Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Roderick
It’s well past two in the morning, and I still haven’t fallen asleep. I’m lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, illuminated only by the artificial glow of my laptop screen, rereading our conversation—for the third time. Maybe the fourth. Definitely the fifth. I’ve lost count.
I should close the damn thing, shut the lid, let the hard drive hum into silence, and pretend I still have a handle on this. Do something that resembles self-preservation.
I just keep reading. Line after line, like a man tracing the blueprint of a dream he knows will end badly. Her words breathe with me. They settle beneath my skin, pulse inside my throat, curl around the edge of my skin.
Each sentence sinks in as if she’s in the room, daring me to feel something I’ve worked too hard to numb.
This . . . this is fucking dangerous.
Even with everything I still feel for Kit—undeniable, unforgiven, unhealed love—this woman I don’t even know is slipping in through the cracks.
She isn’t a breeze. She’s a storm surge. Not sunlight—no. There’s nothing soft about her. She’s a wildfire in a silk dress. She strikes the match, holds it close to my chest, and watches it burn through me until I glow with something that looks like life.
I said it before, this stranger makes me feel alive in the best and worst way possible.
It doesn’t make sense—how she got here. How she got in.
All I think and say sounds . . . like an oxymoron. How fire becomes light and life—but it’s the most honest thing I’ve felt in months—maybe years. Right now, I’ll take anything that reminds me I exist. Even pain. Even something that singes and stings instead of soothes.
Julian came to check on me and said I’m two bottles of tequila away from going back to rehab.
I didn’t argue. My older brother would prefer if I were dead—I took his rightful place when I showed more talent at two than him at five.
Yes, it’s ridiculous that my father would react that way, but that’s what makes Caleb Wilder one of the worst fathers in the world.
Connor Dempsey called a couple of days ago, acting like a savior, pitching a plan that seemed more like a transaction than redemption.
“I’ll get you a career. You bring me new clients.”
Translation: I’ll prop you up like a showroom model, and we’ll both pretend you’re not broken—or that my business is about to close.
I didn’t ask if Kit would be involved.
I didn’t need to . . . because I already know. He’ll coerce her to do it.
And that? That’s the ticking time bomb I’ve been sidestepping every fucking day. She’s still friends with Cleo. Lives in Seattle . . . what are the odds I can keep avoiding her for longer?
But if I see her . . . if she’s in the room—if I hear her voice, smell her shampoo, or catch her eyes narrowing the way they used to when I tuned a guitar flat on purpose just to piss her off—I don’t know if I’ll make it.
Not if she looks through me like I don’t matter.
Not if she smiles at me like I’m a stranger—a business transaction.
Not if she doesn’t look at all.
It’ll destroy me to see how much she hates me—or doesn’t even care for me at all. I don’t know which would be worse. They say the opposite of love is indifference, and if I learn she stopped, I doubt I’ll survive.
Dad left me a message the other day. He said I either let him help me or quit while I’m ahead. Like he knows what ahead even means anymore. It’s always easy for him to say shit like that from the comfort of a legend’s pedestal.
His band collapsed, sure, but he managed to crawl out of the wreckage with a solo career that made him untouchable. Caleb Wilder—icon, frontman, myth. He didn’t just survive the fall. He rewrote the fucking narrative and made the world applaud for it.
Me? I’m hanging on a fucking cliff, waiting for something to happen. Either for strength so I can climb back up or for the fall that will decimate me.
I read the chat again, which apparently is all I have going for me—the messages we exchange.
Her list reads like a threat written in lowercase. Like a love letter addressed to a funeral pyre. There’s something about the way she frames pain—like it’s art, but not art for display.
Art you bleed into and bury.
Art you write in invisible ink and dare someone to see.
It seems like she knows how to weaponize lyrics. How to hold up a mirror and make it look like a knife. She writes as if she’s daring me to see myself and not look away.
And, fuck, I can’t.
Somehow, it feels as if she already knows me even though I’ve never said my name.
We’re not talking about the public version.
She seems to have discovered the version I buried beneath the spotlight and soundcheck.
The one who flinched every time someone called me a musical genius, like it was a compliment, not a curse.
She knows the version of me who used silence as armor. The one who played louder just to drown out the panic. The one who learned how to disappear behind distortion because vulnerability was too fucking loud.
She doesn’t know my name, but somehow, it feels like she’s got her hands on my pulse.
I lean back against the wall and stare at the ceiling like it might crack open and hand me something—an answer, a punishment, a fucking sign.
Anything. The room hums with the low buzz of the lamp in the corner, the only light I can stomach this late.
It throws a soft glow, thick and forgiving, like it knows better than to demand anything from me.
My guitar rests against the wall, angled just right, like it’s tired of waiting for me to pick it up again. I haven’t touched it in hours. It’s there, patient and silent, holding the kind of stillness that feels like judgment.
I can’t reach for it. Not when my hands are still carrying her voice.
She said, “You mourn the version of yourself that believed love was enough.”
That line won’t leave me the fuck alone. It’s lodged deep in me—unyielding, relentless—scraping across every nerve as if it’s trying to hollow me out from the inside.
I want to drown it in whiskey. Swallow it until the words lose shape, until her voice bends into static, and I can finally forget how it made me feel. But that’s what the fucking rehab was about, wasn’t it? Keep your nose clean. Keep your cabinets bare. Keep your head down and your demons leashed.
How the fuck am I supposed to live in a world without the one thing I used for years to calm the fire that starts in my chest and works its way down? I used to be able to take the edge off. Now the edge just keeps cutting.
This—this restraint—it’s the closest thing I’ve had to discipline in months.
I’m clinging to it like it might save me, even though part of me knows it won’t.
I’m terrified that if the lines start to blur again, if I give in and let everything bleed, I’ll write something too honest. I’ll say too much.
I’ll pull the thread on a feeling I’ve barely kept stitched together.