3. Tristan
— ? —
Tristan
I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been in this chair.
The same eight bars, over and over, until they stop sounding like music and start sounding like a ringing in my ears. I pluck the phrase again.
Wrong. My pencil drags across the page, scratching out the line, writing it over, scratching it out again, until the sheet in front of me is more graphite smudge than words.
You are the quiet after all my noise?? storm??the light I walked toward in the
Scratched out. Both of them. The words are almost right, which is the worst place a song can live, close enough to taste and nowhere near finished.
My voice gave out hours ago. My fingers gave out before that. I drive into the next chord anyway, drag my hand down hard across the strings, and the low E bites back, catching the callus and tearing it raw.
“Fuck.” I shake the hand out, and there it is, a thin smear of blood already worked into the pickguard, not the first this week.
Digging the tin of band-aids out of the case pocket, the tin I go through faster than strings these days, I wrap the finger without really looking at it. It’s the third one tonight. With a flex of the hand, a test of the fret, and then I go back to it.
There’s no leaving until I hand something in.
That was the condition waiting for me tonight, half-buried in a rundown of schedule changes I only caught the edges of, one more track locked before the concert or the whole show slips. The set has to be finished. The album has to be finished.
The Forum is getting closer and every hour I’m not producing is an hour the preparation falls behind, so the deal is simple: no finished song, no going home.
It isn’t that I couldn’t walk out. I could. But everybody in this building knows I won’t hand over anything I’m not happy with, that I’ll bleed on the pickguard before I turn in a song that isn’t right, and they’ve built the whole timeline around that fact.
The worst part is I meant to be home hours ago. I texted Lily a vague nothing, told her a work thing came up, promised myself I’d wrap in an hour. That was a long time ago now.
Leaning back, I let the chair spin a slow half-circle, my eyes tracing the ceiling tiles while the line refuses to come, willing it to land faster so I can be done, so I can get in the car, so I can go home to my wife before the sun beats me there again.
Because I canceled on her tonight. Again.
The guilt of it sits low in me, souring everything, and there’s no mystery about what I’ll find when I finally walk through that door. Probably nothing. Dark rooms and her side of the bed, already warm because she gave up waiting hours ago.
Stopping the chair with my heel, I reach for my phone.
The screen lights up on a photo of Lily.
I took it myself, months ago, on a slow Sunday when she had no idea I was looking. She’s caught mid-laugh, head tipped back, hair a mess with no makeup. Just sunlight all over her face and her nose scrunched up at a thing I’ve long since forgotten.
It’s blurry, off-center. Her eyes are half-shut.
And it’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, because it’s the real her.
My Liliana. My muse. My wife.
The world gets the magazine version of my wife, the careful red-carpet smile. This crooked, laughing, unguarded one belongs to me alone.
God, I miss that smile.
I miss her.
My thumb drifts over her face on the glass, tracing the shape of it, and my chest aches in a way no chord I’ve written tonight has managed to touch.
“Just a few more days,” I murmur to the photo, to the empty room, to nobody. “Hang on for me a few more days.”
She has no idea that every stolen hour, every canceled dinner, every night I’ve left her rattling around that penthouse alone has gone into this, a record with her fingerprints on every track.
Twelve songs. All her. It drops right after the concert, my anniversary gift dressed up as an album, the biggest apology I know how to make.
Although there’s one problem, and it’s the reason I’m still bleeding on a guitar at this hour instead of curled around my wife. The main track, the one the whole thing is supposed to hang on, never sat right.
It’s good. But good isn’t enough, not for this, not for her. So I scrapped it and started chasing a better one, I still have no title or full lyrics and it has to be finished before I walk out on that stage. It has to be perfect.
Lily deserves perfect, after everything I’ve put her through to make it.
I set the photo where I can see her face and pick the guitar back up, ruined finger and all.
That’s when the phone goes off.
Not once. It detonates, buzzing itself sideways across the console, notification stacking on notification until her laughing face disappears under a wall of them. Names I know and numbers I don’t, the screen lighting up over and over in my hand.
And before I can read a single word of it, before I can make sense of any of it, the studio door bangs open behind me.
“There he is! The man of the hour!” Ford sweeps into the studio, phone in one hand, the other thrown wide, his suit still crisp at an hour when mine’s been slept in. “Do you have any idea what’s happening right now? You’re trending, Tristan! The timing could not be more perfect!”
I blink up at him, my brain still half inside the song. “What are you talking about?”
“The buzz. The heat. Two weeks out and you hand me this?” He’s grinning, practically vibrating, scrolling something on his phone as he crosses the room.
“This is the kind of organic momentum I could not manufacture if you gave me ten million dollars and a year to do it. I have to ask, though, and I’m a little hurt about it, why in all our years did you never once tell me you were sitting on a song like that? ”
“Like what?” Nothing he’s saying is landing. “Ford, what song?”
He stops. Looks at me as if I’m being slow on purpose. “First Light.”
The name drops into the room, and for a second it means nothing at all.
First Light. It’s not on the album. It’s not anything I’ve touched in years.
It takes a beat, and then another, before the memory surfaces from somewhere far down and cold, a scratchy demo, a kid’s voice, a song I wrote at nineteen and shoved into a drawer with all the other things I’d rather not look at.
I haven’t thought about it in so long I’d half-forgotten it existed at all.
It clicks into place slowly, then all at once, the reason that song exists, the lonely kid I was when I wrote it a lifetime ago, reaching for a girl who was never real, and worse, so much worse, the fact that the entire world has spent the night listening to it.
Somewhere far off, Ford is still talking.
The words swim up in pieces through the noise in my skull, ride the wave, the fans want it live, think of the numbers.
He’s building toward a pitch, a plan, his hands moving.
I catch maybe half of it and none of it matters, because a single thought has burned through everything else and left it ash.
Lily.
Lily is at home right now. Lily, who most likely cooked me dinner and waited for a man who texted her a coward’s excuse and never came. Lily, who is going to open her phone, if she hasn’t already, and find this.
“I have to go.” My voice comes out wrong, hollow.
“Tristan…” Ford turns, catching the shift in me. “We are in the middle of something here. This is a short window, we cannot afford to sit on this, if you would just listen to the strategy for one, single, minute…”
But my chair’s already scraping back, and I’m up on my feet, patting the console for my keys, my phone, snatching both before he can put a hand on my arm.
“Tristan, where are you going? We have to get ahead of this before the morning cycle!”
“My wife,” I say, and I don’t wait for the rest of whatever he wants from me.
His voice follows me out into the hall and I let the door cut it off behind me.
The city blurs past the windows and I drive too fast, one hand on the wheel, the other white-knuckled around my phone at every red light.
Our thread is exactly where I left it. My message from last night, the cowardly little excuse, and under it, nothing. She never wrote back. Not a word, not even the reflexive okay she always sends to let me off the hook.
That empty space under my text scares me more than a screen full of screaming would.
Against every ounce of judgment I have, I open the app.
It takes about four seconds to wish I hadn’t.
The song is everywhere, and so is she, tagged in it, dragged into it, her name sitting in the mouths of strangers who have decided they know my marriage better than I do. The cruel ones surface fastest, the way they always do.
My grip tightens until the case groans in my hand, and I throw the phone into the passenger seat before I can read another word as I press my foot down harder.
Hang on, I think, the whole way home. Please, just, hang on.
***
The penthouse is dark when I let myself in.
No lamps, no music, just the gray beginning of dawn leaking through the windows and the smell of candles that burned all the way down.
My eyes adjust in pieces.
The dining table, still set for two. A dinner gone cold and untouched. And on the floor near the couch, glass, water spreading dark across the hardwood, and lilies, white ones, scattered and bent among the shards.
Her flower. The beautiful table, wrecked.
Then I see her.
Lily is curled on the couch, half under a throw blanket, and it takes my eyes a moment to place what she’s wearing.
The dress, the one I bought her. The one I surprised her with on some ordinary afternoon and told her she had to keep, because that’s what I do now, isn’t it?
I buy her beautiful things. I fill her closet and her jewelry box on the rare afternoons the schedule sets me loose, and I hand them over as receipts, proof of a love I keep failing to show up for in person.
She wore it tonight. For me.
For a dinner I promised her and skipped.
God, I fucking screwed up again.