Page 63 of Crescendo

And at least there was something, because when I woke up in the morning, I had another message from Ella—the first part of her new arrangement, already.

My heart jumped into my mouth at the sight, and I shot out of bed to get my headphones from the music room, sitting to listen to it, a beautiful piece that started off with this incredible string section, billowing outwards with a feeling like flying.

And maybe that meant something—that I’d given her a running start while I was in London, and now she could fly without me.

I gushed praise to her, sparing no detail of which parts I loved the most about it, and I gave her a few samples of the pieces I was working on overhauling, too—all we were now, music partners.

So distant, and yet at the same time, it was intensely intimate without the words for it, because of how much we did both pour ourselves into the music.

Except, I thought, once we’d both promised to get back to work and left our conversation at that, maybe it was worse that way. Maybe all that meant was that I’d get a front-row emotional seat to Ella moving on without me.

I made some damn music. Threw myself back into it, skipping breakfast, taking the world’s fastest shower just to get back to the music room, and Natália was livid when she found me again, grilling me about how long I’d been up working last night.

Didn’t matter, though. I kept at the music, and eventually, she relented and joined me.

I didn’t tell her I’d skipped breakfast and last night’s dinner too, because she would have dragged me away to force-feed me, but she made sure I ate lunch anyway, even though my body protested weakly at suddenly trying to feed it and I could barely get any of it down.

I finished about half of it before I was back at the music, the end finally in sight, and not a moment too soon—just a bit more, was the mantra I told myself as the sun crept across the sky and down over the horizon, and when Natália was wrapping up for the day, she scowled hard at me.

“Please do not keep going until morning this time!” she said. “Meli and I are so worried about you. We think you’re killing yourself with work because you don’t have—”

“Please don’t finish that sentence.”

She faltered, face falling. “We just want you to be happy,” she said softly, and I smiled thinly at her.

“Just gotta get through this. Then I can rest, I can relax.”

She crumpled, stepping forward and pulling me into a hug. “You’re scaring me, Lydia,” she said. “Don’t do this to yourself or us.”

“I won’t,” I said softly. “I’ll go to bed earlier tonight.”

I wasn’t sure if I meant it at the time, but it folded like paper anyway, the second she was gone.

I pushed myself into it, on and on into the evening, until the score started to blur together, and the only thing looming was the main piece, the money piece, the throne scene.

We were so close. Everything was starting to come together.

It just needed one last… adjustment. One honing factor to get it to come together.

I shouldn’t have touched the scotch, but I’d tried coffee, I’d tried tea, I’d tried protein snacks and I’d tried sugar, tried anything I could put in my body to clear out the haze in my head, and I tried scotch too.

One shot turned into two, and then I made the same mistake I had in this music room what felt like forever ago—I took a third shot, just the right amount to remind myself I was a lightweight.

And so it was that Melinda and Natália found me on the floor in the music room, surrounded with scraps of paper, pen in hand writing into a notebook, probably almost midnight, and Natália just about screamed at me.

“Lydia!” she shouted, dropping down to the floor in front of me. “You told me you wouldn’t do this!”

“I’m so close,” I groaned. “I just… I’m just trying to figure out the words.

It’s all I need. The throne scene. March to the throne.

Death march. That’s what it feels like I need…

march me off to my self-imposed destruction.

Look at me! I’m Hedson.” I went to write on the page again, and Melinda took the pen from my hand.

“That’s more than enough, dude,” she said, a hand on my back. “C’mon. We’re getting you food and water and a shit-ton of sleep.”

“Not now, Melinda,” I sighed. “Can’t you see? I’m going to finish it. It’s going to be beautiful. The world will love me.”

“You’re going to finish yourself off at this rate,” Melinda said.

“All the better.”

“ Not all the better. Listen to yourself. Jesus Christ, dude.”

Natália spoke quietly, looking at the notebook. “Lydia… did you write these?”

“Huh?” I took the notebook, squinting at the words. I Only Meant Well. Lyrics about cradling the bodies of promises I made, doves with broken wings as their heartbeats start to fade, blood and memories dripping through my fingers … “Oh,” I managed. “Oh, no, I plagiarized all that. Shit.”

Natália slumped, shoulders falling, as she shut the book and threw it aside. “Okay, never mind. I thought maybe for a second that you were some kind of songwriting genius when you were drunk and sad. Melinda! What are we feeding her?”

Melinda patted me on the shoulder. “What do you want to eat?”

“I don’t want to eat. I want to be locked up inside an auditorium set ablaze and play the violin screaming for it all to end until the flames consume me and there’s nothing left but the echoes of my last cries out into the world.”

“What do you want to eat?”

“I want ramen.”

She got me ramen. That was really nice of her.

It helped ground me enough to come back down from the hazy place I was, but I didn’t really want to come down from that place…

didn’t want to face the way my body and soul were built on a crumbling foundation and how I was so damn scared of finishing because I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself once I didn’t have this project to pour myself into.

Melinda and Natália fussed over me, made sure I ate, drank water like a fish, and finally, made absolutely sure I went to bed as soon as they could make me, Melinda lingering in the bedroom to make sure I wasn’t crawling out of bed looking for my notebooks.

“There’s going to be light at the other end of the tunnel, okay?” Melinda said quietly. “Don’t scare us like that again.”

“Thank you. You and Natália. I’m… I’m glad it’s you she picked.”

She softened, even though she furrowed her brow. “Don’t try to get me to overlook this just by being sweet and crap like that.”

“That’s not what this is. I promise.”

And I broke my promise, because the second the two of them were gone, I found myself compelled out of bed, footsteps padding over the carpet as I walked back into the music room and picked up my notebook, flipping to the last used page and reading it.

Damn, my handwriting was bad when I’d been drinking. But maybe I wasn’t completely… completely off base.

I Only Meant Well. Turned out Hannah was a seriously damn good songwriter.

If she’d tried to write the song for this scene, she couldn’t have done a better job.

Hedson, like me, looking at the broken and bloodied results of good intentions, crumbling all around him, and the only way he knew to address it was to go further, to push harder.

I went back to bed. But I took the notebook with me. And even though I tried to get to sleep—really, I did—it haunted me, and I wound up with the bedside lamp on, scratching out notes of the instrumentation, the orchestration. How to blend the sound together.

And I listened to Ella’s arrangement again, the clarinet stirring something deep inside me.

I meant to listen to it once, but when it cracked something in me and I found tears hot on my face, I wound up standing in the music room again, lit only in the pale moonlight, headphones on, listening to the song and conducting an orchestra of ghosts, all that was left between me and Ella as this one piece linked me back to her.

It was three in the morning before I knew it. I slipped my headphones off, and I sat back on the floor, surrounded by the scattered papers, and without really realizing what I was doing, I picked up my phone, and I dialed.

It rang twice before it picked up, the voice confused down the line. “Lydia? Aren’t you in LA?”

“Morning, Adam.”

Adam scoffed. “Morning to you too. It’s, what, three in the morning? Are you out of your mind?”

“I had to talk to you. It’s very urgent.”

He paused, his voice hitching down the line, and he said, “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Hannah and Eliza. Have they worked things out between them?”

“That is not remotely where I was expecting this to go. Did you hit your head?”

“Answer the damn question.”

He sighed. “Well, admittedly, it’s always something good when you sound like you’ve lost your mind… I think so, actually. I think Ella helped them out, a lot.”

I laughed thinly. “That’s just like her. Always healing things. To think I’d fall for a doctor, huh?”

“A doctor who’s a composition genius. Seems like exactly the kind of over-the-top person you would gravitate towards. So, what, did you just urgently need to know if Hannah and Eliza are dating? You know there’s reality TV shows if you just want a quick hit of messy dating drama.”

“I need them.”

“Damn, can’t get enough girls, huh?”

“Not like that. Hannah wrote a song. I need her and Eliza to work with me and bring it to life for this score. Hannah’s going to get her foot in the door with rock like she wanted.

If this score takes as well as I think it will, maybe it’ll even get Eliza played in places like the Royal Albert Hall. ”

“You’re… contracting them? And you want me to be the one to talk to them about it?”

I laughed. “Neither of them would take it seriously if it were coming directly from me.”

“Well, all right, actually, yes, I can see that, but…”

“There’s something else,” I said, my heart beating faster, clutching the phone. “Ella. She won, right?”

He paused. “That still hasn’t been announced yet…”

“So that’s a yes and you’re not allowed to say. Ah, forget it. I already know she’s going to win, I heard the damn piece.”

“What are you even getting at right now? I never know what to think of it when you’re talking in riddles at three in the morning.”

I laughed, shaking my head. Ella told me we could be together once we were both great musicians, our music side by side. I’d taken it as a rejection, as maybe one day when everything is different then we could try it then.

But that wasn’t Ella. Ella had always wanted me. Her heart had always been like that—big and beautiful and full of love. Even when it got her hurt and she was scared to love again, she still loved. Loved music. And loved me.

It hadn’t been a rejection. It had been an offer. That song, too. I’m flying, Lydia. Come catch me and we can fly together.

“You offered for me to play with the string quartet,” I said.

“That is such a small performance. You’re not going to fly to London when you’re clearly wearing yourself down to the bone already just to play for thirty minutes and leave again.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. I want something grander.”

“Oh, we’re full of demands, then,” he said, laughter bubbling under his voice.

“Yes. You told me people will show up for me, right? I’ve got you wrapped around my finger, honestly. You’d let me lead the orchestra if I asked.”

He snorted. “Ah, probably. I hate when you get a big ego, because it’s always true. So, what do you want, then?”

I laughed. “To lead the orchestra.”

“Bloody hell. I should have figured you actually meant that.”

“I need to be on stage—to perform. To conduct. That was why I went to Crescendo. Why I mentored, why I need to be a part of everyone’s performance, dammit. It’s not enough to make something. I need to be making it with everybody. Let me conduct for the orchestra. At least for the opening.”

He paused. “You mean, you’re looking to…”

“To conduct Ella’s piece.”