Page 29 of Better than Famous

"I’ve heard that song," he said. "On the radio. Brenna plays it at the bookstore constantly. It’s usually... louder."

I winced. "I know. It’s pop. It’s supposed to be loud."

"It’s a production," he corrected gently. "On the radio, it’s just a glossy package. A beat. A hook. Something to tap your foot to while you’re buying coffee."

He looked at the keys, then back at my face. "But that? What you just did? That was real. The song sounds like it actually belongs to you now."

I stared at him, stunned. I had won Grammys. I had received glowing reviews in the New York Times. I had fans who tattooed my lyrics on their bodies. But no one—not Nash, not the critics, not even my mother—had ever told me that my music sounded real. They told me it sounded like a hit. They told me it sounded expensive.

Ben, the man who preferred the Eagles and bought generic peanut butter, had just given me the most validating compliment of my entire career.

"It felt like mine." The admission slipped out before I could stop it. "I forgot what that felt like."

“I’m glad you found it again.”

"Why do you have this?" I ran a hand along the polished wood of the cheek block, needing to shift the focus before I started crying. "You don’t play."

"No. I have hands like catchers’ mitts. I can’t play a scale to save my life." He reached out and touched the top of the piano, his fingers brushing the dust I had disturbed. "I found it in a house on Big Pine after a flood a few years back. The owners were gutting the place, tossing everything. They were going to take a sledgehammer to it because the action was seized up from the humidity."

He shrugged, a gesture of casual competence that I was learning was his trademark. "The wood was good. It just needed... patience. I took it apart. Sanded the hammers. Replaced the felts. Retuned it, mostly. I like fixing things. I like taking something that’s broken and making it work again."

I stared at his hands resting on the dark wood. Those were the same hands that had fixed the carburetor on his truck. The same hands that had washed the dirt out of my hair. He built the structure, fixed the mechanism, and prepared the vessel so that someone else could come along and make the music.

"You saved it," I said softly.

"Nah, I just fixed it. It was a piece of covered furniture until you sat down. I can make the keys move, Sutton, but I can’t make it sing. That’s you."

The air between us grew thick again, charged with the same current that had sparked in the kitchen the night before. But this was different. He saw the artist in me, not the celebrity. He saw the work, not the glitter.

He was standing close enough that I could smell the soap on his skin and the faint scent of laundry detergent from his shirt. I wanted to stand up. I wanted to close the distance between us and press my face against his chest. I wanted to tell him that he had fixed me just as surely as he had fixed this piano—by giving me the space and the patience to find my own sound again.

"It was beautiful, Sutton," he said, his voice low and final. "But it’s late. And you need to sleep. The ankle heals better when you rest." He was retreating and putting the professional distance back in place, reasserting the boundaries that I kept trying to blur.

"You’re right." I forced a smile. "I should sleep. Sorry I woke you."

"Don’t ever be sorry for that. Goodnight.” He turned and walked back down the hallway, disappearing into the shadows of his bedroom. His door closed, a soft click that signaled the end of the moment.

I sat on the bench for another minute, listening to the silence rush back in. But it wasn’t heavy anymore. The air was pregnant with possibility. I reached out and played one last note—a high C that rang out clear and bright in the darkness. I wasn’t just hiding in this cottage anymore. I was healing. And for the first time in I didn’t know how long, I liked the sound of my voice.

Chapter Thirteen

BEN

The underside of my 1978 truck was a familiar landscape of rust, steel, and mechanical stubbornness. I lay flat on a creeper, a wrench in one hand and a shop rag in the other, fighting a seized bolt on the transmission housing. The morning sun baked the gravel driveway, offering a deceptive, heavy heat I wanted to soak up before the approaching low pressure area finally swallowed the island. The air carried a weird mixed scent of motor oil and the sweet jasmine climbing the porch trellis, but my head was stuck in the middle of last night.

The haunting, stripped-down melody Sutton played on my upright piano still echoed around the inside of my skull. She hadn’t sung like a global pop star. She had sung like a woman bleeding her soul out onto the keys. The raw, unpolished ache in her voice bypassed every defense mechanism I owned, hooking straight into my chest. Walking away from her in the dark had required a brutal amount of willpower. Now, hiding under two tons of metal, I used the frustration of a stuck bolt to keep myself from sliding out just to stare at her again.

From my vantage point beneath the chassis, my view of the world was reduced to the black rubber of the front tires, a strip of green lawn, and the wooden steps of the cottage porch. A pair of bare feet and the hem of a blue T-shirt rested on the top step. Sutton sat there reading the Krakauer book, occasionally shifting her weight or turning a page.

It was a peaceful tableau, one that felt dangerously domestic. Since the revelation of her identity, we had settled into a rhythm that felt less like hiding and more like living. I fixed things. She read or hummed quietly to herself. We ate dinner together. We existed in the same space without needing to fill the silence with noise.

I leaned on the wrench some more, satisfaction filling me as the metal groaned and finally gave. I wiped a smudge of grease from my forehead with the back of my wrist. I liked knowing Sutton was there. I liked the sound of her turning pages. I liked the feeling of being the perimeter fence that kept the world away from her.

Then I heard it.

It was a sound that didn’t belong—the crunch of tires on gravel that wasn’t moving at the speed of a delivery truck. My body went rigid, and the wrench hovered in mid-air as I strained my ears against the hum of the cicadas. The vehicle was moving slowly, tentatively, the engine purring with the quiet efficiency of a late-model sedan. It wasn’t the mail carrier. He drove a rig with a bad muffler. And the neighbors all drove trucks or SUVs and took the corner at damn-near thirty miles per hour.

A cold, sharp spike of adrenaline pierced through the warm morning haze. My mind immediately flashed to the worst-case scenarios I had been running—the photographer from the hospital who had tracked the burner phone or a private investigator hired by her ex-husband coming to drag her back to the cage.