Chapter 19
LEAH
Coverage of the livestream had already faded from the news cycle, and his theater tour had shrunk to one-tenth its former size.
Those were consequences of choices he made—not punishments I needed to come back and verify.
Over thirteen months, I had learned to teach, write songs, and buy coffee without him in my mornings.
I had learned to hear my own name without immediately thinking of whose shadow it had been buried behind.
But four months after the divorce was finalized, I still found myself thinking about him at unexpected moments.
Not Asher Vale on a screen, and not the husband waiting in an empty house for me to finish the next lyric.
What I remembered was him boiling water in a broken electric kettle at a cheap motel, and the two of us sitting on a curb after his first show—nine tickets sold—splitting a container of cold fries.
I needed to know whether the person I wanted to see was who he was now, or just a habit that had outlived its reason.
At 1:50, I tucked the bill under my cup and left myself a way out. If he walked in with anyone from his team, or if his first sentence was about the livestream, the tour, or the songs that had already been corrected, I didn’t need to stay for the rest of my drink.
At 1:59, Asher appeared on the other side of the street. He came in alone, wearing a dark coat and plain jeans. When he saw me, he slowed for half a step, then walked to the table.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He didn’t lean in to hug me. He stopped beside the chair across from mine. I tilted my chin toward it, and he sat down.
Asher silenced his phone and placed it face-down on his side of the table. He ordered black coffee, still no sugar. That detail hadn’t changed—but it was no longer something I prepared for him in advance.
For the first few minutes, we talked the way two people talk when they haven’t seen each other in a long time.
He said the theater tour had three dates left and that the next EP wasn’t starting anytime soon.
I told him the next songwriting session had two new high school students, and that Tess’s song about the old rooftop was already in final mixing.
“I heard her last one,” he said. “You had a songwriting credit.”
I held my teacup and didn’t reach for the thread that might have led back to the past. “I’m not here today to go over songwriting credits.”
“I know.” He looked at me. “I didn’t bring anything either.”
There were no documents on the table, no notebook, no envelope waiting to be signed. Just two cups.
“How’s the writing going?” I asked.
“Slow. Most of it isn’t good enough.” He didn’t soften the answer with a smile. “There’s one I kept for myself. A few others I’m working on with Micah and the others.”
“I’m not checking up on you.”
“I know.” He paused. “It’s just how I work now.”
I looked out the window. The sea breeze was nudging a sign along the sidewalk, and a couple pushing a stroller passed in front of the café. I waited until they disappeared around the corner before I looked back at him.
“Did you want Sabrina?”
Asher’s hand stilled at the rim of his cup. He didn’t ask why I was bringing this up now, and he didn’t reach for the kiss that never happened as a shield.
“Yes,” he said.
When the answer landed, my chest tightened anyway. The truth doesn’t hurt less just because it arrives late—but this time, he hadn’t made me piece together the whole truth from half a sentence.
“Be specific.”
He looked down at his coffee for a moment, then raised his eyes. “I looked forward to her messages. After rehearsal, if she said let’s run it again, I usually wanted to stay. She admired me. She believed I could still become the Asher everyone remembered. I liked that feeling.”
I didn’t move.
“I liked the suggestive edits too.” He kept going.
“I told myself it was just promotion, but I watched them. I liked people thinking we looked right together. I liked how easy it felt to be around her—like I had no wife, like I didn’t owe anyone anything, like I could start something completely new whenever I wanted. ”
“But you came home every night.”
“Yes,” he said. “Back to everything you kept running, while I saved the most exciting parts of myself for outside that door.”
I had asked myself countless times whether he had actually fallen for her.
That question was too broad, and too easy to hide inside definitions.
What I had now wasn’t a single word I could forgive or condemn.
It was the specific things I had actually lost: his anticipation, his time, his visible happiness, and the future he was willing to let everyone imagine for him.
“You really never kissed?” I asked.
“No. No sex either. Nothing that almost happened and that I’m now deliberately leaving vague.” He didn’t immediately add and so I was still faithful. “But none of that cancels anything I just said.”
“One more thing.” Asher held his cup, his knuckles going white by degrees. “I’m sorry, Leah.”
He paused, as if the first sentence had used up the breath he’d rehearsed.
“You only agreed to stay uncredited for a while, and I let thirteen years sound like it was always the arrangement. When it came to ‘Still Burning,’ I replaced your name with Sabrina’s.
The night of the livestream, I called you my first fan—because the crowd was cheering and I didn’t have the nerve to let that sound stop. ”
He looked at me, his voice quieter than before. “I put you in the audience and then came home and treated you like a backstage light that would always be on. When you left, the first time I came to find you, I was holding a contract. I even tried to open my apology with your song.”
The café door opened once, and the wind moved the napkins on the table. Asher didn’t reach out to hold them down.
“I did all of that,” he said. “I hurt you. I’m sorry.”
He went quiet.
“What took you the longest to understand?” I asked.
“I kept thinking that as long as I came home after the encore, your place hadn’t changed.” He stared at the small dark reflection in his cup. “But the light in that house was always you leaving it on. It didn’t come on just because I walked back in.”
His throat moved. “I changed the name back eventually. The audience finally applauded for you. But applause doesn’t give you thirteen years.”
I looked down at the ring of tea at the bottom of my cup and waited for the heat behind my eyes to recede. The understanding I had waited thirteen years for had finally arrived—and it hadn’t undone a single thing that had already happened.
“I need a minute.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t fill the silence. The steam wand behind the counter stopped and started again. The door opened twice. When I looked up, he was still in his seat, his hands away from his cup.
I didn’t say I forgave him. I didn’t offer him any comfort. I set my cooled tea back on the table.
“Let’s walk,” I said.
He only said, “Okay.”
The path stretched north along the coast. It was a weekday and there weren’t many people out.
Asher took the outside edge of the path.
We talked about the new streetlights the town had put in, about a student in my class who always wrote a bridge longer than the chorus, and about the first time he sang his new song in a two-thousand-seat theater and the room went so quiet he could hear people breathing.
“Was it hard?” I asked.
“The first two minutes were hard,” he said. “Then I realized that no one singing along didn’t mean I got to stop.”
Near the old pier, he asked whether I usually walked all the way to the end. I said I did when the weather was good—sometimes I’d bring a coffee after class and come out here.
The wind pushed a strand of hair across his forehead.
I hadn’t been this close to him in a long time.
Away from stage lighting, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes were more visible than I remembered, and the small scar on the right side of his jaw was still there from the early years of touring.
I stopped walking.
Asher stopped beside me. “Leah?”
I reached up and touched his face.
I had only meant to find out what touching him would bring back. A second later, I had his coat lapel in my hand and I was kissing him.
The familiarity cut through thirteen months almost immediately. His lips were still warm. He kissed me back, one hand settling at my waist.
When his thumb moved across my side through my coat, I stepped back. Asher let go at once, his breathing still uneven.
“That’s as far as today goes,” I said.
“Okay.”
We walked back to the café slowly and said goodbye at the corner. He had taken a few steps toward where he’d parked when I called after him.
“Next week the community arts center has a box of old cassettes to go through,” I said. “Nothing to do with the catalog, no commercial rights involved. Evan will be there. Do you want to come?”
“Yes.”
I told him to come at three on Wednesday afternoon and use the back door. He nodded, took it in, and kept walking toward the rental car at the end of the block.
This time, the person I was inviting wasn’t my husband, and wasn’t someone I needed to write the next line for. Just Asher.