Page 49

That silence settled again. Not heavy, but dense. Like steam.

She pulled one leg beneath her, and I saw her shoulders soften in that way they always did right before she opened up.

“My dad passed when I was fifteen,” she said quietly. “Heart attack. Out of nowhere.”

I blinked. “Damn. I’m sorry.”

She nodded, looking down. “He used to play jazz on vinyl when I was a kid. Miles, Coltrane, Ella. He said music was the only thing honest enough to trust.”

“That’s real.”

She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I didn’t start singing until after he died. Like… something in my chest cracked open, and it just came out. At first it was grief. Then it was the only thing that felt like home.”

I was quiet for a second. “You ever feel like the more success you get, the more you lose pieces of that?”

She looked at me. “Every damn day.”

I exhaled. “People think this life is all studio lights and stages. But they don’t see what it costs.”

“Relationships,” she said. “Privacy. Sleep. Peace.”

“Yourself.”

She nodded. “But it’s still worth it.”

“Why?”

She paused. “Because when I’m in that booth… when I hit a note and feel it in my spine—I know I’m alive. That something real is still inside me.”

I looked at her. Not just looked—sawher.

The woman beneath the fire. The girl who sang her pain into purpose. The artist who had traded comfort for truth and still managed to sound like salvation.

“You close with your people?” she asked, voice low like it wasn’t just curiosity—but something deeper. A reach.

Taraj nodded, thumb brushing the rim of his glass. “Mena, yeah. That’s my sister. She kept me anchored when everything else felt like it was coming undone. My parents split when I was twelve. Shit got real messy. Mena stepped up… raised me in ways our mother couldn’t at the time.”

Sienna watched him, something warm flickering behind her eyes. “That kind of bond—don’t come easy.”

“She’s everything. Real talk, I think she’s the reason I didn’t lose myself. The reason I still got some softness left.”

Sienna nodded, slow and knowing. “My mom’s that for me. We talk every other day, even if it’s just a voice note or FaceTime. She’s the one who told me to chase the music, even when it didn’t make sense to anyone else.”

Taraj looked at her like he could already picture that woman—grit wrapped in love.

“She says, ‘your voice is a gift, but it’s not all you are.’”

“That’s beautiful.”

“Yeah.” Her gaze softened. “She reminds me to live outside the songs too. To feel things that ain’t for the stage.”

He sat with that. Let it settle between them.

“You ever get scared?” he asked. “Loving people like that. Knowing they can be taken from you?”

Sienna didn’t answer right away.

“I lost my dad when I was nine,” she said finally. “I didn’t understand the weight of it then… just that he was here one day and gone the next. Watching my mom hold it together, raise me on her own, still find room to pour into my dreams... that shaped everything.”