Page 30 of The Sound Between Us (Vinyl Hearts #1)

A girl in the front row is crying, but not from concern. She’s crying because she thinks this moment is beautiful, romantic, authentically tortured artist. She has no idea I’m sitting here thinking about a woman who told me not to change my locks on her account .

The song reaches its crescendo around me—Jamie and Dex carrying the melody whilst I smoke and stare and wonder when I became this empty. The crowd sings every word, their voices rising to fill the space where mine should be.

Except I know what I need now, and she’s three thousand miles away, probably making terrible tea and alphabetising vinyl to avoid thinking about the mess I made.

I stub the cigarette out on the stage floor and stand up, dropping the stool with a clatter that echoes through the arena. The crowd cheers as if I’ve just performed the most brilliant piece of theatre they’ve ever seen.

If only they knew the truth—that this isn’t performance art. This is just a man realising he’s been sleepwalking through his own life, and the only person who ever made him feel awake wants nothing to do with him.

The song ends, and I walk off stage without acknowledging the applause, leaving Jamie and Dex to handle the transition to the next number. My ears are ringing, but not from the crowd noise—from the absolute silence inside my head where music used to live.

Back in my hotel room at three in the morning, I’m doom-scrolling through my phone. The cigarette incident is already trending on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram—every platform where strangers get to have opinions about my life.

The fan theories are wild—some think it was planned, others are worried about my mental health, and a disturbing number are romanticising what they’re calling my “beautiful self-destruction.”

But that’s not what keeps me scrolling. What keeps me awake, thumb moving automatically through an endless feed of content, is the other trend I found buried in the algorithm.

Videos of Seren .

Not professional recordings—grainy phone footage from small venues, acoustic sessions filmed in what looks Mark’s studio, clips that have been shared and reshared until they’ve taken on a life of their own.

She’s been in LA and I’ve been... I don’t even know where I’ve been. Not home. Not the place in the hills with the glass and cement. Not anywhere that matters.

She’s performing songs I’ve never heard, her voice raw and honest in a way that makes my chest ache. The comments are unanimously positive—people calling her a revelation, the real deal, everything her father’s generation promised but never delivered.

“Finally, a Rogers who gets it,” one comment reads. “This is what authentic sounds like,” says another.

In one video, she’s sitting at a piano in what looks a small club, just her and the keys and a microphone that barely picks up her voice.

The song is about hiding, about walls, about being afraid to let people see who you really are.

Her hair falls across her face as she sings, and for a moment—just a moment—she looks up at the camera and I swear she’s looking directly at me.

The view count is climbing by the hour. Three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, half a million people discovering what I already knew—that Seren Rogers is everything I wish I could be. Honest, real, uncompromising.

I scroll to the comments, looking for some mention of me, some sign that our time together left a mark on her music. But there’s nothing. No references to LA, no hints about heartbreak or pop stars or any of it.

It’s as if I never existed in her story at all.

The realisation hits me. She’s not just moving on—she’s thriving. Creating the music she was meant to make, building the career she always deserved, becoming the artist she was born to be.

And she’s doing it all without me .

I click on a music industry article from two days ago: “Serendipity Rogers: The Authentic Voice We’ve Been Waiting For.

” The journalist gushes about her “refreshing honesty” and “complete absence of industry artifice.” There’s a quote from Mark: “She’s the real deal.

No compromise, no manufactured emotion. Just pure talent and integrity. ”

Integrity. The word sticks between my ribs.

I keep scrolling, finding more videos, more articles, more evidence that she’s becoming everything I gave up being years ago. There’s footage of her in interviews, confident but not performative, talking about music as if it matters instead of as if it’s a product to be sold.

“I’m not interested in fame. I’m interested in truth,” she says in one clip.

Truth.

My phone buzzes with a text from Henry: “We need to discuss damage control from tonight. Call me.”

I turn the phone face down and stare at the ceiling of yet another luxury hotel room in yet another city where I’m slowly dying of spiritual starvation.

The decision forms slowly, inexorably, until there’s no fighting it anymore.

I can’t do this anymore. Can’t perform love songs when I’ve finally learned what love actually feels. Can’t pretend to be the sanitised pop star when I know what authentic looks now.

I’ve seen behind the curtain of my own life, and there’s nothing there but smoke and mirrors and the ghost of who I used to be.

My phone buzzes again. Jamie this time: You okay, mate? That was intense tonight.

Then Dex: Fancy a drink? You look like you need to talk.

For a moment, I consider it. Going downstairs to the hotel bar, drowning this feeling in expensive whisky, pretending tomorrow will be different. But the thought of another day, another show, another night of performing emotions I don’t feel makes my skin crawl.

I call the jet company. Tell them to file a flight plan to London. Now.

The consequences will be catastrophic. Contract breaches, lawsuits, financial ruin. Henry will probably have a stroke. The label will blacklist me from the industry entirely.

But as I hang up the phone, I feel something I haven’t felt in months.

Relief.

I’m done being Harrison Carter, pop star. Time to find out if Harry is still in there somewhere, buried under fourteen years of lies and compromise and the kind of emptiness that money can’t fill.

Time to go home. Time to be real again.

Time to find out if she’ll give me a chance to prove that I’m not the man who walked away from the best thing that ever happened to him.

Even if she won’t, I can’t keep living this lie. Can’t keep selling my soul in three-minute increments to crowds who love a version of me that stopped existing the moment she told me not to change my locks on her account.

The plane leaves in eight hours.

For the first time since she walked out of my home, sleep.