10. Tristan
— ? —
Tristan
I hit post before I can talk myself out of it.
It’s short. No PR polish, no team of people workshopping every syllable, just me and a phone and the truth, which is more than that machine ever let me put out under my own name. I read it one last time before it goes.
Tristan Everett ?@TristanEverettOfficial
Effective immediately, I’m parting ways with my label. I’m also stepping back from music, and the industry around it, for the foreseeable future. I’m grateful to everyone who ever listened. But some things matter more than a career, and it’s long past time I acted like I knew that.
Then it’s live, and my thumb is already moving to close the app before the reactions can start, because I don’t need to see them. I know what they’ll be.
Shock, speculation, a thousand hot takes about what it means and who it’s about and whether the rumors are true.
The number climbs in the corner of the screen faster than I can watch, comments stacking up by the hundreds, and I lock the phone and set it face-down on the counter and let the world lose its mind without me.
I meant every word, sitting here in the wreckage of the life I built.
I spent years clawing toward the top of an industry I thought I loved, and it took watching that industry reach into the most important night of my marriage and rip it apart in front of twenty thousand people to finally see it clearly.
They didn’t just cost me a song. They handed me a loaded weapon and pointed it at my wife and told me to pull the trigger or lose everything, and I did it and I will never stop paying for that.
But I’m done being their instrument. I’m done letting that label decide what my life is worth.
It isn’t that I’ve stopped loving music.
I don’t think I could if I tried, it’s stitched too deep into me, the same way it was when I was a broke kid with a secondhand guitar and no plan and no permission.
But there’s a difference between music and the machine that grew up around it, and right now I can’t stand to be anywhere near the machine.
Maybe that changes someday. Maybe it doesn’t. I genuinely don’t care enough to plan it out, because there’s only one thing I want now, and she isn’t on a stage.
Liliana is somewhere across this city in a guest room that isn’t hers, learning how to live without me.
And I am going to spend whatever’s left of my life earning my way back.
However, the pounding on my door starts before I’ve even finished the thought.
I know who it is before I open it.
There’s only one person who knocks like the door personally owes him money.
“Tristan!” Ford’s voice, muffled through the wood, pitched up into a register I’ve heard him use on exactly no one, because Ford doesn’t panic, Ford makes other people panic. “Tristan, open this door. I know you’re in there, I can see the lights. Open up, we need to talk, right now.”
I pull it open, and he’s standing there red-faced with his tie loosened and his phone still in his hand, my announcement no doubt burning a hole in the screen.
He moves to step inside like he’s done a thousand times, and I plant myself in the doorway and don’t budge, and he pulls up short with a look of genuine surprise.
“You’re not coming in,” I say.
“Have you lost your mind?!” He waves the phone at me.
“Do you have any idea what you just did?! You detonated your entire career in a four-sentence post, no warning, no strategy, no soft landing, I’ve had six calls in the last ten minutes and every single one of them was someone asking me if you’ve had a breakdown… ”
“Why did I do it,” I say flatly. “That’s what you came here to ask?”
“Yes! Because it’s insane! Because there were a dozen ways to walk this back and reposition and you chose the one that torches everything, and I need to understand what is going through your head so I can start doing damage control before this becomes…”
“I’m going to stop you.” I keep my voice even, almost gentle, which seems to unsettle him more than shouting would.
“Because you’re operating under a misunderstanding, and I want to clear it up.
You don’t have a say in this anymore, Ford.
Not in the label, not in the strategy, not in any of it. There’s nothing to control.”
“Of course I have a say, I’m your…”
“You’re fired.”
The word lands in the hallway and just hangs there. Ford’s mouth opens, then closes. For a second the practiced spin drains right out of his face, and what’s underneath is small and stunned.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
“Tristan.” He laughs, but it comes out wrong, thin at the edges.
“You can’t fire me. You don’t fire the person who built you.
I made you. I found a kid singing in a bar for tips and I turned him into the biggest name in the country, and this…
all of this, the sold-out arenas, the wife you’re so torn up about, none of it happens without me. You cannot fire me.”
“Watch me.”
He stares at me, and I watch him recalculate, watch the businessman come back online behind his eyes, and when he speaks again his voice has gone quiet and almost pitying.
“You’re making a mistake, and you’re making it emotional, which is the worst way to make one.”
He straightens his tie, buying himself a second.
“You think walking away fixes anything? You think she takes you back because you fell on your sword for her online? Come on. I know how this ends better than you do, because I’ve been three steps ahead of this whole thing since before you knew there was a thing to be ahead of.
There are pieces already in motion you don’t even see.
So do yourself a favor and don’t burn the one person who can still steer this. ”
The way he says it snags at me, some off note I don’t have the room to examine right now, buried under everything else.
“Leave,” I say. “Now. Or I call security and we let them decide how you exit the building.”
“Tristan…”
“You have ten seconds.”
He holds my eyes for a long moment, and whatever he sees in mine finally convinces him, because the pleading shutters closed and the cold professional slides back over it like a mask.
“You’ll regret this,” he says. “Both of us know you will.”
“Maybe.” I put my hand on the door. “But it’ll be my regret, and I’d rather have a hundred of my own than one more of yours.”
And I shut the door in his face.
The silence after the door closes is the loudest thing in the apartment.
I stand there with my hand still flat against the wood, listening to Ford’s footsteps recede down the hall, and then there’s nothing, just me and the enormous quiet of a penthouse that used to have a life in it.
I turn around and lean my back against the door and look at the place I built, and it looks back at me like a stranger.
My guitar is propped in its stand by the window, the old Martin, the one that’s been with me since before any of this.
I’ve barely touched it since that night. I can’t look at it too long without hearing those first chords, the ones I started at the Forum, the ones that were supposed to be for her, and feeling the exact moment the whole thing went wrong under my hands.
So I look away. I let my eyes move across the room instead, the couch where she used to fold her legs up and read, the kitchen where she used to hum, all the small ordinary spaces she used to fill.
And they land on the lilies.
They’re on the console table by the entryway, white and just starting to open, fresh as anything.
A standing order, delivered every week without fail for two years, because early on I set it up so my wife would always have them, her flower, the one that made me think of her before I even had the words for why.
They kept coming. Even after she left, even with no one here to see them, the flowers just kept arriving on schedule like nothing in the world had changed, like there was still a marriage in this apartment for them to belong to.
And right there beside the vase, squared neatly on the table where I dropped them, are the divorce papers.
The two things sit side by side.
Her flower and the end of us. And the sight of them together, the lilies I bought to say I love you and the document that says she’s done, cracks me straight down the middle.
My hand closes around the stems before I know I’m reaching for them, and I grip them too hard, and one of them bends and bruises in my fist, and I hate it.
I hate all of it, I hate that I let it come to this.
I sent her flowers every week for two years and couldn’t manage to send myself home for dinner.
What a thing to finally understand now, standing in the ruins of it.
My phone buzzes against the counter.
I almost don’t answer. But I glance at the screen, and the name on it stops me, and I pick up before I can decide not to.
“Mom.”
“Tristan Everett.” My mother’s voice comes down the line warm and worried and unmistakably hers, and just the sound of it puts an ache in my throat I wasn’t ready for.
“You want to tell me why my son is the top story on every channel I turn to, and not one of those channels heard it from him first?”
“You saw the announcement.”
“The whole country saw the announcement, sweetheart. It’s a little hard to miss.”
A pause, and when she speaks again the teasing has softened into a careful gentleness.
“Leaving your label, I understand. I never did trust those people. But stepping away from music, Tristan? That’s your whole life.
That’s the thing you fought your family and the whole world to go chase.
I need to know you’re alright. I need to know my boy isn’t throwing away his dream in the middle of the worst week of his life. ”
I close my eyes and lean against the counter, and at this moment, I let myself be honest with someone who knew me before any of this existed.
“I’m not throwing away my dream, Mom. I think I finally figured out what it actually was.”
My voice comes out rough.
“I got it wrong. For years I got it completely wrong. I thought the dream was the music and the stages and everyone knowing my name, and I chased it so hard I stopped seeing what was right in front of me. And then I lost her. I stood on the biggest stage of my life and I lost the only thing that ever actually mattered, and I didn’t even feel it happening until she was gone. ”
“Oh, Tristan…”
“I still love the music. I always will, you know that, it’s in my blood, and maybe someday I go back to it in some form. But I don’t need the rest of it. The industry, the machine, the name. I thought I did. I don’t.”
I look at the bruised lily still clenched in my hand.
“My dream isn’t a sold-out show anymore, Mom. It’s her. It’s Lily. And I let everything else crowd her out until she stopped believing she was the point. So the music can wait. Everything can wait. She’s the thing I’m chasing now.”
There’s a long silence on the line.
When my mother speaks again, her voice has gone unsteady. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear you sound like that.”
“Like what?”
“Sure.” I can hear the smile in it, wet at the edges.
“You sound sure. The way you sounded the day you told your father and me you weren’t going to take the safe road, that you were going to go make music instead, and God help anyone who tried to stop you.
I was terrified for you that day. But I have never in my life seen a person so certain of anything. ”
She exhales. “That’s how you sound right now. And it’s about a girl instead of a guitar, which frankly I like a great deal better.”
A laugh scrapes out of me, surprised and raw. “You always did like her more than you like me.”
“Considerably more. She’s lovely and you’re difficult.
” But the warmth underneath it is unmistakable, and then she gathers herself, and I brace, because I know my mother, and the comfort is always followed by the truth.
“Now listen to me, because I’m only going to say this once.
You can’t cry your way back to that girl, Tristan.
You can’t apologize her into forgiving you, and you certainly can’t promise your way there. ”
“I know.”
“I’m not finished.” Gentle, but firm. “Self-pity won’t fix this.
Grand words won’t fix this. The only thing that has ever fixed anything is showing up, over and over, on the days it’s easy and the days it isn’t, and letting the person watch you do it until they believe it’s real.
So you stop feeling sorry for yourself. You get up off whatever floor you’re lying on, and you go be the man you should have been all along, and you show her. Do you understand me?”
I look around the too-quiet apartment, at the guitar and the papers and the flowers, at the ruins of everything I let slip through my hands.
And right now, I don’t feel like I’m drowning in it anymore. I feel as if I have somewhere to swim.
“Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”
“Good.” Her voice softens one last time. “Then go get her back, my love. I’m rooting for you. I always have been, even when you make it hard.” A beat. “Call your mother when it’s done. One way or the other.”
“I will. I promise.”
“Showing, Tristan. Not promising.”
“Right.” I huff a laugh. “Sorry. I’ll show you.”
She hangs up, and I stand there for a moment with the phone warm in my hand and my mother’s words settling into my chest like ballast, and then I straighten up. I wipe my face with the heel of my hand. I set the phone down.
Enough grieving in the dark. Enough lying in the wreckage feeling sorry for what I broke.
Because every hour I spend on this floor is an hour I let her believe she was right to give up on me.
I look down at the flowers still in my hand, the whole crushed bunch of them, and I pull one free. A single white lily, unbruised, perfect. Her flower.
As I turn it slowly between my fingers, a feeling that isn’t quite hope but is standing right next to it rises up in my chest.
Time to win my wife back.