Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Roderick
This isn’t how I expected my conversation with her to go—not even close.
I thought it would be like usual. Top whatever songs exchanged. Something that would give me some inspiration. Which I need badly because I can’t seem to be able to play more than a couple of notes on my guitar. Lyrics? Forget it. I suck at them too.
Yet here I am, staring at a screen, heart thrumming in my throat, completely thrown off course by an email exchange that wasn’t supposed to matter but cracked something open I hadn’t touched in years.
What started as casual turned into a confession meant to be a distraction, and became something close to a reckoning.
I’m talking about Kit, of all people. Remembering things I’ve spent years trying to suppress, things I locked in boxes and buried beneath songs, soundchecks, and the blur of faceless girls I fucked and can’t remember because I was drunk, high, or both.
I don’t even think this is a good conversation for me to have, like seriously. Why am I doing this to myself?
I scroll up, my eyes catching on the lines that knocked the wind out of me the first time I read them. Words I haven’t been able to shake since they appeared like a dare on my screen.
I wonder if she was your sky.
If you still watch her shine from the distance and tell yourself that you’re okay with being the darkness behind it.
I wonder how long a love like that remains buried beneath your skin—woven into your breath, settled in your bones, refusing to let go no matter how far you run.
Does it live in your soul not as pain, but as a song that hums beneath everything you do, even when you swear you’ve moved on?
The longer I look at them, the deeper they cut, like reading a song someone else wrote about my life, except they got every lyric exactly right and every pause lined up with the beats of my regrets.
She lives in my soul, even though it hurts. Pain I never dealt with because I self-medicated with booze, drugs, and sex.
I’ve spent years building walls around this—around her—pretending the silence between us was mutual, necessary, and safer.
But those lines? They blew right through the barricade. They stripped everything away until there was nothing left but the truth I’ve been choking on for years.
Kit Dempsey wasn’t just my sky. She was my sun—blinding, scorching, too much and never enough—and my moon, always there even when I couldn’t see her, tugging at me in ways I didn’t understand until she was already gone.
She was gravity and noise and all the quiet between.
Kit was the inhale before every note and the exhale after the last chord. She embodied every rhythm I couldn’t explain, every silence that felt too loud when she entered a room. She was the pulse that shaped every song I ever wrote, even when I didn’t mean for it to happen.
Kit was the only person who ever looked at me and saw more than I was expected to be, more than the prodigy, the project, or the boy with the perfect posture and the thousand-yard stare.
She saw me, and somehow, without saying much, she made it clear that she understood everything I couldn’t find the words to say.
It was always like that with her. A closeness that defied explanation, a connection that felt like it had existed long before either of us were born. She’s younger than me, but we grew up so close that it never felt like there was space between us—not really.
Our lives orbited each other before we even understood what that meant, and by the time we figured it out, it was already too late to untangle anything. Kit was always there, just a room away, a piano bench away, a breath away. And from the beginning, she was electric. Brilliant.
She was unreachable in that beautiful, maddening way that makes you want to chase someone just to keep breathing.
Her mother, Ethel Price, was the catalyst. She embodied everything my father wanted in a teacher—classically trained, deeply respected in every circle that mattered to him, with the kind of résumé that made him believe she could mold me into something extraordinary.
But more than that, she was someone he could keep close, someone he thought he could control.
What he didn’t realize was that Ethel couldn’t be controlled.
She had her own rhythm, her way of moving through the world—equal parts grace and grit, with a spine built on patience and an eye that missed nothing.
He trusted her in a way he rarely trusted anyone, which meant I was handed over to her like some precious instrument he expected her to fine-tune and send back ready for the spotlight.
But Ethel didn’t just train me. She took me in.
She listened when I didn’t know how to speak, watched me like she memorized every version of who I might become.
She was nurturing but never coddled me. She stripped me down to my nerves and rebuilt me—note by note, breath by breath—not to impress my father, but because she believed I was worth the effort.
She taught with her hands and her heart.
Her corrections were firm but never cruel.
She saw music in me before I did. She gave me discipline, yes, but she also gave me permission—to feel, to question, to become.
And Kit?
Kit was always nearby, just close enough to brush against, always half a room away, curled around the piano bench like she’d been born into it.
She’d be practicing her pieces in the next room, humming through transitions, correcting my posture with a smirk and a lifted brow like she already knew everything I didn’t.
She was smaller than me, younger by a year and some change, but she never played like it.
She matched me, competed with me, challenged me—beat for beat, breath for breath—without ever trying to.
We were both prodigies, two kids wound too tight by adults who needed us to be perfect. But where I was rigid and burning out, Kit moved like music was stitched into her blood—fluid, effortless, fucking radiant. Sometimes, I hated her for that ease. But I mostly worshipped her for it too.
Now I’m wondering if the only reason my father tolerated Connor Dempsey was because he needed Ethel.
She was part of the plan to shape me into .
. . I don’t even know exactly what my father expected from me.
But when she died, the plan collapsed, and my parents, who had never been particularly involved in my emotional well-being, barely noticed.
They didn’t ask where I went every day after school—or the weekends. They didn’t care that I was disappearing. Which worked out, because I didn’t want to be found. All I wanted was to be near Kit.
I started spending all my time at her house.
In her room. In the quiet places where grief and companionship hung in the air, and neither of us knew how to speak about it.
I’d sit beside her on the floor, my back against her dresser, listening to her breathe through her tears.
I’d hold her when she couldn’t hold herself together—as if I could somehow keep all her sorrow from spilling out.
Sometimes—when it got too quiet, when the grief started to fill the walls, when it became something neither of us knew how to handle—I’d reach for my guitar and let my fingers do what my mouth couldn’t.
I’d play something to remind us we were still here, still breathing, still tethered to something bigger than the ache sitting between us.
Music became our language, and silence became our home. We didn’t talk about Ethel much. We didn’t talk about anything, really. We existed inside it, breathing the same air, orbiting the same grief, trying to survive it without admitting we were drowning.
I was thirteen and loved her with an intensity I didn’t have language for yet.
Not just in the innocent way kids are supposed to care for each other.
No, it was deeper than that. It had roots.
It curled beneath my skin and settled in my bloodstream.
My love for her pulsed behind my ribs. It was overwhelming, consuming, and utterly without logic.
It was soul-deep and restless. It felt like we had been stitched together long before we were born—soulmates who hadn’t yet learned the language for what they were, who didn’t know how to carry what they felt or what it would one day become.
She became the center of my orbit without even trying.
Just by existing. By breathing beside me.
By letting me see her when she broke. And I never once asked her to move.
I didn’t want distance. I didn’t want detachment, maturity, or whatever the hell adults think kids should want at thirteen.
I wanted proximity. I wanted her laugh when it cracked through her tears.
I wanted to carry her grief just so I could feel useful. I wanted to protect her.
And maybe that’s what made it so hard. No one else was there to help us with our grief and loss.
It was just the two of us, bruised and grieving, trying to pretend we were strong enough to hold our own pain and each other without cracking wide open.
I lost Ethel, but my parents were also in the middle of their first separation.
I was beginning to learn what being left behind really meant.
Suddenly, I became acutely aware that I could lose it all. That realization—that at any moment, without warning, everything could disappear—stuck with me. Branded itself into me.
I was too aware of how fragile everything was—how easy it would be to lose it all, even Kit.
And that fucked with my head more than anything else.
Because she wasn’t just someone I loved.
She was my person. The one thing I needed more than the music, more than the fame I had never asked for, and more than any version of myself the world wanted to mold me into.
We didn’t fall in love the way people write about it.
We grew into it, let it unfold around us like a song we didn’t realize we were creating together until the melody started sinking into our skin.
It was intense—consuming. It was touches that lingered too long, kisses that left us breathless, nights that felt like forever.
It was intense and everything anyone could want, but I didn’t have the tools to protect it. I didn’t know how to shield us from what came next—from the pressure, from the noise, from the expectations that demanded I become someone else entirely.
They—my agent and my manager—didn’t want who I was.
They wanted the version of me that looked good on stage.
The image. The fantasy. The rockstar with the smirk, the abs, and the voice that could seduce stadiums. The heartthrob who played broken just enough to be interesting.
They wanted someone who could have anyone—who would have anyone—and of course, someone like that couldn’t hold onto his everything.
That guy? That guy always loses the one thing that matters. And I pretended to play the part . . . until pretending blurred into becoming. I became the one person she never wanted me to be, and she hated me for it.
I lost her.
But even after she rejected me—more like after I fucked it all up—I knew that no matter how far I drifted, no matter who I touched or fucked or tried to feel something with, there was no version of my life where Kit wasn’t the gravity I needed to return to.
Even now, after the silence, after the distance, and after the choices that carved years between us . . . she’s still in me.
Threaded through every note I play, stitched into the lyrics I try to write and never finish.
She’s the ache behind every song I haven’t released.
The woman I taste in the quiet hours before sleep.
When the world stills and there’s no one left to distract me, she’s there—pressed against the backs of my eyelids, mouth parted, eyes filled with all the things we never said.
She appears in flashes, in gaps, in the slide of her name through my mind like a lyric I’ll never forget.
Sometimes she’s smiling, other times she’s crying.
Most nights, she’s staring at me with that look: the one that made me feel like she saw every fractured part of me and still fucking wanted it.
Using her as an excuse for my addiction? Yeah . . . that’s the part I can’t forgive myself for. It’s shitty. Selfish. And fucked up beyond reason. But back then, numbing myself was the only way I knew how to survive without tearing my skin off. She was gone. I was hollow.
The silence that followed her absence was unbearable. So, I filled it with whatever I could find. Substances. Noise. Women I didn’t care about. Nights I can’t remember.
And now . . .
Now I’m here, sober and raw, trying to relearn how to be a human without a crutch. No filters. No haze. Just skin, memory, and regret. Just me—stone cold—and all the shit I buried rising back up like it never left. Like she never left. Like I never fucking let her go.
How am I supposed to survive that?
How am I supposed to wake up every day, put one foot in front of the other, write songs, and sit in studios, pretending like I’m okay when even now—after everything—she’s still in me? Still pressed into my bloodstream.
Still tangled in my nerves.
Still fucking there, like she never once let go.
And the worst part?
I don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t know how to carry it without burning.
I don’t know how to live with her ghost and still call it living.
Which is why I don’t respond to the email.
I shut the computer, pressing the lid down as if it might prevent everything from spilling over.
This . . . this is the edge.
I should call my sponsor. I should go to therapy. I should do anything except sit in this ache and let it turn into something reckless.
Because the craving is already curling in my gut, dragging me toward two equally destructive options—search for a dealer or try to find Kit.
Either one would wreck me.
And I’m not sure which one I want more.