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WHEN I FINALLY told my parents, standing in that storied lobby with all the photographs of musicians that came before, they were silent for a long while.

Then Mom asked, “But what about the life you built in LA, heart? Your career? You worked so hard.”

Dad agreed. “We don’t want you to give it up.”

“I know. And I’m not. I went out to LA thinking I knew what I wanted, but as it turns out, what I want is right here,” I replied simply, because it had always been here. I just hadn’t seen it yet. “Is that okay?” I added a little softer, just to Mom.

She understood. “Chase your joy, heart.”

And then she pulled me into a hug, and Dad joined, and they squeezed me tightly.

They’d never tell anyone that they were heartbroken about giving up the Revelry, but I knew them.

I knew this place, too. And maybe this was a terrible decision, but if it with- stood fifty years of hurricanes and ocean swells and angry rock stars, maybe the Revelry could stand the test of time, too. And me.

There was only one way to find out.

Eventually I had to pack up my apartment in Los Angeles and move home.

Sasha helped— apparently he was very good at moving.

He’d done it so often in his youth, he knew all the best cross-country hacks.

Sometimes, we’d feel a little shiver in our heads, but never another thought.

Never another song. But that was okay, because we made the songs anyway, and it turned out that he was a much better producer than artist, and Gigi was a much better singer.

So was Willa. And a handful of other artists that he lent his talents to.

At first, while he set up his business in LA, Sasha split his time between his Hollywood Hills apartment and Vienna Shores.

And he’d meant what he said that day on the pier: I was the first person he called in the mornings, and the last person he said good night to, but the weeks he was gone felt like years .

He rented a studio out in Burbank but kept toying with the idea of converting one of the old storage rooms at the Revelry into one.

“I don’t want to move the piano ,” Sasha always said when he brought it up. “What if it breaks? That’s why they never moved the one at Abbey Road. No, better to just bring everything to the OBX.”

It sounded like an excuse, but I didn’t mind. I started cleaning out the storage room anyway, just in case.

Billboard lauded his new role as “the comeback of the decade,” but I thought that was a bit dramatic.

Though, when he produced his first Billboard top hit with Willa Grey, a bottle of champagne arrived for him at the Revelry. When he opened the card, I waited for him to tell me who’d sent the Dom Pérignon to a man almost fifteen years sober.

It turned out, when he finally showed me the card, I hadn’t even needed to guess. “Oh. Your dad.”

“Yeah,” he said, frowning at the card in my hands.

I studied his face, never wishing more that I could hear inside his head again. “Are you … happy?”

Because for so long he’d wanted to catch his father’s eye. He wanted to step out of Roman Fell’s shadow. Be his own person. And now he was.

“I …” And his frown deepened. He took the card back, studying his father’s scratchy handwriting.

“I should be, but I … I’m finding that it doesn’t matter.

No, it matters , but I don’t care.” As he said it, his mood lightened.

“Huh. I don’t care. I don’t care!” But then he paused and looked pointedly at the champagne. “But that does piss me off a little.”

He ended up gifting the champagne to Mitch and Gigi, who later said it tasted so bad they mixed it with orange juice the next morning for mimosas instead.

He was much more delighted when Mom and Dad threw him a surprise celebration for hitting the list. The Big Pie catered with his favorite pineapple and pepperoni pizza, and Willa flew in from LA, and at the end of the night when she tried to convince him to move back out west, he told her he was home.

And sometimes, if you came into the Revelry for one of his rare shows, he’d sing songs he never sang anywhere else—the songs we kept for ourselves—and whenever he did he would find me in the crowd, and hold my gaze, and the rest of the world would melt away.

The people of Vienna Shores knew to deny that they ever saw him.

Todd denied knowing his coffee order by heart, and no one ever saw him in colorful Hawaiian shirts, sitting at the Marge, delighted to try whatever concoction Uncle Rick spun up.

And he most certainly didn’t have a seat at the bar inside the Revelry, where I could, on busy nights, steal a kiss whenever I wanted. No, this wasn’t a Hollywood love story, but the rumor was his girlfriend ran away from LA anyway.

THAT FALL, I took Mom to the VMAs, with Sasha in tow (though at that point he was still figuring out that bicoastal sort of life, so he was perpetually jetlagged), and for a brief moment on the red carpet Mom locked gazes with Roman Fell.

Maybe when I’d met Sasha, I would have thought they looked like echoes of each other, but really they couldn’t be more different.

Their hair had the same curl, the same shade of dark brown, and their jawlines were sharp, and their builds slight, but it was like looking in a fun house mirror at someone Sasha could be.

Roman’s shoulders were rounded forward, and though his skin was weathered, it looked smooth from expensive chemical peels and surgery, and really—in the middle of this lobby full of countless faces and photographs, songs and histories and moments frozen in time—Roman Fell looked so small.

Roman turned pale, like he’d seen a ghost. And quickly disappeared into the crowd. For the rest of the night, he avoided us like the plague.

“What was that about?” I muttered to Mom.

She looked perfectly unmoved as she cryptically declared, “He knows what he did.”

Willa Grey didn’t nab a Moonman for Artist of the Year, and I did not win for Song of the Year, but it was nice to be there anyway and be nominated. I promised Mom that I’d take her to the Grammys, too, if I was invited.

I was, but by then Mom couldn’t come.

We took every day the best we could. We got pit tickets for Roman Fell’s farewell tour and sang along to all his greatest hits at the top of our lungs.

We might not have been his biggest fans, but we didn’t go for him.

We went for ourselves. We took every day as it came.

We made our holidays bigger, our birthdays grander, and we shuffled through the memories in the office and storage rooms, all the ticket stubs my parents kept and the Polaroids they took and trinkets they stole from roadside attractions, and we lived the best we could in the moment. Without regrets.

Because it was all anyone could ask for, really.

Then one evening as I was closing up the Revelry, after another of Sasha’s impromptu shows, Mom grabbed a step stool and took the framed dollar bill off the wall.

The frame was dusty from all the years it’d been there, leaving behind a square on the wall.

She took out the dollar and smoothed it on the bar.

“Before I forget,” she said, tongue in cheek, and handed it to Sasha, “I bet your mom she’d come back. I guess I was half-right.”

Because the things that left never stayed gone for good—not really. The things that mattered always returned. Just maybe not in the way you expected.

“Go get my daughter something nice.”

In the end, you really couldn’t buy anything with a dollar.

And the days grew short and the nights grew longer and time went on.

Most evenings, we’d sit out on the bench in my parents’ garden and watch the sun set over the Atlantic, and I learned of the kind of patience that was bittersweet. The kind of patience that made you wish the passage of time hurt a little less.

Mom was right—grief was a love song in reverse. The notes were still there, but they sounded a little different.

And the truth was, there was no last good day.

There was just this slow fade, bit by bit, like the sun sinking below the waves of the Atlantic.

There were beautiful moments—golden rays of light and warm orange shades, dipping into deep, heartbreaking reds.

The last good day never came, or maybe it had, and I missed it as I watched the sunset, slow at first and then too quick.

Much, much too quick. And when the last ray of light shimmered over the water at the end of it all, I held her hand and I watched it with her, until the light had gone and night set in.

And my mom was gone.