Chapter Twenty-Eight
Colin had made it down the stairs twice in three days, and both times he’d done it without Diwa’s arm around his waist.
The first time, he’d appeared in the kitchen doorway at half seven in the morning while Lysander was making tea, wearing a dressing gown that swallowed him and a pair of Diwa’s socks pulled up to mid-calf.
He’d stood there gripping the doorframe with both hands, breathing as though he’d just summited Kilimanjaro.
“I did the stairs,” Colin announced.
“I can see that, Daddy.”
“On my own, Sander. No help.”
Diwa, who had been shadowing him from three steps behind the entire way down, appeared on the landing with Tala against his shoulder and said nothing.
The second time, Colin made it all the way to the garden.
Lysander watched from the kitchen window as Diwa settled him into the wicker chair on the patio with a blanket over his knees and Tala in the Moses basket beside him, close enough that Colin’s hand could rest on the basket’s rim.
Diwa brought out a pot of rooibos, two mugs, and the iPad already open to the Hamleys website.
Colin was still thin, still prone to headaches that sent him back to his darkened bedroom by mid-afternoon.
He still couldn’t reliably hold a full mug without his wrist trembling under the weight of it.
But the colour in his face had shifted from grey to merely pale, and when he talked about the welcome dinner, he spoke with authority.
Lysander had left them to it and retreated to the basement to bury himself in his work.
Diwa’s studio was quieter than the rest of the house.
Three floors and a thick carpet separated it from Tala’s lungs, and the acoustic panels absorbed everything else.
Down here, the world contracted to the glow of three monitors, the hum of hard drives, and the silence of a room built specifically to capture human voices.
Lysander sat in the leather chair with his laptop balanced on his knee and his mobile face-down on the desk. If he could see the screen he’d check it, and if he checked it he’d open WhatsApp, and he’d lose any hope of getting work done that night.
Hamish and Cassian were landing at Heathrow tomorrow evening.
He hadn’t seen Hamish in weeks. The FaceTime calls and the voice notes had kept the shape of them alive, but he missed Hamish’s hand on the back of his neck, and falling asleep against him.
He had to focus on the podcast. He’d emailed Meredith a rough recording of what would be the first episode four days ago.
Seven minutes and thirty-two seconds of Lysander talking about the worst thing that had ever happened to him in a voice that only cracked twice, and yesterday she’d sent a Google invite for a meeting to discuss.
Lysander joined the video call, and Meredith’s face filled the centre monitor. She had dark skin, cropped silver hair, and wore chunky tortoiseshell frames. Behind her, a wall of vinyl records was arranged in a gradient from white sleeves to black.
“Hi Mer! How’s it going?” Lysander searched her face for any hint of what was coming, but her expression gave him absolutely nothing. Lysander’s knee bounced beneath the desk.
Meredith tilted her head so that her chandelier earrings smacked against her cheeks. “You can stop looking at me like you’re facing the firing squad. Your recording wasn’t a complete disaster.”
Lysander’s hands unclenched.
“You’ve got an interesting story to tell,” Meredith continued.
“And enough of a personality to carry it, which isn’t a given.
I’ve worked with plenty of people who have extraordinary lives and no idea how to talk about it all.
They sound like they’re reading their own Wikipedia entry.
” She leaned back. “You don’t have that problem.
I’d want to sit next to you at a dinner party, which is the only metric that actually matters in audio. ”
Lysander thrilled at the compliment even though it was delivered with the same brisk matter-of-factness she’d use to tell him his gain levels were off.
“Right,” Meredith said, and his stomach tightened again.
“Here’s the hard bit. What you’ve recorded is a one-hander.
You, talking to a microphone, telling your story.
And that’s fine. There’s a version of this show that works exactly like that.
But it’s not the version that’s going to cut through.
You’re competing with every other confessional podcast hosted by someone who’s been through something terrible, and there are a lot of them, Lysander.
The market is saturated with people who’ve been wronged, sitting in their home studios, narrating the injustice into a Blue Yeti. ”
“I’ve got a Neumann,” Lysander said.
“You could have a Neumann dipped in gold and it wouldn’t matter if you’re just another talking head.
” Meredith’s glasses caught the light as she tilted forward.
“Your hook isn’t your story. Your story is the foundation, but the hook is getting the other side into the room.
That’s where the tension lives. That’s what makes someone choose your podcast over the thousands of others on the charts. ”
Lysander’s thumb found the edge of the desk and pressed into it. He knew where this was going.
“Do you know what Dane’s up to these days?” Meredith asked.
Lysander’s shoulders tensed. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what Dane’s up to. He’s got a new boyfriend. Nineteen. Not a male omega, just a regular kid. They’re still making content together. Their subscriber count’s nowhere near as big as ours was, but they’re not hurting for money.”
Meredith watched him through the screen. “Do you think you could stomach sitting across a table from him?” she asked.
He tried to picture it. Dane in the leather chair, four inches from the pop filter, those long legs stretched out the way they always were, taking up more than his rightful share of the space.
In the early days with him, Lysander had been taken in completely by his easy grin and carefully styled sweep of blond hair, and hadn’t cared about the mansprawling, because he’d thought it Dane’s due.
The thing about Dane was that Lysander hadn’t understood how bad things were while he was with him.
He’d known it wasn’t good. You didn’t need a psychology degree to clock that your boyfriend arranging a queue of alphas to fuck you through a full heat while he stood by the door keeping count didn’t exactly make for a good relationship.
But knowing something was wrong and being able to understand why were different skills, and Lysander had only acquired the second one after Hamish.
“Lysander.”
At the sound of his name he looked at the monitor. Could he hold his nerve while Dane did what Dane always did: went on a charm offensive and reframed the narrative to make everything sound like just a bit of fun between consenting adults?
“Let me think about it,” Lysander said.
Meredith nodded once. “Take your time. But not too much of it,” she said.
“For what it’s worth, the podcast is in good shape even without him.
You’ve got a setup that most indie producers would saw off a limb for.
Dane isn’t the difference between a good show and a bad one.
” She paused. “He’s the difference between a good show and a number one. That’s all I’m saying.”
“What would you do,” Lysander asked, “if you were me?”
Meredith looked at him for a long moment. Then she smiled, lifted one hand in a wave, and ended the call.
The monitor went dark. Lysander sat in the silence of Diwa’s studio, the acoustic panels absorbing every sound except his own heartbeat.