I’ve been trying to ignore since we decided that this tour would be Cross My Heart’s last.
I can’t lie and say this farewell tour isn’t taking its own toll on me. Doing this in my twenties and even my early thirties was much easier than just a few months shy of turning forty.
But I don’t want it to end.
This band and getting us to where we are is how I’ve spent a better part of my life. And while touring is time-consuming and tiring, and takes time away that I can spend with my son, I don’t know who I am without Cross My Heart.
“When are you supposed to meet Talia?” Mia asks, pulling me from my thoughts.
I look over her shoulder, checking the time on her oven. “Half an hour. We were going to meet at Hey Honey’s, but they’re closed today for some event, so we’re going to Lenny’s instead.”
“And she really didn’t tell you anything?” Mia pries again, playing with the paper wrapped around her water bottle.
“Nope,” I answer, chuckling at the way Mia groans.
While I am curious and a little worried to talk to Talia, knowing that my ex-wife wouldn’t argue with me coming home from tour for anything that wasn’t incredibly important, there’s nothing I can do about it for the next thirty minutes.
Without Talia, this last tour wouldn’t have happened.
She’s the one who keeps Crew grounded in the middle of it all—flying him out when schedules line up, making sure weeks don’t slip into months.
Somehow, she’s always made the distance feel smaller than it is, taking time out of her own days to make sure I can see my son.
When the label first floated a farewell world tour, I’d written it off before they even finished the pitch. We’ve never done more than a handful of weeks at a time. Four guys, four separate lives, all of us trying to be present somewhere else.
We weren’t the bachelors, aching for the rockstar life anymore—willing to sacrifice anything to have it in our hands.
After almost a decade, Eddie, Theo, Silas, and I have all found different priorities—significant others or kids who need us at home, not sleeping on tour buses and performing in different cities every night for weeks on end.
But in the end, we all agreed that we owed it to our fans. One last run for the ones who turned our small indie Milwaukee band into something we never thought possible—something we only dreamed of.
The four of us agreed this last hurrah was what they deserved, and we knew our loved ones would help us make it work.
After all, the fans made us into one of the best—a band with awards and accolades we only ever dreamed of back when we were playing covers of our favorite songs in whatever dive bar would give us a chance.
“Well, you better get going,” Mia says.
I exhale, push off the counter, and cross the room to Crew. His attention doesn’t leave the blocks scattered in his lap as I crouch down and press a kiss into his brown hair—apparently Duck Duck Goose didn’t last long.
“I’ll see you later, buddy.”
He glances up at me then, those blue eyes just like his mom’s. “You have songs to sing, Daddy?” he asks, and something tightens in my chest—the same place it always does when he says it like that, so casual.
Crew has been coming to shows since he was a baby. The first time, he slept through the entire set, curled against Talia’s chest in a suite above the crowd, almost too small for the huge headphones we put over his ears.
After the divorce just before he turned two, drop-offs always ended the same way. A small hand waving from her doorway, a quiet Daddy, sing trailing after me as I left.
Now at four, he just asks if I’m going to sing whenever I go.
I swallow and nod once. “Something like that,” I say, like I always do, my voice cracking as he smiles wide, his long brown hair tied up in a bun to keep the waves out of his face. “Be good for Aunt Mia,” I say, standing up to my full height. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy,” he says easily, just as one of the twins hands him more blocks. He says it like he’s used to saying goodbye.
Like I'll just disappear for a while.
And he'll hardly notice I'm gone.