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THE LAST NOTE of the song faded into silence.

Maybe no one would want to play it on the radio, or blast it from their stereos, or dance to it at their weddings, but I loved it.

I loved every note, every harmony. This was the first time we heard it outside of that cramped rental on the beach, and somehow the Steinway had brought it to life in a way that no other instrument could.

There was a sureness to it—a warmth that reminded me of when Sasha used to be in my head.

I drew my fingers away from the keys first, turning to look up at my playing partner.

He had turned to do the same. The silvery linings of the moon painted his face in soft, cool tones, warring with the candle flickering at the edge of the piano.

His shoulders had melted as we played, his body relaxed. Here, in the soft light, was Sasha.

My Sasha.

It was almost like we were still connected. The notes had told him my thoughts, between the mezzo-fortes and the crescendos, the harmonies and the contras.

I hoped it was enough.

Too bad the moment was ruined by my parents. And, also, the fact that we had an audience at all. Everyone clapped. Todd’s wife even dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. Mom’s smile was so wide, her eyes full of unshed tears.

Dad pressed his hands against his heart. “That’s my girl! Did you see? That’s mine! She came from me!”

To which Todd replied tepidly, “We know that, Hank.”

“And I did all the work,” Mom added matter-of-factly.

Dad just laughed and slung his arm around Uncle Rick, and they returned backstage to try to revive the generator.

“It wasn’t that good,” Sasha muttered under his breath as the crowd dispersed.

I agreed. “It needs some work. You were flat.”

“You came in too early on the chorus.”

I gasped, shocked. “Did not !”

He shrugged lazily. “So you say.” But then he grinned, moving close to me, and whispered in that gravelly voice that made me tingle all over, “It almost felt like you were in my head again, bird.”

“Maybe I was.”

And his grin widened, reaching up into his eyes. Even without our connection, I liked this. I liked the sound of us.

Mitch asked, “So … you two still taking requests? How about something not so sappy?”

Sasha quirked an eyebrow. “One song’s my limit, sadly, because you can’t afford me.”

Mom barked a laugh, clapping her hands together in delight, while Gigi consoled her partner with a pat on the shoulder.

Suddenly, the lights flickered back on. One by one, they popped alight, rushing across the venue to the bar, and then beyond. The jukebox came to life in the corner, and picked up exactly where it left off in the middle of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

As everyone dispersed, Sasha and I sat on the bench in silence. And for a moment I was afraid that wall would build itself back up, that the silence between us would harden and—

Quietly, he bent in to me, like a flower toward the sun, and pressed his forehead against mine. He closed his eyes.

I did, too.

And there it was—that warmth I’d always felt with him in my head. That presence. That comfort. I couldn’t hear his thoughts any longer, but maybe a little bit of that magic lingered.

“Don’t push me away,” he whispered, so softly only I could hear. “Don’t tell me to go. Not when you just asked me to stay.”

He was right. I had been so lost in the panic of our disconnection, I didn’t realize. The swirl of emotions, the intrusion of my “real” life back in LA, the incoming hurricane and my responsibility to the Rev. “I didn’t want you caught in the storm.”

The one we stood in the eye of now, and the proverbial one just out at sea, coming closer, gaining speed. One that would last for years. Dementia was called the long goodbye. It would be a long storm, too.

“I can weather storms, bird—I want to weather them. With you. Beside you. So we don’t have to do it alone.” He hadn’t lost trust in me, in our connection … I had.

Tears sprang to my eyes. “Was the bridge really down?”

“I never made it there,” he replied truthfully.

So he came back for me. In a hurricane. That was … probably one of the most idiotic things he could have done. Then again, I should have expected no different. I sighed and pulled away from him. My forehead still felt warm from where we touched.

He said, “You think I’m a fool.”

“Maybe.” I opened my eyes, and he was already looking at me, studying the crease in my brow. “But so am I. I just want to apologize—”

“You don’t have to,” he interrupted, beginning to pull away, but I cupped his face in my hands and kept him close.

“I want to, Sasha,” I insisted, so he understood the gravity of it.

The edge of his mouth quirked up, and I knew he was thinking something snarky, but I dutifully ignored it.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I pushed you away.”

He took my hand from his face, and kissed my palm. “Rooney emailed me the cowriting contract before we found your mom at the piano. I thought it was you, so I was coming to … apologize. I was just so afraid that you were pushing me away now that I am no longer useful.”

“ Useful? ” I echoed.

He nodded, pursing his lips. “Because you’re so much better than me—you deserve so much better than me.”

“Well, that’s silly,” I replied, falling deeper into his gaze with every moment. “I deserve every bit of you.”

And I wanted to know every one of those bits. I wanted to put them all in songs. I wanted to match the inflections of his voice to notes on this piano, and I wanted to make love songs with all of them.

WHEN SASHA AND I slipped away, Mom was the only person who saw us. She was in charge of the jukebox, and she gave us an inconspicuous wink before she put on the next record.

“Wherever” by Roman Fell and the Boulevard.

‘ Wherever you go ,’ Roman Fell sang, the brassy sound of the rock band behind him, ‘ there you are .’

And strangely enough, I learned that Sebastian knew every word to the song.

“I thought you said you hated your dad,” I teased, pulling him into the foyer, a soundproofing blanket draped over my arm. I put it down on the floor under the ticket window and made a nest.

He rolled his eyes. “I hate my father, not music .”

“Mm-hmm, do you have a favorite?”

He said, sitting down next to me, leaning back against the wall, “Guess, and I’ll give you a prize.”

I scowled. “That’s not fair, I can’t read your mind.”

He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “Pity, it was a good prize …”

“Gimme a hint?” I leaned against him.

“Too easy.”

“Hum a few notes?”

“It’d be cheating.”

I pouted.

“Ooh, sadly, that’s the wrong guess.”

“Then I’ll take a consolation prize,” I replied as I closed the distance between us and kissed him, and to my surprise, that warm and golden comfort was still there.

It had just changed a little. The warmth was my hands in his, and the comfort was his steady presence, and that was good, too.

Sasha and I stayed pleasantly where we were, leaning against each other, my head on his shoulder, his arms around my body, curled together as the eye of the storm passed and the back of the hurricane raged through our town.

At some point between our conversations about his classical piano training and my self-taught guitar, and our adamant disagreements on the perfect four-chord progression—he claimed it was the axis progression, while I firmly believed that the royal road chords were far superior—he fell asleep.

I sat awake, watching the storm through the glass front door. I was never very good at falling asleep during hurricanes.

Neither was Mom. As long as I could remember, I’d always spent hurricanes at the Revelry. We’d post up either here in the lobby or near the loading dock, and wait.

I wondered if she was still awake, too.

I needed to pee, anyway.

Silently, I unwound myself from Sasha. He didn’t even stir. Sebastian Fell was a lot of things, but a light sleeper was not one of them. He could sleep through a freight train. I envied that.

So I went to the bathroom and then peeked into the theater.

The kids were asleep on the stage, while everyone else was scattered across the room.

Dad was snoring upright beside the jukebox, while Mitch and Gigi were slumped together under the bar, wrapped in each other’s arms, awake but drowsily muttering to each other about their future.

I heard snippets—things like “singing” and “we’ll try LA” and “I can be your Yoko Ono,” which I think was just Mitch being Mitch.

Finally, I found Mom by the doors to the loading dock. She’d propped open a door with a metal chair and sat on it, watching the stormy winds roll across the road in watery waves. The worst of the storm had passed, having flung debris of tree limbs and waterlogged wood across town.

She noticed me approaching and whispered, “Ah, we have to stop meeting like this, heart.”

Instead, I sat down on the ground beside her and leaned my head against her knee. I stifled a yawn. “Feels like we’ve done this before.”

“Only a thousand times.” She gently stroked my hair, pulling tresses one by one out of my tattered braid. “Now a thousand and one.”

“I’ll take a million more.”

A million more sheets of wind and rain. A million more bolts of lightning. There was just the storm, my mom, and me. This was what I missed the most.

This was what I would miss forever.

“Hey, Mom?”

“Yes, my heart?” she asked, detangling my hair as she pulled her fingers through it.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she replied. We stayed there for a while, watching the rain. “Your father and I aren’t ignoring what’s ahead of us, heart. I just want you to know that.”

My throat grew tight suddenly. Made it hard to swallow. “I’m sorry I lashed out.”

“I understand why. It’s all frightening. We are all frightened. We just want to live every day as full as we can, because the only thing that makes grief worse is regret. And I don’t want anyone to regret anything—especially not your father. I’d like you to make sure he’s okay after all of this.”