34. Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Four
Evan
Iabandoned my phone on the kitchen counter of the short-term rental the label stuck me in for our two-day "break," like it was radioactive and might sizzle straight through the linoleum if I so much as breathed near it.
No tour. No Grant lurking in the shadows, poised to tackle me the second I did something idiotic—which, let’s be honest, is basically his full-time gig lately.
Still, I kept staring at the phone, because apparently my personal brand is masochism with a generous helping of self-sabotage.
We need to talk.
Four words. No punctuation, no softener, no anger in it either.
I read it on the bus after soundcheck, tucked into the back lounge with my guitar case as my emotional support animal and my band pretending not to eavesdrop on my every sigh. I read it once, twice, three times, because why suffer in standard definition when you can go full HD?
My first instinct? Run. My second? Try not to screw it up for once.
So I texted back a question I could actually keep.
Where do you want to meet?
She answered ten minutes later: a coffee shop in a neighborhood that didn’t scream celebrity, with concrete floors, chalkboard menus, and baristas who would probably recognize me but might do me the favor of pretending otherwise.
Neutral territory. Public enough to keep us honest, terrifying enough to make me wish I’d brought a fake mustache and a new identity.
I told Grant the neighborhood, not the address. Just enough so someone would know I wasn’t dead in a ditch, but not enough to turn this into a full-blown PR fire drill.
His response was immediate: Do not be weird. Then: Actually, be less weird than usual. Then: If she says leave, leave.
I texted back, I know. He replied with a thumbs-up emoji and a skull. Fair.
I threw on a hat, a plain sweatshirt, jeans. No jewelry, no guitar, nothing that screamed Evan Walker, frontman of Arcadia Drive, here to ruin your latte.
I walked the three blocks to the coffee shop with my hands in my pockets. Cars rolled past with weekday impatience, completely uninterested in my personal crisis. I tried to focus on that. Most people got to exist without every one of their feelings becoming a headline. Wild concept.
I pushed the door open.
Warmth hit my face: coffee, sugar, a hint of cinnamon.
The low hum of conversation, the espresso machine hissing behind the counter.
Half the tables were full. A girl with a laptop and earbuds in had a messy bun.
A guy in a suit leaned over a phone call near the window.
Two women shared a muffin by the door, one of them crying while the other nodded with the grave intensity of someone receiving battle plans.
Normal life. Messy everywhere.
I scanned the room and found her immediately.
Lila sat at a small table near the back, hands wrapped around a cup, hood of her coat still up even inside. She looked up when the door opened, eyes tracking, then landing on me. Her face didn't change much. Her eyes did.
That was the thing about her. She could keep a calm expression while her whole world flashed behind her gaze.
I walked toward her. She didn't stand, didn't smile, didn't look away. I stopped at the edge of her table and kept space, because I had learned my body could be a pressure even when my voice behaved.
"Hey," I said.
"Hi."
Her voice sounded steady. I didn't buy it. Mine probably did too, and I was one emotional inconvenience away from chewing through drywall.
I gestured toward the chair across from her. "Is this okay?"
She nodded. "Yeah."
I sat. For a second we were just two people at a coffee shop, no stage lights, no headphones, no red recording light maybe still catching our worst fear. I pushed that thought down.
Lila's eyes flicked to my hands, then to the hat, then back to my face. "You left your phone behind." Not a question, an observation that told me she had done the same.
"Yeah."
She took a small sip of her drink. Her fingers were bare, no rings or bracelets, nothing to fiddle with except the cup.
Her nails were short and practical. Her hoodie was plain, her hair tucked under the coat hood.
She looked like she wanted to disappear.
She also looked like she was choosing to be here anyway.
"I didn't bring anyone," she said.
"I didn't either."
A beat passed between us.
"I watched the podcast," she said.
I nodded. "Okay."
She studied me, as if she expected me to be proud of it, smug that I had finally said the thing. I wasn't proud. I was relieved. I was also terrified I had made it worse for her.
"I didn't do it to force you," I said.
"I know." The way she said it made something in my chest ache. She had heard me.
Silence stretched between us, filled by the coffee shop's noise, cups clinking, someone laughing, the espresso machine hissing again.
Lila set her cup down and looked at the table for a second, then back up. "I don't want to fight."
"Me neither."
Her mouth tightened slightly. "I also don't want to pretend it didn't happen."
"Okay."
She inhaled slowly, as if bracing her own ribs. "When I said my fear in the booth, I left something out."
My shoulders went still. "What?"
"It's not just about you." She paused. "My mom."
The word landed with weight. I knew her mom in the way you knew the outlines of someone's grief — the stories Lila had dropped over the years, usually in the middle of nights when she couldn't sleep.
The way her mom's heartbreak had become part of the legend people told about her.
The way family history could turn a woman into a before-and-after photo.
Lila's gaze flicked away, then returned. "My mom didn't become a person to people until she got hurt. At least, that's how it felt when I was younger. Before that, she was someone's girlfriend. Someone's almost-wife. Someone's future."
I stayed quiet.
"She got cheated on. It wrecked her. It also gave her a story." Her fingers tightened around her cup. "She became strong after. Interesting after. Admired after heartbreak."
A muscle jumped near her cheek.
"I know that's not the whole truth," she said. "I know Dad loves her. I know they made something real. But the story people told about her always started with what she lost."
That sat between us, ugly and clear.
"And I think I absorbed that," she said. "That maybe women become real after the damage. Not while they're loved, not while they're whole."
My hands curled slightly on my thigh. I forced them to relax.
Lila blinked hard. "I don't want to become her story. The woman who only became interesting after heartbreak. The woman people root for because she survived being hurt, not because she was worth seeing before it."
The line hit me so hard I forgot the coffee shop for a second. The chatter, the espresso machine, the guy on his phone by the window, all of it dulled behind her.
"Thank you for telling me," I said.
Lila let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh. "It sounds insane out loud."
"It doesn't. It sounds honest. And it makes sense."
Her shoulders dropped a fraction. She stared at the cup, then looked up again. "That's why I keep pulling away. It's not punishment, it's panic. It's me trying to make sure I can still stand if the love goes away."
I nodded. "I get it."
A beat passed.
"So. Your turn," she said.
My instinct was to deflect with a joke. I didn't.
"My fear," I said, "is that without the noise, I'm nobody."
Her brows lifted slightly. She had heard versions of it in fights, probably — the uglier versions, the ones I threw like broken glass because I was too scared to hand her the wound cleanly. This was the core.
"I built a life where the crowd proves I matter. Where noise equals worth, where someone screaming my name means I exist." Her mouth tightened. "I thought loving you would fix that. I thought if you chose me, it would mean I was enough without the stage."
I looked down at my hands. They were flat on my thighs, like I was trying not to touch an instrument that wasn't there.
"Then I started to feel you slipping, even when you weren't. And I panicked. I tried to compensate by taking up space — I got louder, bigger, I turned private into public because I thought it made us real." My jaw set. "It was control. It was ego dressed up as devotion."
Lila flinched slightly at the bluntness.
"I didn't want to feel small," I said. "So I tried to make your world smaller around me."
The words tasted awful. Good. They should.
Lila's eyes watered. She looked away for a second, then back. "Thank you."
"I'm sorry."
"I know," she said.
We sat there with the truth between us, heavy but clean. No screaming, no headlines, no microphone catching it.
My hands stayed flat on my thighs. I wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. I didn't. Touch was my favorite shortcut; it was how I avoided the hard work and still felt close.
Lila broke the silence. "I'm getting offers."
"I know."
"From Grant?" Her gaze sharpened.
"From the internet," I said. "From your song. From you."
Her mouth tightened as if she was trying not to smile. "My song went stupid viral."
"Not stupid. Your voice hit people. That's what happens."
Her eyes glistened. She blinked, annoyed. "I hate crying in public."
"We can leave."
She shook her head. "No. It's fine. This is real life. People drink coffee and have breakdowns. It's a Tuesday."
A laugh slipped out of me.
Lila stared at me, her gaze dropping to my mouth for half a second, then away fast, as if she didn't trust herself.
I had wanted this moment for two weeks, imagined it a hundred ways — a neat apology, a neat forgiveness, a neat kiss. We didn't do neat.
"I missed you," she said.
The words hit me in the gut. "I missed you too."
Her hand shifted on the table, fingers curling around the cup again. "I didn't want to talk because I didn't want to fall back into it."
"I know."