3. Hugo
— ? —
Hugo
I watch my wife walk away from me, and I don’t follow.
I tell myself it’s because Derek is still standing in my foyer with his phone buzzing and his face pale, waiting for me to fix a situation I didn’t create. I tell myself it’s because someone needs to handle this, and Lucille needs space, and chasing after her right now would only make things worse.
I tell myself a lot of things.
The truth is simpler and uglier: I don’t know what I would say if I caught up with her.
I don’t know how to explain that I just surrendered without her permission, that I folded under pressure the way I always fold, that the man who promised her last night that he wanted to try is the same man who just proved he doesn’t know how.
So I let her go. I stand in my kitchen and listen to her footsteps on the stairs, the soft click of the bedroom door, the silence that follows.
Then I turn to Derek.
“Get out.”
He blinks. “Hugo, we need to discuss the timeline…”
“I said get out.” My voice is steady, which surprises me. Inside, I’m anything but. “You’ve delivered your message. The label wins. Congratulations. Now leave my house before I say words we’ll both regret.”
Derek opens his mouth, thinks better of it, and nods.
“I’ll send over the details tomorrow,” he says, already backing toward the door. “Recording starts Monday. The label wants…”
“I don’t care what the label wants.” I’m moving toward him now, and whatever is on my face must be frightening because he actually flinches. “I’ll show up. I’ll sing the song. But don’t you dare come into my home again and tell me what I have to sacrifice for your bottom line.”
“It’s your bottom line too, Hugo.”
“Is it?” My laugh is hollow. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like everyone profits from this except me.”
Derek leaves without another word. I lock the door behind him and stand in the empty foyer, listening to the silence of my own house, and I wonder when exactly my life stopped belonging to me.
I don’t go upstairs.
Instead, I pour myself a whiskey and sit at the kitchen counter, staring at nothing while the ice melts and the minutes crawl by. The house is too quiet. I can feel Lucille’s absence like a physical weight, pressing down on my chest.
This is my fault. All of it.
Not the leak. I didn’t do that. Not the label’s ultimatum. I didn’t ask for that either. But the reason it hurts her, the reason she walked away from me like I’d driven a knife between her ribs… that’s on me. That’s two years of neglect coming home to roost.
I think about the night I agreed to marry her.
My father had laid out the proposition over dinner at the club, the way he laid out all his propositions, clinical, strategic, as if he were discussing a merger rather than my future.
The Adlers were old money looking to cement their position in new industries.
The Kensingtons were new money looking for the legitimacy that came with heritage.
A marriage between their daughter and their son would benefit everyone.
“She’s lovely,” my mother had said, showing me a photograph. “I’ve met her at charity functions. She’s quiet, but there’s depth in her eyes.”
“She’s suitable,” my father had countered, which was his version of a compliment.
I’d looked at the photograph, a woman with dark hair and careful posture and eyes that gave nothing away, and I’d felt nothing.
No attraction, no repulsion, no curiosity.
Just the familiar distance that had always been my default, the quiet certainty that nothing was ever worth the risk of reaching for it.
Ginny had been the closest I ever came to trying, and even that had only lasted a semester before I understood I wasn’t built for it.
“Fine,” I’d said, and my mother’s face had fallen slightly at my lack of enthusiasm. “If it’s what the family needs.”
“It’s what you need,” she’d insisted. “You’re a grown man and you’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than a few months. You work constantly, you never let anyone in, and I worry about you, Hugo. I worry that you’ve decided loneliness is safer than vulnerability.”
She wasn’t wrong. I had decided that a long time ago, and Ginny hadn’t caused it so much as confirmed it.
We’d been good together in a studio and nowhere else, and by the time I found out she’d been with my roommate, I’d already known for weeks that I didn’t love her. It stung my pride more than my heart.
Mostly it just proved the thing I already believed, that letting someone close was a lot of exposure for very little return.
But I couldn’t say that to my mother.
So I said yes to the marriage instead.
I said yes because I didn’t care.
Because nothing had ever mattered enough to fight for, and I figured a practical arrangement was better than the alternative, a lifetime of surface connections and careful distance and women who wanted my name or my money or my access but never actually me.
At least with Lucille, the transaction was honest.
What I didn’t expect was for her to move into my house and start existing in my peripheral vision.
I noticed her the first week, the way she arranged her things in the guest room instead of the master bedroom, giving me space I hadn’t asked for.
I noticed her the second week, when I came downstairs at 2 a.m. for water and found her in the kitchen, stress-baking cookies for a friend’s birthday, flour in her hair and an apology on her lips for making noise.
“You don’t have to apologize,” I’d said, and she’d looked at me like I’d spoken in a foreign language.
I noticed the way she laughed with Alice on the phone, unselfconscious and bright, so different from the careful composure she wore around me.
I noticed her off-key humming while she worked on her sketches, little fragments of songs I couldn’t quite place.
I noticed the way she moved through our house like a guest who’d overstayed her welcome, always making herself smaller, always apologizing for existing.
And I noticed, though it took me longer to connect the dots, that my clothes started fitting better than they ever had.
I’m not a careless man. I know my measurements.
I know when a jacket sits wrong or a hem drags or a cuff needs adjusting.
But suddenly, everything was perfect. Every seam sat exactly where it should.
Every button fell at the right point. I mentioned it to my tailor once, asked if he’d changed his techniques, and he’d looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“I haven’t touched those pieces in months,” he’d said. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”
I never chased the answer. It didn’t seem worth the thought, so I let it go the way I let go of everything that didn’t fit on a setlist or a schedule.
That was the shape of us. She gave, quietly, in ways I was too far away to notice, and I took it without once wondering where any of it came from.
I never once looked hard enough to see her at all.
I drain my whiskey and pour another.
The thing about cages is that sometimes you build them yourself, bar by bar, and you don’t realize you’re trapped until the door closes behind you. I built mine out of distance and work and the careful maintenance of walls that kept everyone at arm’s length.
I told myself it was protection. I told myself I was being smart, being cautious, learning from past mistakes.
But Lucille isn’t Ginny. Lucille has never once asked me for anything except my presence, and I couldn’t even give her that.
She deserves better than me.
She probably knows it too.
***
The label meeting is at 9 a.m. the next morning, in a glass-walled conference room that smells like expensive coffee and desperation.
I arrive early because I couldn’t sleep anyway, and I sit at the long table while executives file in one by one, each of them wearing the same carefully neutral expression. Derek takes the seat beside me, his notepad already covered in talking points I don’t care about.
“Alright,” says the head of A&R, settling into his chair at the head of the table. “Let’s talk about the opportunity.”
“Let’s talk about the ambush,” I counter. “You announced the duet without my consent. You know that’s a violation of my approval rights.”
“Your approval rights cover your solo releases.” His smile is thin. “This is a collaborative project. Different terms apply.”
“Convenient interpretation.”
“Accurate interpretation.” He slides a folder across the table. “The legal team reviewed everything before we moved forward. You’re contractually obligated to participate in promotional opportunities that significantly benefit both parties. This qualifies.”
I open the folder and scan the documents inside, contracts, schedules, marketing plans. The scope of what they’re proposing makes my stomach turn.
“A music video,” I read aloud. “Shot on location in Nashville. Concept: ‘recreating moments from Hugo and Ginny’s relationship for an emotional visual narrative.’” I look up. “You want me to film a fake romance with my ex-girlfriend.”
“We want you to tell a story,” he says smoothly. “The same way you tell stories with all your music. This one just happens to be collaborative.”
“And the press tour?”
“Standard promotional cycle. Talk shows, podcasts, a few print interviews. The focus will be on the creative reunion, the magic of rediscovering a lost partnership.”
“The magic.” I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “You want me to pretend I’m in love with someone I haven’t spoken to in seven years while my actual wife watches from the sidelines. That’s your definition of magic?”
His expression doesn’t change.
“Your wife isn’t part of the narrative,” he says. “She doesn’t need to be involved.”
“She’s my wife.”