Moving toward the piano in a trancelike state, I send him a quick glance. “Can I?”
A noncommittal shrug. “Sure.”
That’s all I need. I pull out the bench and take a seat, gliding my fingertips over the keys. New and hardly used. “Any requests?”
“Whatever you want,” he says, sounding faraway.
I take a moment to zip through a playbook in my mind, then settle on a song.
A cover of “California Dreamin’.”
Fitting.
My voice starts off soft, weaving through the familiar song with a trace of nostalgia. As I reach the chorus, I let it swell, filling the room with rich, husky melodies that sweep through the echoey space, my fingers dancing across ivory keys. Each note is laced with a longing that feels almost too personal, like I’m singing directly to my past. Directly to him. The lyrics ground me as warm music pulls me deeper into fractured reveries.
When the final note sounds and my voice fades into the silence, I take a moment to close my eyes. I breathe in deeply through my nose, letting the chords settle in my bones, a smile curling at my lips. It feels good. Familiar and sweet.
I turn on the bench to face him. “Well, that was—”
But the words lodge in my throat.
My heart sinks, shoulders slumping, as I stare at the space where he once stood.
The room is empty.
He’s not there.
Chapter 26
Lex
“Lex!”
Stevie’s voice reverberates through three thousand square feet of useless space, yanking me off the bed as I’m groggily scrolling through my social apps, barely awake.
Fear. Her tone is pitched with fear.
I sprint down the hallway in my sweatpants toward the bathroom, sans a T-shirt, because of course I’m half-naked.
My heart skips. I immediately think it’s her knee. Her leg injury. Something happened, she slipped in the shower, and I’m about to be wading in chest-deep guilt for the foreseeable future because her knee would be fucking fine if I hadn’t decided that driving through a blizzard was the perfect time to take a nap.
But when I shove through the bathroom door and skid to a stop, I’m not chest-deep in guilt.
I’m ankle-deep.
In water.
“What the fuck?”
I find her hopping around a growing puddle, wearing nothing but a tank top and baby-blue underwear, eyes popped with panic, clutching a wrench in one hand and a soaked-through bath towel in the other. The marble floors are slick, water spraying out from an exposed industrial-style pipe, drenching everything.
“I tried to fix it,” she exclaims, dropping the wrench with a clatter. “I found a wrench in your junk drawer. There was a small leak, and my dad’s a plumber, so I thought I could just tighten it, but—”
“Fuck my life.” Groaning, I kneel beside the chrome-plated pipe, water gushing from a point where the fitting connects to the wall. The pipe itself isn’t old—it’s modern, high-end, the kind you’d expect in a place like this. But the pressure must have built up after she tightened it too much, causing the fitting to crack under the strain.
Stevie drops beside me, but I shoo her away. “I got it.”
“Let me help.” She grabs the fallen wrench.
