13. Geo
— ? —
Geo
It takes me three days to open the audio file.
But the silence of it gets me. No subject line, no plea, no explanation. He sent it and then he left me alone with it, and that’s the first restraint he’s shown in a year.
Val is at school. The apartment is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sounds of traffic from the street below. I have a session at the studio in two hours, but right now there’s nothing pressing, nothing to distract me from the decision I’ve been avoiding.
I click the file.
The song begins with a voice note, old and crackling with the static of a recording made years ago on inferior equipment. I recognize my own voice before I recognize the melody, younger, lighter, laughing at something I can’t remember.
“No, wait, hold on, let me try it again. The chorus should go…”
And then I’m singing. Just a fragment, four bars of a melody I don’t remember writing, my voice layered with a joy I hadn’t yet lost.
Harrison’s voice comes in over the voice note. Raw. Unproduced. Nothing like the polished performances I’ve heard on the radio for the past decade. This is just him, just his voice and a piano, singing lyrics that feel like they’re being ripped directly from his chest.
I built a house of gold and gave away the key
I let them call you nothing while you were everything to me
I heard you drowning and I looked the other way
I traded all your silence for the noise of yesterday
My hand is shaking. I didn’t realize it was shaking until I see the cursor trembling on the screen, until I feel the moisture on my cheeks and understand that I’m crying.
The song continues. Every verse is a confession. The statement, she makes me feel like I’m drowning, is there, turned inside out, weaponized against him instead of me. The silence. The erasure. All of it, laid bare in melody and metaphor.
I forgot the voice that used to sing me home
I forgot the hands that kept me from the cold
I forgot the woman in the gold dress by my side
I forgot to love you, and I don’t know why
At the bridge, another voice note surfaces: Val’s laugh, high and bright, from back when she still believed we could fix anything. I press my hand to my mouth and try to breathe through the swell of grief that threatens to knock me sideways.
Harrison’s voice cracks on the final verse. He’s crying in the recording. I can hear it, the way his breath catches, the thickness in his throat. He doesn’t try to hide it. He doesn’t try to smooth over the rough edges or make himself sound better than he is.
The song ends the way it began: with my voice, younger, laughing, singing a melody that belongs to a version of me I’m not sure exists anymore.
Then silence.
I play it again.
And again.
I play it until I know every word, every break in his voice, every moment where his guilt bleeds through the production like a wound that won’t stop bleeding.
The third time through, I notice details I missed before. The way the harmonies open up at the word forgot, creating a space that feels empty, unfinished. The way the arrangement leaves room for another voice, my voice, to fill in the gaps.
He wrote this for me. Not about me. For me. A space I’m meant to occupy.
I play it a fourth time, then a fifth, then I lose count. The afternoon sun shifts across my apartment, casting long shadows on the floor, and I barely notice. I’m inside the song now, inside the architecture of regret Harrison has built, and I can’t find my way out.
My phone buzzes with a reminder: Studio session in 30 minutes.
I silence it.
I play the song again.
At some point, I realize I’m singing along. My voice threads through Harrison’s, filling in the empty spaces, harmonizing on the lines that need it. The song changes when I sing with it. It becomes whole.
I think about the Grammy speech. The whole world that heard him apologize. I remember how angry I was, how furious that he gave the world his confession before he gave it to me.
But this isn’t a public performance. This is private. This is a song he sent to me and only me, with no message attached, no demands, no expectations. Just the music. Just the truth.
I pick up my phone.
I stare at the blank message screen, watching the cursor blink, trying to find words for a feeling too big for language.
In the end, I type two words:
It’s true.
I hit send before I can talk myself out of it.
Then I close my laptop and sit in the silence of my apartment and try to figure out what happens next.