13. Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
Willow
Ihave been at my parent’s house for three weeks now.
Three weeks in my old bedroom, surrounded by every version of myself I thought I had outgrown.
There’s a little dent in the skirting board from when Phoenix dared me to throw a hairbrush at his head and ducked too late.
The faded band posters I was too sentimental to take down and the chipped white desk where I wrote my first real song.
The stupid glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to the ceiling because thirteen-year-old me thought wanting the sky closer made me deep.
And the photos.
Jesus Christ. The amount of photos of Phoenix and me shoved onto the side of my mirror, tucked under the frame, curling at the edges from years of heat and dust. There is one of Phoenix at thirteen, his arm slung around my neck, grinning as if the world had not touched us yet.
Phoenix at sixteen, flipping off the camera while I laughed beside him.
The photo Mom took of us under the tree in our backyard, where Phoenix has his guitar across his lap and my notebook open between us.
Both of us looked so young and so hopeful.
We had no idea life was already sharpening its knife.
I know I should take them down and throw them away but I don’t. I just stop looking directly at them.
Three weeks is long enough for my clothes to end up back in drawers that still smell faintly of Mom’s detergent. Long enough for the room to seem less like a place I ran to and more like a place I was sent back to because I fucked up adulthood too badly to keep pretending.
Long enough for Mom to stop pretending she is not listening outside my door when I go quiet.
Dad starts carrying anger through the house, too. He carries it in his shoulders, in the hard set of his jaw, and in the way he grips his coffee mug as if it might be Phoenix’s throat if the universe had any sense of justice.
It’s not loud anger. Graham Hart doesn’t need to shout to make a room seem smaller. He can do it with a single look.
Sometimes Dad looks at me as if I am something precious and cracked. Something he wants to put back together with his bare hands. But one wrong touch might split me open for good if he isn’t careful enough.
While Mom just watches me differently. She notices the food I push around my plate, the tea I forget about until it goes cold, and the way I flinch when my phone lights up.
Her worry is softer than Dad’s but somehow worse.
They both watch me as if I have come home with bruises beneath my skin.
I tell them both that I’m fine.
I say it in the morning when Mom knocks on my door to ask if I slept.
At lunch, it comes out before Dad can say anything about finding me at the kitchen table with my notebook open and not a single damn word written on the page.
By night, when the house goes quiet and their worry starts pressing through the walls, I say it to myself as well.
I’m fine. I’m fucking fine.
The words lose shape over time. They stop meaning okay and start meaning please stop looking at me. The truth is, I am awake most nights until my body feels thin and scraped out.
I can get through the first few hours of the day if I take a pill before breakfast and smile when Mom sets toast in front of me.
By afternoon, my skin feels too tight, my thoughts too loud, and my chest too full of all the shit I refuse to face.
So I take another. Not because I’m out of control. Not because I need them. I just need the edge gone. The rawness dulled. The memory of Phoenix, his mouth swollen from mine and his hands on someone else, cut down to something I can breathe through.
I need to stop hearing him say we should get back out there, as if I had taken a wrong turn on the way to something better.
Mostly, I just need to stop remembering.
That’s all it is.
A pill in the morning so I can sit at the table without shaking. Another in the afternoon so I can answer Mom without snapping. One at night so the room stops spinning with every version of my life I no longer have.
It becomes an ugly, silent routine.
Wake up. Swallow. Lie. Survive.
The days pass in a blur of sunlight bleeding through lace curtains, untouched tea, Mom’s soft hands, Dad’s hard silence, and my phone lying face-down on the bedside table because I am too afraid of what it might show me.
I have no idea what my life looks like right now and that scares the shit out of me.
For years, my life had shape because of Static Hearts.
Songs. Rehearsals. Studio sessions. Tour dates.
Hotel rooms that all smelled the same once the lights went out.
Phoenix walking into every room as if the world had been built for the pleasure of disappointing him.
Cruz making filthy comments over guitar riffs because the man would flirt with a power outlet if it hummed back.
Jax hitting the drums too hard because moderation has never entered his body.
Jett watching everything, saying almost nothing, and then finding the one sentence sharp enough to cut someone open.
And me, always somewhere in the middle of it.
On the couch, with a notebook pressed to my knees, turning their mess into verses, and their fights into bridges. In the studio, fixing words, broken melodies, and all the shit no one else noticed before it made it onto the album.
Phoenix’s problems most of all. I watched him become everyone’s dream. Then the world loved him so loudly that he stopped hearing me.
Now I don’t know who the hell I am when I’m not doing that.
Mom tries to help in the only ways she knows how. Soup I never asked for. Cut fruit left beside me when I sit outside under the old pergola, staring at nothing. Her fingers brushing through my hair as she passes behind my chair, gentle enough to make me feel loved.
Instead, it makes something inside me twist violently.
“Your hair’s getting so long,” she says her voice careful.
I sit at the kitchen table with a mug cradled between my hands, even though I have not taken a sip. The tea smells of honey and lemon. Mom has been making it for me since I was little, for scraped knees, sore throats, and schoolyard bullshit I swore did not hurt.
“I should cut it,” I say.
Her hand hovers near my shoulder. “You don’t have to change anything right now.”
“I know that.”
“I only mean—”
“I know what you mean, Mom.”
Her hand drops.
The silence after it is awful. So is the shame. Mom is only trying to love me, and I am standing here, making that feel like another thing I have to survive.
Dad is not gentle when Phoenix’s name is mentioned.
One night after dinner, the news shows a clip of the band walking a red carpet from months ago. Phoenix is at the front, black shirt unbuttoned too low, hair a mess and that stupid mouth curved as if every camera wants him.
I look away too late and Dad sees it. He reaches for the remote and turns off the television.
Mom freezes at the sink.
I stay at the table, fingers curled around a glass of water, my pulse turning mean beneath my skin.
Dad sets the remote down. “He was always going to take everything he could from you.”
“Graham,” Mom says softly.
“No.” Dad turns to me. “I watched that boy grow into exactly the kind of man I had hoped he would not become.”
I stare at the table.
“You don’t know him,” I say, the words coming out before I can stop them.
I hate myself instantly because some bruised, stupid part of me still wants to stand between Phoenix and the truth. Even after everything the asshole left me choking on.
Dad’s voice lowers. “I know enough.”
Something in me hardens. “No, you think you know what it was.”
“I watched my daughter disappear into that band year by year.”
“That band was my life.”
“And what did it give you?”
I stand too quickly and the chair scraps hard against the floor. “Don’t.”
Dad’s eyes flash. “Don’t what, Willow? Tell the truth?”
“Turn him into a villain because it’s easier.”
His jaw clenches. “I don’t need to turn Phoenix into anything, Willow. He’s done that himself.”
I should be nodding, agreeing with Dad, saying he isn’t wrong. Instead, the old instinct crawls up my throat. “He wasn’t always this.”
The second the words leave my mouth, I want to claw them back. Because they’ve watched him become the kind of man I should’ve known better than to love. That asshole doesn’t even have to be in the room to make me still choose him.
Dad stares at me.
“I’m going to bed,” I say.
“It’s seven-thirty,” Mom says.
“I’m tired.”
I leave before either Mom or Dad can say anything more.
By the time I reach my room, the sick, humiliating ache in my chest has teeth. I stand with my back against the door, breathing through it, staring at the old photos shoved onto the side of my mirror.
I move across the room and reach for the small pill bottle.
There is no fight in me anymore when I touch it. No dramatic little war between good and bad. No clean version of myself standing in the corner, begging me to make a better choice. That girl must have packed her shit and left since the time I arrived here.
Now there is only this. The cap beneath my fingers. The sound of the lid opening and the small white promise rolling onto my palm.
My body settles before I even swallow, already trusting that the thing ruining me is about to save me for a few more hours.
I wait for the world to improve, but it only moves farther away.
I set the tiny bottle on the floor beside my bed and try not to notice how few remain.
Not counting them feels safer. Counting would mean admitting I’m running out because I keep reaching for them. And that would mean admitting I no longer have control.
My phone buzzes on the bed. I flinch and for one stupid second, my heart races. Then I remember Phoenix’s number is blocked.
I pick up the phone.