Aiden’s POV
The suite was too quiet. The kind of quiet that doesn't just fill a room — it eats it. I'd been sitting on the couch for forty minutes staring at the wall, thinking about how many walls I'd stared at in how many hotel rooms while the silence did its work on me like water on stone.
She'd walked away. Footsteps sharp on concrete, not looking back. I'd stood there with my hands shaking and mine still hanging in the air like smoke. I'd called her my sitter. I'd watched her face close and let it happen because the alternative would have meant stepping off a ledge I couldn't see the bottom of.
The minibar hummed in the corner. I looked at it the way you look at an ex who's moved on — with the specific knowledge that the thing you want is right there and the thing it would cost you is everything. I didn't open it. The voice in my head that used to say don't had changed somewhere on this tour — it wasn't mine anymore, it was hers, and I knew she wouldn't like it. That was the only victory I had tonight and it was a small, strange one.
I found Jude on the rooftop terrace. Beer, phone, the particular stillness of a man who'd learned to be alone in public spaces. The strip glittered below. He looked up when I dropped into the chair beside him and waited, because Jude understood that people who needed to talk would talk when the silence got heavy enough.
"I'm in love with her." The words came out without preamble, without buildup, without the careful construction I usually put around anything that mattered. Just the raw fact, dropped onto the rooftop like a thing I'd been carrying too long and couldn't hold anymore.
Jude took a sip of his beer. "Yeah, man." His voice was calm and completely unsurprised. "I know."
"You know." I stared at him. "How long have you known?"
"Since the bus." He set the beer down. "Since you changed the station when her lyrics came on. Since you sang the wrong verse at soundcheck because she was standing in the wings. Since you stopped being a complete asshole for the first time in six years." He paused. "That was the big tell."
I leaned back in the chair and looked at the sky. Vegas had too much light pollution for stars but you could see them anyway if you squinted — faint, persistent, refusing to be drowned out.
"I've been in love with her since I was seventeen." The truth sat in my chest like a key turning. "I thought it was envy — thought the reason I couldn't stop reading her notebook was because I wanted what she had. The talent, the words. But it wasn't that. It was her. The mind that made them. I was in love with her and I was seventeen and terrified and the only thing I knew how to do with a feeling that big was destroy it."
Jude listened the way he played drums — present, precise, making you feel heard without being watched. I told him the rest. "Otis made a deal with her. Told her to write my songs in exchange for a singing career. Engineered the whole thing — the coffee shop, the hire, her being here. She was his asset from day one." I looked at Jude. "She told me. Herself. Could have kept lying and didn't."
"And you punished her for it." Not a question. Jude said it the way he played drums — precise, no wasted motion.
"I called her my sitter." The words tasted like ash. "She asked what she was to me and I said my sitter because I was too afraid to say the real thing. Because if I do, I have to ask whether she'd be here without Otis's contract. And what if she wouldn't?"
"Would it matter?" The question landed on the rooftop between us like a coin tossed into still water.
"Would it matter how she got here?" Jude picked up his beer again. "She's here. She told you the truth. She taught you to write your own songs — which, by the way, directly sabotaged the deal Otis gave her. She torched her own leverage to hand you a pen." He drank. "Does it matter that the door she walked through was built by someone else if she's the one who chose to stay?"
The rooftop was quiet except for the hum of the strip below and the distant sound of a city pretending it never slept. I sat with Jude's words and felt them land in the places where the fear lived, in the gap between what I knew and what I'd been too scared to act on.
"I need to fix this," I said. Not the vague version I'd given Allison in the desert. Something harder. Something specific. "Not just with her. With everyone. The stolen songs, the notebooks, the career Otis built on lies — all of it."
Jude set his beer down slowly. "What are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking about the show tomorrow night. Twenty thousand people. Full production." I was staring at the strip but I wasn't seeing it. I was seeing a stage and a microphone and the particular terror of standing in front of a crowd and telling them the truth about the man they'd paid to see.
"I'm going to tell them. Everything. The notebook, the girl, the stolen words. That my career is built on someone else's talent and I've been lying about it for eight years."
Jude was quiet for a long time. The beer sweated in his hand. "And Allison?"
I looked at Jude. "I'm going to bring her onstage and hand her a microphone and give her the thing everyone took from her."
Jude stared at me. The strip lights reflected in his eyes. "That's either the bravest or the dumbest thing you've ever done."
"Probably both." I almost smiled. It felt strange on my face, like a muscle I'd forgotten I had.
"Otis will destroy you. The label will drop you." Jude wasn't arguing — he was making sure I'd counted the cost. "Your career —"
"My career is built on stolen words." I said it quietly. The rooftop absorbed it. "It was never mine. And I'd rather have nothing that belongs to me than everything that belongs to her."
Jude looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded — a single nod, the kind that said I'm with you and you're insane and I'm still with you. He raised his beer. I had nothing to raise, so I just sat there in the rooftop dark with the decision crystallizing in my chest like something that had always been there, waiting for me to stop being afraid long enough to see it.
The next morning I found Allison in the hotel lobby. She was sitting in one of the oversized chairs with a coffee and a phone and the particular posture of a woman who was very carefully not looking for anyone. I stood in front of her. My hands were in my pockets because if they weren't they'd be shaking.
"Be close to the stage tonight." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Watch from the wings. Just — trust me."
She looked up. Her eyes searched my face — for the angle, for the performance, for the version of me that would have said this as a manipulation. She didn't find it. Whatever she found instead made something shift in her expression — not softening exactly. Recognition. The face of a woman who'd spent weeks learning the difference between Aiden performing and Aiden meaning it.
She didn't say yes. She didn't say no. She looked back at her phone and sipped her coffee and the silence between us was the loudest thing in the lobby. But she didn't say no. And that was enough to walk away on.