Xander
TWENTY
Ihaven’t written a song in three years.
There have been fragments. Half lines. Chord progressions I never finished. Melodies that showed up at two in the morning and were gone by daylight because I refused to chase them.
I told myself I was done with that part of my life. That I’d said what I needed to say already. That building this place, this label, this studio, was enough.
It was easier to believe that before Willow.
Now everything feels too close to the surface.
I’m in Studio B alone, door shut, lights low. The rest of the house is quiet for once, or silent enough that it doesn’t reach me in here. There’s a guitar across my lap, my notebook open on the table beside me, pen uncapped, coffee gone cold an hour ago.
I haven’t touched it.
I’m staring at the same page I’ve been filling and crossing out for the last forty minutes, and the thing that should concern me is how fast it’s happening.
The thing that actually concerns me is that it doesn’t feel forced.
Something broke open.
The bottle game should’ve been stupid.
It was stupid. A reckless idea from Julian with too much charm and not enough self-preservation, and I should’ve shut it down the second he said it out loud. Gabe should’ve helped me. Instead, he made it worse by being reasonable about it, which is somehow more dangerous than Julian being obvious.
And Willow…
Christ.
Willow sat in the middle of all of it looking because she knew exactly how insane it was and stayed anyway.
My fingers tighten around the neck of the guitar. I force them loose.
That isn’t where this song starts.
That isn’t what it’s about, not really, even if it’s the thing that cracked the door open.
I pluck the progression again. Lower this time. Slower.
There.
That’s closer.
The sound in here is clean in a way live rooms never are. Honest. No crowd swallowing the edges. No roomful of people turning a note into something bigger than it is. Just the strings, the wood, the shape of the thing as it exists before anyone gets hold of it and starts naming it.
I used to love this part, before the machine got involved. Before every song became a strategy, a schedule, a release date and a press cycle and a conversation about marketability. Before Josiah died and every sound after him felt wrong.
I press my palm over the strings to kill the vibration.
The silence after hits harder than the note did.
Josiah.
Even now, all this time later, his name still lands with an impact.
Most people talk about grief as if it’s soft and makes you reflective and sad in a way other people can tolerate. That isn’t what it did to me.
It made me violent inside my own skin.
It made every room feel too small. Every conversation too stupid. It made music a body I couldn’t look at without remembering what it had cost me.
He wasn’t supposed to die.
Simple sentence. Useless one.
Nobody is supposed to die when they’re twenty-nine and drunk on adrenaline and talent and convinced they’ve got another decade before consequence catches up.
Nobody is supposed to walk out of a venue angry and not come back.
Nobody is supposed to become the phone call that splits a life into before and after.
I reach for the pen.
Write one line.
Cross it out.
Write another.
I still hear your laugh in the feedback.
No.
Too clean, too aware of itself. I slash through it and try again.
You left your blood in the backbeat.
I stop.
That stays.
The chord under it comes faster now. The next line with it.
I count the wreckage by the songs we never finished.
That stays, too.
I sit back, guitar balanced against my thigh, pen tapping once against the notebook. Then again.
My fingers start moving before I think about it. Progression first. Then melody. Then the words finding the shape they want because my body remembers how to do this even if the rest of me has spent years pretending it doesn’t.
I sing the first verse quietly.
My voice catches on the second line, because it’s there, still there, after all this time, buried under boardrooms and contracts and silence and the kind of self-control that calcifies if you leave it long enough.
I start again, this time louder.
The room gives it back to me.
I can feel where the song wants to go. Not toward him, exactly.
Not only. Toward everything that happened after.
The wreckage that didn’t look bad from the outside.
The fiancée who stopped trying to understand me before I even realized I’d stopped trying to let her.
Dylan stepping into the space I abandoned and blowing the rest of it apart.
The betrayal never hit cleanly because it came at the wrong time.
If Josiah hadn’t died, maybe I would’ve gone after Dylan with both hands and no hesitation. Maybe I would’ve broken his face and forced us to drag the truth into the light right there where it belonged.
Instead, I was too hollow to do anything except absorb it. Let it rot in me. Let it become proof of every suspicion I already had about people leaving when things stopped being easy.
That part’s harder to write.
I know exactly how it felt to walk into a room and realize my brother had taken the thing I’d been too broken to hold onto. I know what it did to me to see pity in other people’s eyes afterward. My humiliation was somehow secondary to my grief and that should’ve made it better.
It didn’t.
It just made me meaner.
I drag a hand over my mouth and stare at the page, then I write anyway.
You took my silence as an open door.
That line sits there for a long second.
I hate it.
I leave it.
The chorus comes next, rougher than the verse, less elegant, which is right. Choruses shouldn’t explain. They should wound cleanly enough people recognize themselves in it before they know why.
I play it through once.
Twice.
On the third pass I’m not thinking anymore. I’m standing now, guitar strap digging into my shoulder, voice stronger, the notebook forgotten on the table because the song’s out in front of me and I’m chasing it with both hands.
The sound tears out of me harder than I expect.
I can hear the old band in the shape of it, in the bones. In the way the rhythm wants to kick harder than the lyrics. In the way the melody drags against the words because they don’t want to go the same direction. That was always where the good stuff lived for us.
Josiah drove everything forward. I held it back just enough to make it hurt.
My throat goes rough by the bridge.
Good.
It should.
The bridge is where the truth is, anyway.
The thing I’ve spent years refusing to say because saying it would mean I hadn’t moved on nearly as well as I pretend.
I close my eyes and sing it out into the empty room.
I left the stage before the fire went out.
I let the ghosts wear all the names.
I built a house from wires and locked doors.
Still wake up hearing you in the rain.
That last line lands so hard I stop.
The strings ring out once and fade.
My breathing sounds too loud in the room.
I stand there with the guitar hanging off me and the aftershock of it moving through my chest, ugly and undeniable.
That line isn’t just about Josiah.
It’s about Dylan, too. About all the years I’ve spent hearing him in every unfinished argument and every news story I pretended not to read and every song someone else wrote trying to sound half as honest as we used to be.
It’s about the way I left the stage and then kept building performance into everything else.
A compound. A label. A life with enough gates around it to feel safe.
And now Willow walks into it in worn jeans and sarcasm and looks at all of it because she can see exactly where the walls are.
I set the guitar down carefully.
Then I sit.
Then I don’t.
The stool feels wrong under me. I’ve got too much adrenaline in my blood to stay still without breaking something.
I pace across the studio. Back again.
My fingers drum against my thigh.
There’s more in the song. I know there is. Another verse, maybe. Or something after the chorus that names the part of me I don’t let near anybody. The part Willow seems to drag into the light without even meaning to.
Because she does.
That’s what she’s done from the beginning.
She spills coffee on my jacket, tells me I’m unbearable, runs out on a date I couldn’t stop thinking about, then ends up in the lake, naked and laughing, because she doesn’t know she’s every bad decision I’ve wanted to make all at once.
And somewhere in between all that, I’ve started writing again.
I stare at the notebook.
I close it.
If I stay in here, I’m going to keep going until I’ve gutted the whole thing open, and I’m not sure I can take that tonight.
I need air.
I need something ordinary. Noise that isn’t music. People who don’t know what’s in my head.
By the time I’m out the side door and onto the drive, the afternoon has shifted toward evening.
The light over Redemption Falls has gone softer, gold cutting around the trees and the old stone walls.
The town sits just beyond the hill as it always has, stubborn and unimpressed by the scale of what we’ve built out here.
That’s part of what I enjoy about it.
The town doesn’t care how much money I have.
It cares whether I’m useful, whether I’m a problem, whether I buy produce and make eye contact and say thank you as my mother taught me before she started turning every human interaction into leverage.
Redemption Square’s busy by the time I get there.
The farmers’ market has spread itself across the center of town in rows of tents and folding tables and crates full of produce that looks too good to be real.
Tomatoes stacked. Bunches of herbs. Honey jars catching the sun. Fresh bread, flowers, local cheese, homemade jam. People moving in loose currents around the fountain and the gazebo, stopping to talk, to compare, to gossip.
That last part more than anything.
This town runs on produce and information in equal measure.
I shove my hands into my pockets and keep walking.