Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Kit
I freeze, stare at Bernice across the table, and feel the static build in my chest. She knows what he did . . . of course, the questions come quickly.
Do you really know what the fuck that asshole did?
Do you know what it feels like to hear your song—your fucking song—on the radio with someone else’s name on it?
If you knew, why didn’t you stop it?
Does she know what it is to watch someone you once loved torch everything he touched and not even flinch?
Not even remember what the two of you were.
We were friends, and I was in love with him.
He . . . he stole from me and called me a fucking child when I caught him at a party, drunk, getting a blow job from some girl.
It’s insulting, honestly. To have her distill it down to just him, as if Roderick Wilder alone is the reason I won’t go anywhere near my father’s crumbling empire.
As if one man—albeit a man who turned my world inside out—could be the singular, defining reason behind my refusal to step into a kingdom built on favors, missed birthdays, and broken promises.
Roderick might be part of it, yes. A big part. He’s the unresolved chord in a song that still lingers in my bones. But he’s not the whole fucking story. He’s not the only scar. My father made sure of that.
“Wilder doesn’t need me,” I say, and it comes out low and tight, barely more than a whisper strangled by restraint. My pulse kicks up, a frantic tempo under my skin. “He needs a fucking miracle.”
Bernice doesn’t indulge the spiraling beneath my words. “Sometimes those are the same thing,” she dares to say.
She opens another folder, her movements smooth and surgical, like she already knows what’s coming next—like this is all part of some carefully designed choreography she’s danced through in her mind a dozen times. She slides it across the table toward me.
I don’t want to look, but I do.
Roderick’s face stares back at me in glossy black-and-white, frozen mid-expression in the last official press photo he probably bothered to sit for.
He appears older. Not exactly aged—more .
. . softened at the edges and then roughed up again.
Weathered. It’s as if he hasn’t slept in years.
As if time hasn’t just passed—it’s taken its toll and left teeth marks behind.
His jaw is more pronounced now, sculpted by years of silence turned brittle, as if the anger he’s carried calcified somewhere beneath the surface and decided to reside in his bones.
There’s no softness in his expression, no hint of the boy who once grinned with too much light behind his eyes and too little concern for the fallout.
The mane that used to tumble past his shoulders, wild and poetic, has been traded for a short, almost buzz cut.
It’s almost like he’s curating the illusion of calm, trying to convince the gatekeepers—and maybe whatever pieces of himself survived the fall—that he’s still relevant, that he’s not a relic, not a cautionary tale dressed in leather.
But it’s the eyes: God, the eyes.
They haven’t changed. They’re still that impossible green, marbled with gold.
They used to ignite when he played—truly played, not the rehearsed bullshit they expected of him later.
When he bled through chords and left everything on stage, those eyes lit up rooms, fractured nights, and drew out versions of myself that felt larger than life and more fragile than truth.
They created music in places where no sound existed. They made silence feel like anticipation. They turned glances into verses and longing into rhythm. And that’s where the real damage is. They still hold that music. They still look like something that could break me open and make it feel holy.
I remember what it felt like to love him. Not just during the hours we stole behind locked doors or in the moments he whispered lyrics against my throat like confessions—no, it was deeper than desire.
It was the pull of something ancient that might have begun before the origin of life. It was something that lived between his fingertips and my skin. He touched me as if I were a song he didn’t want to rush through, like every part of me held a note he wanted to memorize.
His kisses weren’t always sweet or gentle—they were searching, consuming. As if he were trying to crawl inside and rewrite every verse I carried from before him. And when he was inside me, it felt like more than intimacy—it was surrender, not just of body, but my heart and my soul.
Roderick Wilder didn’t just touch me—he threaded himself into the spaces I never thought I’d share. I let him all the way in. And for a while, I believed he stayed.
Even now, even after time has taken its cruel work, after I’ve rewritten myself without him and learned how to walk through days without hearing his voice in every quiet hour, I can’t look at a picture of him without something stirring beneath my ribs.
Those eyes still hold the ache of songs never finished, of nights when we missed each other because it was over. Because he ended us—destroyed us.
There’s a truth in him that’s always been wrapped in distortion, and I was foolish enough to think I could untangle it and find the melody beneath the noise.
But my body remembers.
My skin remembers.
My heart reacts the same—how it jumps whenever I remember how he looked at me like I’m a song he’s still working on.
And my soul . . . it still hums what we used to be, no matter how much I try to silence it.
Every cell in my body remembers what it felt like to disappear into the music of us, to let his hands move over me like he couldn’t believe I was real.
He touched me like I was something he’d waited a lifetime for—slow, reverent, hungry in a way that made it impossible to doubt how much he loved me.
There was nothing guarded in him back then.
Just open devotion, poured into every kiss, every breath, every way he held me close like he couldn’t get deep enough, close enough, full enough.
He touched me as if he could imprint himself onto my skin.
And I let myself believe it would always be that way.
I stop myself from remembering. I can’t let these memories crawl back into me. I can’t let him back in. Back then, I was a foolish girl who believed in love and forever needed the approval of every guy around her. Thankfully, I’m older, wiser and . . . well, I won’t let him get to me.
I snap the folder shut, harder than I mean to.
My pulse surges, knocking around in my throat, breath caught somewhere low and lodged.
If I keep looking, I’ll fall back into the stories I once wrote with trembling hands and hope that blurred every warning.
Stories that never found a clean ending.
Ones that still follow me like unresolved chords.
Bernice says nothing. Doesn’t press. She just watches me with that careful stillness people use when they’re afraid the next word might shatter someone.
Like I’m standing on the edge of an abyss, and I might lose my shit if she doesn’t let me find my footing.
One breath, then two . . . after the third one, I calmly say, “No.”
“Your father needs this,” she says at last, voice stripped of emotion but not entirely devoid of care.
“The agency’s struggling. He hasn’t signed anyone new in months, and the ones who are on board .
. . they’re not doing well. His roster’s down to barely a handful of artists. This could help him stay afloat.”
That—goddammit—that gets my attention. It’s true. Every word of it.
“Fine. I’ll look into it.” I swallow hard. “Maybe even talk to Wilder.”
I push back from the table, the chair scraping against tile like it’s protesting the decision with me.
“I’ll check on Dad,” I say, my voice flatter than I intended.
“Then I’ll call Cleo and let her know I won’t be at the record shop for the rest of the week.
We’ll work on a schedule—” The pause that follows stretches, just long enough to hear my resistance clawing at the back of my throat.
“Listen, I’ll do my best, but the piano students stay.
That part of my life doesn’t get put on hold. ”
Bernice nods without comment. She knows not to push, at least not this time.
The hallway feels longer on the way out, like the space between decisions has grown wider.
I move through it as if my body remembers the weight of every unfinished thing I left behind, even when I tried so hard to walk away clean.
It’s not just the agency. It’s the sound of my name tied to Dad’s empire.
Then there’s the invisible chords between my past and the man I’ve spent years trying not to think about.
The lobby greets me with the sterile stillness hospitals collect like dust—televisions flashing headlines no one really reads, voices lowered to whispers, grief tucked into sleeves.
In the far corner, a woman speaks into her phone, face pressed into the crook of her arm, her words garbled by a combination of tears and exhaustion.
Instead of checking on Dad, I decide to take a walk—or better yet, drive home. Allegra might be in the mood to keep me company.
Outside, the wind rises against my coat, curling under the hem, sliding across my skin in a way that reminds me I’m still exposed no matter how tightly I wrap myself. There’s no real protection against memory. No fabric thick enough to silence that kind of ghost.
My car waits where I left it. I slide behind the wheel and let my hands rest on the steering wheel, fingers curled tight—not shaking, though they threaten to.
The radio comes to life with the twist of a dial. Bach spills through the speakers in clean, elegant lines. There’s comfort in the structure, in the precision of something that doesn’t change. Yet somehow, all I hear is him.
Twelve years ago, Roderick told me I was his symphony in a world without sound. He said it like it was a fact, not a metaphor, not an attempt to impress. Just the truth he believed in, before everything cracked and he forgot what mattered—or realized he never loved me.
Now I sit in this car without any idea what day it is or what version of myself just agreed to step back into the life I left. I don’t know what to name the feeling clawing its way up my spine, what category to file this under—obligation, guilt, something closer to longing than I want to admit.
All I know is I said yes.
And somewhere out there, Roderick’s waiting. Though he doesn’t know it yet, I’m coming.