76-Zach
I’ve been staying with Steve since I left LA.
We’ve grown closer than ever; even made the trip up to Milwaukee to have last Thanksgiving with Simone and Keisha. He’s been gracious with my healing, giving me as much space and time as I need to sort out my life and figure out my next move.
The final chapter came with selling Dad’s house.
It’s taken longer than I expected, not because of logistics, but because I wasn’t ready to let go.
I grew up in that house, hid in its corners and survived in the shadows.
Steve took care of everything; all that’s left is for me to walk through the rooms one last time and say goodbye to the willow tree.
My chest hollows.
I’ve been sober for months. Stable in a way I haven’t been in years. Happy, even. But knowing what I need to do today itches at my addiction.
The car radio crackles as I channel surf.
“…festival has always been a place of community in London.” Judas’s voice drifts through the speakers. “It was truly an honor to headline. It felt right, like coming home in a way.”
He scrapes through my ears and lands in my chest.
Judas continues, explaining the narrative of his upcoming album taking a turn, how the lore behind the man will deepen, why he’s opening himself to more interviews. Even speaking about the UK’s political issues, something that has been met with tons of resistance.
But despite that, Somnium walked away with one of the highest achievable awards in music, reaching their largest sales to date. Talks of a stadium tour are already happening.
I swallow, fingers thrumming the steering wheel. Steve and I talked about whether I’m ready to see him again. I told him I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter because he’s an ocean away.
Growing. Changing. Stepping into himself. I’m doing the same.
The radio host shifts topics. “And of course, we here at DYWTYLM Rock-46 can’t stop talking about the documentary that’s been making waves everywhere. Zachary Blake, the woman behind the camera, clearly brilliant, has created something truly special hasn’t she? How was it working with her—”
“This was a collective effort by hundreds of talented people, set designers, costumers, lighting techs, camera operators.” Judas’s distorted accent comes through, clipped and piercing. “To give credit to one singular aspect is diminishing the work of so many.”
I turn the volume down, my cheeks warming.
As I drive up, the house looks different. Two white contractor vans, and a flatbed loaded with lumber crowd the driveway. A cement mixer’s parked crooked near the mailbox.
Sawhorses stand like skeletons in the grass; two-by-four planks balanced across them. Orange cones mark off patches of lawn where the earth’s been torn up, soil piled in uneven mounds. The porch railing’s gone, the posts raw and exposed, and the siding hangs half-peeled like the house is shedding.
For a moment, I genuinely wonder if I’ve driven to the wrong place.
I pull into the driveway and turn the car off, the engine ticking. I sit there for a beat, hands still on the wheel, staring at what’s left of the house I grew up in.
A burly man in a neon-yellow vest walks out the front door carrying a toolbox. Another pushes a wheelbarrow toward the backyard. A third man unloads more wood from the back of the truck.
I step out slowly, gravel crunching under my boots. The country air is filled with sawdust. Tire tracks carve deep grooves through the yard, leading toward the back of the house. Fresh, heavy ones. My heart kicks hard against my ribs.
The willow.
The workers keep moving in and out, carrying boards, shouting measurements, slamming doors. I follow the tracks, but I can’t see past the giant digger parked next to the house.
I take a step toward the backyard, toward the willow. Turning the corner, everything goes still.
Someone’s kneeling beneath it; shoulders hunched, head bowed as if in prayer, their golden strands catching the mid-morning shine. My sight narrows to a pinpoint, construction noise fading into a dull whine. The only thing that exists sits below the one place that still feels like mine.
The wind rustles the willow branches like they recognize my presence. Kit rises slowly, brushing dirt from his hands on the back of his white sweats. As if he can sense me, he turns. For a heartbeat, I’m convinced I’ve conjured him.
Our eyes meet across the yard, and I freeze. My heart stutters, then thuds so hard it feels like it might bruise my ribs from the inside. Kit takes a step towards me.
“Hi,” I say, my voice just loud enough to carry across the space.
“Hi,” he echoes, soft and careful, like the word might break between us.
We inch closer, slow and unsure, like approaching a wild animal that might bolt. The silence is thick enough to choke on. A dozen questions claw at my throat, but none of them make it out.
Does he hate me for leaving the way I did?
Kit swallows, the movement tight. I take a half-step closer.
“Zach…” he says, my name breaking in the middle as his breath catches.
I shake my head, blinking hard. The air between us hums, charged and fragile.
I step closer until we’re only a dozen feet apart.
Kit’s eyes shine as his face softens, the tension in his shoulders easing.
My feet pound the earth, overgrown grass brushing my ankles.
Soil and leaves fill my lungs with each gulp.
We collide with enough force to knock the breath from both of us.
Kit’s arms wrap around me, holding me together as I sob into his shirt. It hits me all at once; cedar and cinnamon, clean laundry, cigarettes, and a hint of musky cologne I remember from months ago. His heartbeat races against my cheek, steady and grounding.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for leaving like that,” I finally manage, voice thick as I speak into his sweater. “But I-I didn’t want us to ruin each other.”
“I know.” He pulls back, eyes shining as he cradles my face. “It’s all right, love. We needed space.”
My breath catches, sharp as January air. “So, you don’t blame me for leaving?”
The wind stills. Even the birds seem to pause their chirping.
“Never.” His brows pull together, something like hurt flickering across his face.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper, our foreheads pressed.
“I heard there’s a non-profit music festival happening this weekend.” Kit looks down at me, a small smirk tugging at his lips as he shrugs. “Thought I’d check it out.”
The strands that used to fall into his eyes no matter how many times he shoved them back are cut short, sides cropped close to his head. Like he’s been living instead of just performing, his skin’s sun-kissed, warm. The dark circles that used to haunt him are gone.
His face is fuller, healthier, like he’s finally sleeping and eating; breathing in a way he never could when everything was collapsing around us.
“Besides,” he continues, tucking a sweat-drenched curl behind my ear, “I don’t know if you know this, but I’m a big rockstar now. I’ve got loads of money, and I started looking into investment properties for—”
“You didn’t.”
I step back, nearly tripping on myself. The idea of him spending that kind of money on this place knocks the air from my lungs. He wipes the tears from my cheeks with his thumbs. My skin tingles beneath the familiar gentle touch, memory and present colliding.
“Can I show you something?”
I nod, and he leads me toward the construction area, where a man in a hard hat stands reviewing blueprints on a plastic foldout table. I blink. Beside him stands Steve, sipping away from the mug I filled with coffee earlier.
“Oh, so this is where you rushed off to so quickly this morning?” I ask, and he smirks coyly. “How long have you known?”
Steve shrugs, sharing a look of mischief with Kit. “Who do you think gave him the idea?”
“The idea for what?” I laugh, shakily and deep, glancing between the two men. “I don’t understand why you’d buy this raggedy house.”
Kit shakes his head. “I didn’t buy the house, love. I bought the land.”
The construction guy steps forward, offering me the blueprints.
“Go on.” Kit gestures. “Have a gander.”
I unfold the paper, and a colored-pencil sketch fills the first page.
My hands shake so hard the page rustles.
It’s a beautiful cottage, with white stone, viridian shudders, dark wood beams, a wraparound porch, and a loft window overlooking the willow tree.
Flipping through, there are plans for two gardens, one flower and one vegetable.
The studio loft has a reading nook, and the kitchen has a farmhouse sink.
“It’s yours,” Kit says. I freeze, nearly crumpling the papers, but he continues, “Happy birthday.”
“I—my birthday was in June,” I stammer, my brain processing the images in front of me while my heart tries to keep up.
“Well, I mean I had to do something special to make up for it,” he counters, drawing circles on my hands with his thumbs as I clutch the papers.
“You’ve talked about wanting to stay in the area.
That leaving this place was the hardest part because you can find a new home with a willow tree, but it wasn’t this willow tree. ”
He’s right; I even looked into uprooting the tree and moving it to Steve’s property, but it would’ve killed it. I couldn’t do that. Not to the tree. Not to myself.
My throat tightens, panic and desire tangling.
“Kit, I can’t…I can’t accept this.” I gaze up at him, my breath hitching. “It’s too much.”
He swallows, throat working around something he can’t quite say. His gaze flicks to my hands, then my face, before darting away, like looking at me too long might undo him.
“Do you want it?”
His hand lifts as if he’s going to touch me. It hesitates mid-air, fingers curling in on themselves before he lets the gesture fall. Fragile hope flickers in his eyes, undoing me.
“Of course I do,” I whisper, though my voice barely makes it past the tightness in my throat. Inked lines blur, swimming across the blueprint as it trembles in my hands. “It’s my dream.”
He exhales, and it brushes across my skin like an exotic tropical breeze. “Then it’s priceless.”
“So,” I say with a shaky breath, “if the land is my present, does that mean you want your money back?”
“Love,” he murmurs, grasping the vial at my neck, “for all I care, you can burn it. I got all I want right here.”
I look up at him, and the hollow life carved into me over years of loss, noise and survival finally feels ready to fill.
“Well,” I say, setting the blueprint back on the table, “I know of a pretty cool non-profit music festival that could use an anonymous donation.”
Like clouds parting after a storm to reveal a rare-sighted rainbow, his lips spread then split into a beaming, toothy grin. “For the music, then.”
Because it was always the music.
It found us long before we found each other. From grief to joy; through the bloody, shameful parts we never talk about. Even if two people never meet; through music they can share a wound—knowing someone out there lived something close enough to their pain.
That’s what makes it eternal.
Art outlives their makers. Emotion outlives its moment.
A melody becomes a message delivered from the past to the future, saying, I felt this too. You’re not alone.
“It’s going to be quite a bit until this is finished.” Kit’s eyes are soft, storm-blue and shimmering as he scans the construction chaos. “Um, I— well I was hoping until it is, after this weekend, if you’d…like to come stay with me for a while?”
“To London?” I press my hand to my mouth, overwhelmed. Heart stuttering, it forgets how to function for a beat. “The London?”
My soul soars, exhilarating and terrifying.
He chuckles, a bellowing, boyish one, hooking a finger under my chin as he pecks my forehead. “Yeah, my love, that’d be the one.”
London; where I felt more at ease for one summer than ever before. Where, for the first time, I felt fully, freely, myself. The city that Nicole once said she could see me making a home.
With no job or apartment, and no prospects in America anymore, maybe, just maybe—this is fate, finding its way back around. I grip the teardrop vial of ashes, biting my lip.
“It doesn’t have to be anything serious,” Kit rushes to add, the freckles across his nose deforming as it crinkles, “I have plenty of rooms, and—”
“Please, for the love of everything,” I say, throwing my arms around his neck, “just shut the fuck up and kiss me!”
He’s stunned, like I’ve short-circuited whatever careful logic he’s clinging to. Then, that crooked, infuriatingly confident smirk pulls at his mouth. He lifts me, laughing as my breath stumbles out in a soft, startled sound.
“Bossy,” he murmurs, voice dropping into something warm and wicked, “I like it.”
Fingers firm and certain, his hands slide to my waist. Before he touches me fully, the heat of his chest is like gravity drawing me in.
His arms lock around me, strong and sure.
Like he’s been starving, Kit pours months of silent ache into our kiss.
He pulls me against him like he’s afraid I’ll vanish if he loosens his grip.
I wrap my legs around him, sliding my hands into his hair as I kiss him back with everything I’ve learned in the months without him—every certainty I was too afraid to say out loud.
We give pieces of ourselves, fragile as a bird’s wings, yet strong as steel.
When people part, they leave those pieces behind, in memories, places, and within the hearts of those who remain.
Losses that carve out space inside us will never fully close.
But that space, that hollow, is proof that we lived. That we loved.
And it changed us.
There’s power in realizing that the love you want isn’t some singular thing. It’s threaded through people, during moments, and in the quiet, neglected places you never thought to search.
Now I’m meeting the future in Kit’s arms, eager to take every second that its love has to offer.