Page 3 of Last Chorus (A Perfect Song Duet #2)

Lily scoffs. “Yeah, in the same tone you use when you tell my parents I’m a great cook.” Her fierce gaze moves to me. “I realize we’ve had a don’t ask don’t tell policy about this for years, but I’m officially over it. What happened between you guys messed her up big time.”

“I know,” I whisper.

Her head tilts. “Do you? Do you know that while you went to rehab, did all that therapy and figured your shit out, she was sitting awake in a dark closet all night, every night?”

Dizziness hits me as blood drains from my head. A familiar prickle rolls down my spine. Imaginary fists squeeze my lungs.

Rye shifts. “Lily, maybe?—”

“It’s okay,” I say, sucking in a deep breath. “I’m ready to hear it.”

Lily’s eyes soften. “You know I love you, Wilder. I’m so glad you’re sober, and you’re the best godfather Emma could have. But you also broke my best friend, and a part of me will never forgive you for that.”

Sharp pain slices through my chest. Rye shifts in his seat, giving me a pained look.

“You think this is my fault,” I murmur.

“God, no!” She sighs noisily. “I’m sorry.

I don’t mean it that way. What I’m trying to say is I don’t think Eva dealt with what happened between you guys.

At least not in a healthy way. She pulled it together, sure.

Glow was obviously a great distraction. From the outside, it looked like she’d transferred all her pain into an album and was fine. Great, even. Right?”

My tongue too thick for words, I nod.

“I thought the same.” She gives me a sad smile. “Like the rest of the world, I bought the act she put on. I was convinced she’d tell me if she wasn’t okay. If I’d paid more attention or asked more questions, maybe?—”

“Don’t do that to yourself,” I interject. “Even if you’d known the right questions to ask, there was no guarantee she’d answer.”

Rye cups her shoulder. “He’s right. She’s always been that way, always hated showing weakness. Or whatever she perceives as weakness, I should say.”

My heart squeezes. “Remember the eyepatch?” I ask, and Rye laughs shortly. I tell Lily, “When Evangeline was five, she made an eyepatch out of cardboard and yarn for her gray eye.”

Rye grins at the memory. “She used black and green crayons to draw an eye on the cardboard, but it was all misshapen and freaky-looking. I ran away screaming when I saw it.”

I crack a smile. “You were a wuss.”

“I was four, asshole.”

We chuckle.

Lily sighs. “Is the point of this story coming anytime soon?”

The moment’s reprieve passes, heaviness sliding back into my chest. “Sophie called my mom freaking out because Evangeline wouldn’t tell her why she wanted an eyepatch. She asked for the number of the child therapist I was seeing. ”

Lily’s jaw drops, and I wave dismissively.

“Yeah, I was already a mess at seven. Anyway, that weekend I cornered Evangeline and got the truth out of her. Some kid at school had called her a freak and hurt her feelings. I made up a story about how her gray iris meant she was related to fairies. It worked and she took off the eyepatch. But the point is, she’s always locked down her emotions. Compartmentalized them.”

“That’s when you started calling her Fairy,” she surmises.

I swallow the sudden knot in my throat. “Yeah.”

A loaded silence falls, broken only by the soft, rhythmic whistles of Emma’s deep breathing.

Rye’s stare narrows thoughtfully on me. “Except with you.”

Lily looks between us, frowning. “What?”

He turns to her. “Eva has always locked down her feelings around everyone except Wilder . Think about it. In all the years you’ve known her, has she ever really lost it in front of you? Like full-blown emotional meltdown?”

Lily sucks in a breath, glancing at me. She doesn’t have to say anything. I know exactly what day she’s thinking about.

I’d relapsed the night before and hid it as best I could from Evangeline. But she still knew instinctively that something was wrong. The next afternoon, I walked into her house full of shame and crippling fear. Lily was there. Evangeline had been crying, her eyes swollen and bloodshot.

After Lily left, she told me she was afraid of the dark, both tangibly and metaphorically. That when I’d shut her out the night before, I’d felt like a darkness she couldn’t find her way out of.

I was too desperate to keep her to tell her she was right. I was the dark, and I was swallowing us both.

Memories and regrets clatter inside me. Fighting for calm, I look up at the knot on the ceiling beam. The afternoon shadows make it look like an eye. I squint, and it seems to wink at me.

Inhale—two, three, four.

Exhale—two, three, four.

I repeat the exercise until my body lets go of the fight-or-flight response. Until my heart stops racing. Until my disjointed thoughts blend and finally ring with a single, harmonious note.

Everyone close to me knows I don’t carry a mere torch for Evangeline.

My entire soul burns for her.

Like I told her when we were kids: everything else, everyone else , will always be background noise. At least for me.

I’ve kept my distance for over six years out of respect for the very clear boundary she set when I came home from treatment.

It was the only form of amends she’d accept.

But something else is equally true: my distance was dependent on the conviction she was okay.

Healthy and happy. That not only did she not want me, she didn’t need me.

After today, that conviction is smoke.

I lower my gaze from the ceiling. “If you tell me where Evangeline will be on New Year’s, I’ll teach you how to make the best Nikujaga your parents will ever taste.”

Lily blinks in surprise, then smiles. “Deal.”