Chapter 86
Chapter Eighty-Six
Roderick
“What are you doing here?” Cleo’s voice slices through the static in my brain the second she finds me planted in front of Julian’s computer, hands hovering over the keyboard like I know what I’m doing.
“Looking for clues?” I offer with a shrug—casual, breezy, completely full of shit.
She stares me down. I sigh, cracking under her stare in less than a heartbeat. “Fine. If you must know, I’m checking my messages.”
She doesn’t say anything at first. Just tilts her head, arms folding across her chest like she’s storing disappointment there for safekeeping.
“You sure you’re, okay?” Her voice is soft, but the edge behind it is all too familiar. Like she already knows I’m not.
“I’m totally fine,” I lie because if I’m honest with myself, I’m bored to tears.
This trip was . . . I’m still not sure how to catalog it. Before I can think or tell her that we should head back home, she speaks.
“Then why are you lying about checking your messages?”
I scoff, letting out a laugh that’s way too forced. “You think I’m lying?”
“Yeah,” she says without hesitation. “You didn’t even pretend to look excited when I gave you the laptop after you came out of rehab.”
“There’s a difference between not being excited and being confused,” I reply, dragging a hand through my hair. “I didn’t know how to use it. I had to figure out what all the buttons did. And the mouse—who the fuck thought putting it on a little red dot was a good idea?”
She doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even crack a smile. Her arms tighten across her chest. Okay, so we’re not even entertaining my nonsense.
“The point is that once I figured it out,” I add, quieter now, “I began to like it—even enjoy it.”
She uncrosses her arms, which I assume is her way of saying, “I believe you,” and then moves on to the next thing. “Did you even try to look for any clues?” she asks, her eyes flicking toward the clean, almost sterile desk.
I glance around the room. Nothing’s out of place. Everything in Julian’s office feels curated. Sterile. Empty in a way that feels . . . wrong. Unless my brother became a relentless anal person who has to have his office white-glove clean.
“I’m sure he’s fine.” I wave a hand. “We could track his credit cards, like Eddie suggested.”
“So we’re not even going to try?” she snaps.
“Why are we panicking again?” I counter, leaning back in the chair, feigning calm I absolutely do not feel.
“So, Julian hasn’t called in a week. That’s not exactly shocking.
We all have done this once. You heard his housekeeper.
He disappears into creative wormholes all the time.
He’s not exactly a daily check-in kind of person. ”
“Rhodes says he met some girl,” she says, her voice dropping, like even the idea feels loaded. “And he’s been acting weird ever since.”
“Oh, no,” I deadpan. “He met someone. Stop the presses.”
She doesn’t laugh.
“This isn’t funny,” she says. Her tone slices through the bullshit I’m trying to keep between us. She’s unraveling—has been for hours—but she’s holding it together just enough to make me feel like shit for pretending I’m not worried too.
“He’s fine,” I tell her, but even I don’t believe it now.
Her eyes narrow. “How do you know?”
“No news is good news,” I say, but it comes out brittle and flat. It’s the kind of thing you say when trying to soothe someone with the same lie you’ve been whispering to yourself. I just want her to buy it. I want me to buy it.
She just watches me.
Julian hasn’t answered his phone. He hasn’t called. There are no letters. No weird cassette tapes were dropped off at the studio. Nothing.
And Cleo? She’s spiraling. She’s holding on by the skin of her teeth and pretending not to be.
I didn’t realize how anxious she’s been until Eddie said it during the drive over. “You ever notice how your sister doesn’t breathe when she’s stressed?” he muttered. “It’s like she forgets how.”
Seattle to San Francisco was a very long drive. Mostly because the silence was as awkward as the brief conversations we tried to have.
Barret was silent the entire way.
Eddie cracked a couple of jokes—some dumb comment about radio static being Julian’s preferred method of communication—but I caught the way his gaze kept drifting. Always back to Cleo. Studying her like she was a page of lyrics he couldn’t quite get right.
When we arrived, I reminded them that my sister is fucking off-limits.
Actually, it’s not just him who looks at her like she’s the embodiment of perfection. Nope, it’s also Barret. Fucking Barret with his broody, long-lost poet energy, and quiet awe, like she’s a melody he hasn’t quite learned how to play.
They better stay away from her, or I will break both of them if they even try to touch her. My little sister is off-limits. Also . . . I think the two of them are back together, which adds another layer of what the fuck is going on here that I never understood, and they didn’t care to explain.
“No news is bad,” Cleo says after a long pause, her voice trembling under a forced calm. She keeps her eyes on the chipped rim of her coffee mug like it holds some hidden answer. “What if something happened to him?”
I exhale through my nose and push my palms against the table, grounding myself before my frustration tips into panic. “Like I said, ask Eddie to call his guy. They can track any card activity, right?”
Her shoulders rise, tense and small. She shrugs, but it’s not nonchalant—it’s defeat dressed up as uncertainty. “Do you think he’s using again?”
Fuck, I’m not ready to go there with her. She should be talking to someone who’s less fucked up than me. Though maybe she needs to hear it from me.
“Who knows, Cleo? Our father is an addict, and our first agent made damn sure we were introduced to every fucking vice in the industry.” I scrub my face with both hands. “Booze, drugs, women . . . he made sure that we got hooked on all of them.”
I pause. Let the silence stretch. Let the truth sting.
“However,” I continue, “he’s been clean for five years.”
Cleo bites her lip, as if she’s trying to chew away the doubt. “Yeah, but . . .”
Her voice trails off into the space between us, and the silence that follows isn’t hollow—it’s saturated with years. Years of broken promises and missed holidays, forgotten birthdays, and fractured moments that should’ve meant something.
This silence carries grief in all its disguises—anger, guilt, resentment, and love bent out of shape. It’s fucked up, sure, but beneath all of that, there’s something deeper. Something raw and unfinished that still pulses between us.
“I’m sorry.”
She blinks, like she misheard me.
“For?” she asks, voice brittle.
I swallow. The lump in my throat tastes like regret. Like tour buses, backstage fights, and nights I don’t remember, but I was absent from her life.
“For all of it,” I say, quietly. “For the years I was high and drunk and unreachable. For the phone calls I didn’t answer. For every time you needed your brother, and I was too fucked up to show up. For making you feel like you had to be the responsible one when you were still just a kid.”
Her eyes go glassy, but she doesn’t look away.
“I should’ve protected you,” I continue, voice cracking under the truth of it. “Instead, I was absent and . . . made you feel like you weren’t important.”
She nods once—small, shaky.
“Thank you for not dying.” She glances toward the door. “I just don’t want to lose any of you. Not even Alfie, who keeps ignoring us.”
“He’ll come back around. We all do,” I say almost like a promise, but honestly, I’m not sure if he’ll ever speak to us again.
Sure, it seems like it’s the girlfriend’s fault. But what if he has realized that we’re terrible for his emotional sanity and he’s just trying to keep himself safe? I won’t say that out loud. Not until we know where Julian is. Then, maybe we can start becoming a family again.