15. Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Fifteen
Hunter
That night, back at the bungalow, Hunter had just set two grocery bags on the kitchen counter when Eli said:
“Wendy and Lily came to Vesper Hill today.”
Hope struck so hard that Hunter’s fingers went numb around a carton of eggs. He set it down before he dropped it.
“Did she ask to see me?” he asked, voice breaking.
Eli watched him for a moment. “No. She didn’t have a message for you, either. But she said it was fine if I told you about her visit.”
Hunter looked toward the window over the sink. Outside, the first drops of rain darkened the porch boards.
He could ask how Wendy had looked. Whether she’d been angry, whether she’d understood the option or thought he’d bought her dream out from under her.
He could ask if she’d touched the work orders, if she’d stood in the tasting room, if anything on her face had changed.
He swallowed hard and ended that train of thought.
“What did you tell her?” Hunter asked.
“What she asked. The option, the developer, the no-contact orders, the limits on the work.” Eli leaned one hip against the counter. “I didn’t defend you, and I didn’t ask her to forgive you. And I’m not going to report her private reactions because you’re desperate for a sign.”
Hunter swallowed. “Okay. Thank you for telling me.”
Hunter put the groceries away, then sat with his laptop and opened the latest site report.
A photograph showed the tasting room after the crew had cleared damaged plaster from the rear wall.
The long windows faced the vines, and bare spaces waited where a wealthy owner could make quick, impressive choices.
For one reckless moment, Hunter imagined what might persuade Wendy that he’d understood: her microphone in the cleanest corner, shelves for her notes, a table where Lily could sit across from her.
He closed the report. Knowing one part of Wendy’s dream didn’t give him the right to build it.
Her visit hadn’t changed anything between them.
By midnight, steady rain struck the bungalow windows.
It continued the next morning, hard enough that Rafael closed the site except for an inspection of the tarps and drainage.
Hunter set up a basic microphone in the living room, ran a cable to his laptop, and placed two guitars within reach.
The old one had the worn neck his hand knew best. The second was a cheap acoustic that had come with the bungalow rental, its strings a little too bright.
Eli stood in the kitchen making coffee.
“You planning to record an album between the sofa and that avocado refrigerator?” he asked, amused.
“Four songs,” Hunter said.
“That’s album math now?”
“It’s what I’ve got.”
Handwritten pages covered the floor around Hunter’s chair. His knuckles were scraped from working at Vesper Hill, and one cuticle had split open again when he’d tuned the old guitar. He wrapped it with a bandage, tested a chord, and saw Eli reading the top page from several feet away.
“Are these letters?” Eli asked. “Publicity? Some new way to reach Wendy without technically reaching Wendy?”
Hunter rested his palm over the strings. “They’re a correction.”
“For her?”
“For the public. She doesn’t have to listen.”
Hunter started with a song about the cameras at the Hollywood Bowl. His first verse blamed the bright lights and the people counting down in his ear. It sounded good. That was the problem. He crossed out the verse.
The next version named what he’d actually done. He’d heard a publicist tell Wendy to keep smiling. He’d watched camera three turn toward her. He’d known she was hearing the song for the first time, and he’d kept the show moving because her pain made the reveal feel real.
He called the song “Keep Smiling.” There wasn’t a chorus big enough for an arena. The title returned in a low line after each plain admission, less like a hook than an order he should’ve stopped.
Billy would’ve asked where the release was, where the drums entered, and which fifteen seconds could carry a short video.
Hunter could hear those questions without Billy in the room because he’d spent years letting them shape his instincts.
He played the verse again and refused to answer any of them.
He recorded six takes. On the first, he rushed the line about Wendy’s face. On the second, his voice cracked and he tried to improve the sound instead of accepting why it had broken. On the fifth, he added a high note that made regret sound beautiful.
He stopped midway through it.
“Too much?” Eli asked from the kitchen.
“Too flattering.”
Hunter removed the note. The sixth take kept the cracked breath, a small buzz from the cheap guitar, and the sound of rain against the glass.
The second song took most of the following day.
“After This One” began with the words he’d used to delay Wendy’s life: after the record, after the tour, after the launch, after this one.
He wrote about the forest-green Vesper Hill binder open next to his elbow while he answered messages.
He wrote about her podcast room becoming storage one box at a time.
He wrote about promises that sounded temporary until years collected behind them.
At first, he wrote that he hadn’t noticed the boxes.
The line failed the test before he sang it.
He’d noticed holiday decorations in Wendy’s recording room.
He’d noticed tour gifts stacked where her second microphone used to be.
He’d noticed enough to find things when he needed them.
What he hadn’t done was treat the loss as urgent because it wasn’t his.
He changed the line from not seeing to looking away.
The first draft ended with him alone and finally understanding what he’d lost. Hunter read it twice, then drew a line through the ending.
His loneliness wasn’t the cost the song needed to measure. Wendy’s lost work was.
He rewrote the final verse around an empty microphone and plans that kept being moved because of another schedule. No plea followed it, no line promised he could restore the years if she came home.
The third song, “Load-Bearing,” was the hardest because there wasn’t one dramatic scene to write about.
It was an inventory. Wendy remembering meals he forgot, Wendy smoothing sponsor conflicts he created, Wendy making his home, tours, and moods easier to live inside while he treated her steadiness as proof she needed nothing.
He’d let the daily choices make her disappear, then thanked her in public for her support as if being useful were the highest praise he could give his wife.
He kept reaching for lines about his father, the pressure to stay relevant, Billy’s manipulation, Serena’s attention, and the cropped video that was leaked. Each one shifted weight away from him. Each one was eliminated.
Eli listened without intervening. When Hunter finished the final take, Eli remained quiet long enough that the refrigerator’s buzz filled the bungalow.
“You don’t make yourself easy to forgive in any of those,” Eli said.
“That isn’t what they’re for.”
“Good.” Eli lifted his perpetual mug of coffee. “Because they’re not going to make everybody believe you.”
“I know.”
“And they may hurt Serena.”
Hunter looked at the fourth page on the floor. “I know that too.”
“Her most visible performance is tied to that story. Correcting it takes something from her, whether she helped sell the story or not,” Eli clarified.
Hunter rubbed his thumb along the edge of the old guitar.
Serena had withdrawn from him and the campaign.
She’d also put her voice on a performance people had called career-defining.
Publicly removing the lie would expose how completely that performance had been built around a man who hadn’t wanted her.
Her part in the deception didn’t make her disposable. It didn’t give him the right to turn her private proposition into evidence or feed her to an angry audience so he could look cleaner. But the alternative was to protect a falsehood because it benefited two careers. He’d already chosen that once.
“I’ll disclose only what’s necessary to correct the leaked video,” Hunter said. “I won’t blame her for a campaign I authorized. But I can’t keep letting people believe she inspired Wendy’s song.”
Hunter recorded “Twenty Again” last. He used the arrangement he’d imagined before Billy heard the demo: one guitar, his voice, no duet answer, no radio lift in the final chorus.
The private memories remained where he’d first put them, without a spoken dedication or new details offered to strangers.
He didn’t replace Serena with another singer, and he didn’t make the solo bigger to prove the correction mattered.
The first chord brought back the old photograph and the night he’d meant to give Wendy the song.
Cheap cartons on a kitchen counter, and her pretending she didn’t know he’d steal the last dumpling.
Fifteen years reduced to the easy belief that there would always be a “later” if he missed the right moment.
His throat closed before the first verse. He finished the take with one wrong string ringing under the final chord. His hand moved toward the laptop to erase it, then he listened back. The mistake didn’t change the song; it only proved no one had polished it into something safer. He kept it.
The completed duet master with Serena would stay shelved. It had never entered commercial distribution, and it never would. Hunter’s solo would become the only official audio release of the song.
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