Vegas swallowed us whole. The bus crawled through the strip at sunset, neon bleeding across the windshield, and by the time we pulled into the hotel's private entrance the sky had gone from fire to bruise.
The lobby alone could have paid for my mother's surgery. Marble floors, chandeliers the size of small cars, a concierge who greeted Aiden by name. We checked into the penthouse floor — connected suites, rooftop terrace overlooking the strip. My room was bigger than my mother's apartment, with heated floors and a bathtub deep enough to swim in.
I sat on the edge of the bed and called my mom. Described the bathroom, the heated floors, the mirror that cleared itself like magic. She laughed — not the small, medicated laugh I'd gotten used to but a real one, the kind that sounded like the woman who used to fill our kitchen with noise and music.
"You be careful, baby." I could hear the heating pad clicking in the background, the sound of her shifting on the couch that had become her whole world.
"I'm always careful." I tucked my feet under me on the bed, phone pressed to my ear, watching the strip pulse below like a living thing.
"You're never careful. You just survive the consequences better than most people." A pause. "Are you happy?"
I looked at the strip glittering below, thought about the deal in my chest, thought about a man in the next suite who carried my stolen notebook like scripture. "I'm getting there," I said.
The residency began — twelve nights at a major venue. I had the minibar emptied before Aiden finished unpacking, restocked with water and juice. Intercepted a welcome-back champagne in the hallway, sent it back with a note: "Client is in recovery. No alcohol. No exceptions."
I thought I'd covered every angle. Then I walked into his suite next morning and found him on the couch, barefoot, sipping from a plastic water bottle with the ease of a man who'd never done anything wrong.
Something was off. The way he held it — too careful, too deliberate. I crossed the room and took it from his hand. He didn't fight me, which was the tell. I unscrewed the cap and the smell hit — vodka, poured into an empty water bottle, label still on.
"Come on, what's the matter, Calloway?" He stretched an arm across the back of the couch. "The color's the same."
I poured it down the sink. Came back. Picked up the second bottle from the coffee table — actual water. Picked up the third from his nightstand — vodka. He watched me find it with the expression of a man playing chess who'd just lost his queen and was pretending it was strategy.
"So you've changed tactics." I lined the bottles on the counter. "From now on I check everything you drink. Every glass, every bottle. You want water, you drink it in front of me from a sealed bottle I hand you."
"That's insane." He said it like a man stating a fact, not making an argument. "You put vodka in a water bottle, Aiden. We passed insane three stops ago."
That night I wrote him a full song. Not a fragment — a complete piece, verse and chorus and bridge. About masks. About wearing a performance so long the face underneath atrophies. The words came the way they always came when something inside me had been compressed too long — fast, urgent, like setting a bone.
Every line carried the weight of watching him read my notebook in the dark. I was writing about a man I was paid to write for, and the line between transaction and truth had dissolved so completely I couldn't find the seam.
I slid it under his door at midnight. Stood in the hallway with my palm flat against the wood, listening. Heard movement — the creak of the couch, footsteps, the whisper of paper lifted off carpet. A silence long enough for him to read it. Then nothing. No door opening, no voice, no response. I went back to my suite and told myself it was the deal, told myself Otis was paying for every word. My hand was still warm from the door.
Next morning he had the page on the piano in the rehearsal room. When I walked in his fingers were already finding chords underneath my words — he didn't acknowledge the midnight delivery or the fact that I'd written something so nakedly about him that anyone could see the portrait. He just played. And the melody — minor key, stripped, aching — turned my lyrics into something that lived and breathed. His voice filled the space the way water fills a glass, and I sat in a side seat feeling my own words come back to me transformed.
I was no longer just fulfilling a deal. I was giving him pieces of myself and he was turning them into music and it felt less like a transaction and more like a conversation between two people who couldn't talk any other way.
He played it through twice. Set his hands in his lap. Still didn't look at me. "It's not diary stuff," he said, quiet enough that I almost missed it. A concession that cost him something — I could see it in the way his fingers curled against his thighs, the careful stillness of a man admitting defeat on one small front.
The first show was a wall of sound and twenty thousand voices singing words I wrote at fifteen. I stood in the wings feeling it in my bones — the vibration, the heat, the madness of hearing your thoughts amplified until they shake the floor. Aiden was electric. Whatever I knew about the machinery behind it didn't make the performance less true. Just more complicated.
After the show he was wired. Pacing the green room with sweat on his neck and adrenaline vibrating off him. Jude and Tommy had gone upstairs. Just us and the ringing aftermath of volume, the ghost of twenty thousand voices still humming in the walls.
"I need to go out." He was pulling on a jacket, reaching for the door. "One drink, Calloway. It's Vegas."
I stepped between him and the door. "No."
"First show back. A toast. Don't I deserve that?"
"You deserve a lot of things. A drink isn't one of them." I planted my feet. He looked down at me — taller, broader, vibrating with the energy that makes people do stupid things — and I looked up and didn't move.
The green room was small enough that I could see the desperation behind his eyes. It wasn't about alcohol. It was about the imposter — the voice that said every cheer was for words he didn't write, every standing ovation a monument to theft, and the only way to silence it was to drown it.
And I was keeping that lie running. Writing new words to replace the stolen ones, per a deal he didn't know existed. The imposter in his chest and the secret in mine — same green room, same stale air.
"Move." His voice was low, his hand on the door handle beside my hip. Close enough that I could smell the post-show heat coming off his skin, the sweat and adrenaline and something underneath that was just him.
"No." My pulse was hammering but my voice was steady and I did not move.
He stared at me. Five seconds. Ten. Jaw working, breathing ragged, hand white-knuckled on the handle. His eyes dropped to my mouth for a half-second — involuntary, almost angry — then snapped back with something that looked like fury at himself for looking. Then something behind his eyes cracked — not broke, cracked — and he let go. Stepped back.
I stayed at the door until his breathing slowed. He sat on the green room couch and put his head in his hands and neither of us spoke, and I thought: you're keeping him sober and keeping him lying and you don't know which one is saving him and which one is killing him.