7. Tristan
— ? —
Tristan
The wedding ring is cold in my palm.
I don’t know how long I’ve been down here on the floor of this hotel suite, on my knees where I ended up when she walked out, staring at the small gold band she pressed into my hand as if it was a thing she’d found and didn’t want.
Long enough that the city outside the window has gone quiet. Long enough that my legs have gone from aching to numb and to nothing at all.
I can’t feel them. I can’t feel much of anything, which is a mercy, because the second the numbness wears off I know what’s underneath it is going to be unsurvivable.
The one thing I want to feel, I can’t anymore.
My cheek stopped stinging hours ago. I keep lifting my hand to it anyway, pressing my fingers to the place where her palm cracked across my face, willing the burn to come back, because it was the only thing she left me that felt as if it belonged to me.
After all, I deserved it, and I would give anything to still feel it, because a stinging cheek is the lightest punishment I have coming but even that has already faded.
Somewhere out there, twenty thousand people are still calling tonight the show of a lifetime while here, I am kneeling on the floor of an empty suite, holding my wife’s wedding ring, and I cannot make myself move.
Then I hear it in the hall. The click of expensive shoes on tile. Unhurried, certain, a sound I’ve heard a thousand times outside greenrooms, studios, and hotel doors. My stomach turns before the handle even moves.
The door opens without a knock.
I don’t have to look up to know who it is.
Only one person walks into rooms as if he holds the deed to them.
“I knew I’d find you here.” Ford’s voice, brisk, already working.
His shoes stop a careful distance from me.
“Jesus… What happened to you? Did you know I’ve been fielding calls for two hours straight?
Let me get you up to speed. The press is frantic, but it’s a good frantic, you’re trending in nine countries, the clip already has millions of views, and I’ve got us positioned so that whatever this was read as a bold artistic moment and not a… well.”
He clears his throat. “The point is, it is publicity. Either way, it is still publicity. We can spin this into the biggest week of your career if we move tonight.”
A dead, quiet part of me lifts its head.
“Publicity?” I hear my own voice come out low and strange. “That’s what you came here to tell me?”
“I came here to save your career, which somebody has to, because you’re clearly in no state to.
” He crouches to my eye level, that practiced sympathy sliding across his face.
“Tristan. Look at me. I know tonight got emotional. But this is a moment, and moments are fragile, and if we don’t get ahead of the narrative by morning then the tabloids write it for us, and trust me, you do not want… ”
I’m on my feet before I decide to be.
My hand closes on the front of his shirt and I shove him back into the wall hard enough to rattle the framed art beside his head. For one second, I watch the composure drop clean off his face.
“What the hell was that tonight?” My voice shakes with the effort of keeping it level, and I lose the fight halfway through.
“Why the fuck did you change the song, Ford?! Answer me! You put me up there and you switched it out from under me! That is not what we agreed! That is not what we talked about!”
He recovers fast. That’s the thing about Ford, nothing lands on him for long. His hands come up, placating, and then he laughs.
A short, careful little laugh, the kind you’d use on a spooked horse.
“Okay. Okay, you’re lashing out. I get it, it’s been a night. Let go of my shirt and let’s talk like adults…”
“Don’t.”
I tighten my grip, get in his face, and whatever he sees in mine kills the laugh in his throat.
“Don’t you dare handle me right now. I started Lilies in the Dark.
I started my wife’s song, the one I’ve been killing myself over for weeks, and halfway through, the whole track changed in my ears and my monitors, and I had a choice of standing up there frozen in front of twenty thousand people or catching up to whatever you’d cued instead.
You did that. So look me in the eye and tell me why! ”
For a moment he just breathes, pinned. Then his eyes go flat and businesslike, and he tells me, because Ford has never once in his life understood that some truths shouldn’t be said out loud.
“It’s all because you wanted to postpone the tour.”
He says it as if it should be obvious.
“You spent all of that day in my ear about needing time, time for her, clearing the calendar, pushing the dates… Fine. But you don’t just postpone a tour off without giving another thing to keep people’s interest, or the whole album loses its window.
First Light was the biggest song in the country this week.
Playing it live was the trade. That’s what kept your precious postponement alive. ”
He straightens his collar where I’ve rumpled it, and I stand there staring at him, my pulse climbing, my hands still half-curled from his shirt.
The anger builds low and slow in my gut, banking hotter with every easy, reasonable word out of his mouth, because he isn’t even sorry. He doesn’t even understand that he should be.
To Ford, this is just arithmetic. A song for a tour, my wife for a window. And he’s standing here waiting for me to thank him.
“Alright, that’s enough. Off.” He plants a hand flat on my chest and pushes, firm, forcing a step of space between us, then rolls his shoulders back and straightens to his full height.
He tugs his lapels back into line and brushes a hand down the front of his coat, smoothing away the wrinkles I put there, and when he looks up again his patience has thinned.
“You want to put your hands on me, fine. Get it out of your system. But you’re going to stand there and hear the rest of it like a professional.
” His stare pins me, cool and unimpressed.
“Which, by the way, you’re welcome for. And speaking of the album, you walked off before the announcement went out, so now I’ve got to figure out how to cover the… ”
“Stop.” The word comes out of me cracked. “Stop… Just stop talking. I don’t fucking care anymore. Everything is ruined, Ford.”
“Nothing is ruined, that’s what I’m…”
“My wife left me tonight.” I step back because I don’t trust my hands. “She walked out, and you’re standing here in the wreckage of it asking me about the album rollout.”
Even as I say it, even as the rage is pouring out of me at him, some cold honest voice underneath it all reminds me that the last inch of it was mine. The track changed, yes. But nobody put my hands on the strings.
I could have stopped. I could have set the guitar down and walked off that stage and let it all burn but I didn’t. Because some coward part of me chose the smoother path in the moment, and that part is mine to answer for.
Ford lit the fuse but I’m the one who kept playing.
Still, it doesn’t make me any less furious with him.
“I’m done.” The words settle a weight in my chest even as they leave it. “I mean it. I’m not doing this anymore. I’m finished and I don’t want any of it if this is what it costs.”
That, finally, gets a strong reaction.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Ford is now the one raising his voice, the calm gone.
“You’re at the top, Tristan! The absolute peak!
Men spend their whole lives clawing for what you have right now and you want to throw it in the trash because of one bad night?
! Especially now, at this exact moment, you cannot walk away! ”
I go very still.
“What do you mean, especially now?”
Ford hears the change in my voice. A smarter man might have stopped there. But he squares his shoulders and lays it out.
“I mean the situation is, frankly, workable. Better than workable.”
He spreads his hands and meets my eyes.
“There’s a real appetite out there, Tristan.
A big chunk of your audience never loved the married thing, they want the fantasy, they want the guy who wrote First Light, single and searching.
The split practically writes itself. We lean into the first-love story, we let people run with the Hallie of it all, we boost both your names together for a season…
And nobody’s asking you to date anyone, just…
let the narrative breathe. Give the people what they’re already begging for. ”
Ford, the sick bastard, actually smiles, warming to it.
“If handled right, this isn’t the end of anything. This is the biggest rebrand of your life. You’d be number one for years!”
The room goes silent except for the blood roaring in my ears.
I stare at this man I’ve handed a decade of my life to, and I feel the last of whatever loyalty I had left curdle into disgust.
“I can’t believe you.” My voice is quiet now, and quiet is worse than the shouting. “I can’t believe I’m standing here listening to this. This is what it cost me, Ford. My marriage. The only good thing I ever built that wasn’t for sale, and you’re already carving it up for parts.”
“I’m just doing my job…”
“I said, I don’t want it.” I take a step toward him, and to his credit he finally has the sense to look afraid. “Any of it. Whatever you’re offering, I don’t want it, I’m not doing it, and I’m going to say this one time so you hear me.”
My voice drops until it’s barely there, and I watch him go pale.
“Leave my wife out of this. If you ever, ever meddle in my marriage again, if I catch her name anywhere near one of your strategies, you will not be dealing with my label or my lawyers. You’ll be dealing with me. Are we clear?”
He doesn’t answer and he doesn’t have to. It’s written all over his bloodless face.
I grab my jacket off the chair, my phone, my keys, and I head for the door.