Allison’s POV
The session ran long. David wanted to rework the bridge — "the melody drops where it should climb" — and by the time we'd tracked three versions it was six-fifteen. I checked my phone in the parking lot.
Three missed calls from Jude, no message. A text from Tommy: Where are you? Timestamped 4:47. Nothing from Aiden, which was strange — he texted me every forty minutes — and the silence where his name should have been felt wrong the way a missing tooth feels wrong.
I drove back with the mix playing and the particular glow of a woman whose song was one session from a label. The pregnancy sat underneath like a second heartbeat — the secret I'd tell him tomorrow on the bus.
The hotel lobby was wrong. The Hollow Saints crew was gone. Equipment cases gone. The front desk clerk looked at me with the expression of someone who knew something.
"Where's the band?" The words came out sharp, my hands tightening around my phone.
"They checked out thirty minutes ago, ma'am. The bus departed at six."
Six. I'd been reworking a bridge while our bus rolled out without me. My phone said 6:32. Thirty-two minutes late, and the number sat in my chest like a splinter.
I called Aiden. The call didn't connect — not voicemail, not a ring. The number you have reached is not available. Tried again. Same. Called Jude — voicemail. Tommy — voicemail. The wrongness solidified into something cold and deliberate.
I was by the elevators trying Aiden's number again when the voice came from behind me.
"Allison." Otis. Sitting in a leather chair near the window with a coffee and a newspaper and the unhurried posture of a man who'd been waiting. "I was hoping I'd catch you."
"Where's Aiden?" No preamble. "The bus left and nobody told me and his phone is dead."
"Sit down." He gestured at the chair with the calm of a man who controlled rooms for a living. "Please. This will be easier sitting."
"I don't want to sit down." I could hear my voice rising and I didn't care. "Tell me what's happening."
Otis set his coffee down. Looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen from him — something that looked like sympathy, which was wrong. Otis didn't do sympathy.
"First — congratulations." He said it gently, the way a doctor delivers news they've been trained to soften. "Rumours travel fast on a tour. I heard about the pregnancy. I'm happy for you."
The floor tilted. He knew. The test I'd hidden twelve hours ago was now information traveling through the tour like current through a wire. My hand found the back of a lobby chair and held on. "Who told you?" My voice came out thin and strange, like a sound played through the wrong speaker.
"You know how fans are." Otis shrugged — casual, practiced. "They notice everything about the people they love. Somebody caught you looking pale at the last show, the nausea backstage, you skipping the champagne at the party. There's a thread about it already. Fans piece things together faster than any tabloid." He said it like it was obvious, like the information had traveled organically, like he hadn't stood in my bathroom twelve hours ago holding the evidence in his hands. He leaned forward. "I'm sorry, Allison, but the rumours reached Aiden too."
"He knows?" My hand was on my stomach before I could stop it — involuntary, protective, the body guarding something the mind was still trying to hold together.
"He knows. And he told me he's not ready." Otis exhaled — heavy, practiced. "His career is growing faster than it ever has. He said a child isn't something he can take on right now. That it would derail everything."
The words landed the way the groundskeeper's shed had landed — rearranging the architecture of everything I thought I knew about the person who'd said them. Except this time the person had stood on a stage and said I love this girl.
"I don't believe you." But my voice shook. "He burned his career for me. He stood on a stage and —"
"I know what he did on that stage." Otis's voice didn't waver. "And I know what he told me this afternoon when the rumour reached him. He said he's not the kind of man who can be a father right now. That he watched his own father disappear and he's terrified of becoming him." He paused. "He asked me to tell you that you're on your own now. Those were his words."
The cruelty was in the specifics. The kitchens, the mother who cleaned floors, the father who was never there — Otis was using details Aiden had trusted him with, and I couldn't tell whether Aiden had said those words or Otis had built a lie indistinguishable from truth.
"Let me see him." I stepped forward. "I need to talk to him personally. Face to face."
"I'm so sorry." Otis looked at me with rehearsed sadness. "The bus left at six. He asked me not to tell you." The pause filled with everything it implied — that Aiden had known I was at the studio, that the timing was a coward's exit strategy. "He didn't want the conversation. He wanted distance."
He stood. Straightened his jacket. And then — the final performance, the one that made me want to scream. "Listen. Whatever happens next, your contract with the tour will be paid in full. Every cent. I'll make sure of that personally." He put his hand on my shoulder — brief, warm, the gesture of a man who cared. "You're talented, Allison. Genuinely. And you're going to be a wonderful mother. I'm sorry it happened this way. If there's anything I can do — anything at all — you have my number."
The kindness of it was the worst part. The hand on my shoulder, the softness in his voice, the offer of money and support from the man who was — though I didn't know it yet — the architect of every piece of wreckage in the room.
I stood in the lobby with my phone full of dead calls and a baby inside me, and the thing I felt wasn't sadness. Sadness would come later — in the dark, with my hand on my stomach and the strip glittering through the window.
What I felt was rage. Older and colder than anything before, with a plan forming behind it — the way plans form in women who've been underestimated their entire lives.
He had stood on a stage and said I love this girl. He had held still and said tell me when. And now he'd run — left while I was recording, left a manager as a messenger because looking me in the eye was more courage than the confession-stage hero could muster.
Fine. The word was hard and bright like a blade. You want distance? I'll give you the kind that comes with lawyers and headlines and the full weight of a woman who knows what her words are worth.
I walked to the elevator. Caught my reflection in the mirrored wall — yesterday's clothes, studio headphone marks in my hair, hand on my stomach, jaw set. The woman looking back was not the woman who'd walked into this hotel carrying a duffel and a deal. That woman had been surviving. This one was done surviving.
The doors closed. The elevator climbed. And somewhere on a highway between Las Vegas and Phoenix, a man I loved was believing a lie about me while I believed a lie about him, and between those two lies a man in a suit sat in a lobby drinking coffee and telling himself it was business.
But that was a story for another day. Tonight I had a hotel room and a rage and a baby and the first song I'd ever recorded, and I pressed my palm against my stomach and said, to no one and to everything: "We're going to be fine. You and me."
The elevator opened. I stepped out. And I began.