Page 49 of The Song We Lost

The one Luke will hear.

The one the internet will replay.

“There’s no place I’d rather be.”

The words taste like ash. They make me feel sick because I’m not petty by nature. I’m not cruel. I’m not here to hurt anyone. But I also think... just for a flicker of a second...

If he’s watching, he should know what that means. How it feels…

He tossed me aside. He threw away seven years of marriage and a lifetime of friendship, family, love. And he didn’t even call.

So yes, I say it.

Let him hear it.

Let him feel even a fraction of what I have felt.

Then something in my chest lifts, not because I’m okay, but because I finally stop trying to protect him from consequences.

Jackson grins, and the band hits the first chord, and I sing. It's not careful or small...

I sing like a woman who has spent years dimming herself to fit beside a man who kept needing her to shrink.

No more.

The crowd is singing back at me, and I feel power and pain in the same breath. I feel distance from my old self. I feel…release. And when Jackson harmonizes with me, it doesn’t feel like a replacement. It feels like collaboration, like respect. Like someone standing beside me without needing me to disappear. When the song ends, the roar is deafening.

Jackson pulls me into a quick side-hug, then he leans close. “You good?” he asks again.

I nod, because I am still standing, and right now that’s all I have.

The party is industry-heavy, with bright smiles, expensive perfume, laughter that doesn’t reach eyes, and everyone hunting for opportunity like its prey. I usually avoid parties like these.

Rachel stops me just before we enter, her hand is light on my elbow.

Her voice is low. “They served him,” she says.

My body stills, a strange, heavy sense of finality overwhelming me.

I blink once.

“Okay,” I say.

Rachel watches my face. “We can leave.”

I shake my head.

“I can’t,” I say quietly. “I need to do this.”

Rachel nods once, understanding that this isn’t ambition. It’s survival.

Jackson is at my side as we enter the room. He feels oddly like a barrier made of calm. The buzz shifts the second people see us. Heads turn as conversations pause. And then they come, industry stars, producers, writers, label execs, other artists.

Jackson does something subtle and brilliant: he introduces me before anyone can define me. And then when someone asks how I got so lucky to score a deal to work with Jackson, he jumps in and says, “I am the lucky one. I get to be the first artistto collaborate with her. I’ve been wanting to work with her for five years. I saw her sing in a bar in Nashville right before she got signed, and I have been after my team to make something happen.”

What...

I swallow hard.