Page 38 of The Lodge

“It seems like you weren’t just willing to be more patient with Jason, but also more forgiving, even after he manipulated you both—but in your voice memos, it sounds like your feelings aboutJason and the whole situation changed at some point. When was that, and what caused it?”

“Nowthat’sa loaded question.”

He runs a hand over his five-o’clock shadow, which barely even qualifies as a shadow since it’s blond and only visible when the sunlight hits it in just the right way.

“It… it took way too long to sever ties with Jason,” he says. “I should have done it a lot earlier. Jett tried to get me to do it sooner—”

He breaks off and looks away.

“We met up one time, just Jett and me, and he pitched this idea—he wanted us to, like, go on strike, refuse to play Jason’s games anymore. Refuse to record, refuse to perform, stuff like that. Said it would only work if both of us did it together, which was probably true since none of the other guys could carry the lead vocals. He didn’t say so, but I’m sure he thought it would get under Jason’s skin if I suddenly started putting my foot down about stuff—Jason played favorites, and I was his favorite because I never made trouble or asked too many questions.”

“And Jett did?”

“Oh, all the time. And he hated that I went along with everything Jason wanted, called me a puppet or something stupid like that. Jett and I were never on good terms, so I was suspicious of the whole thing from the minute he asked me to go get drinks. I thought maybe he was just trying to pull me down so he wouldn’t be the only one on Jason’s bad side.”

“So you said no,” I say, “because you were happy enough as it was and because you didn’t want to burn bridges with Jason?”

He nods. “Didn’t realize until later that bridges aren’t worth keeping if they lead straight to snake pits.”

I scribble that line down word for word—that’s definitely going in the book.

“When was that?” I ask. “The ‘later,’ I mean, when you finally came to that realization?”

His jaw tenses as he looks off into the distance.

“When Jett disappeared and Jason found a replacement by the next weekend.”

Wow.Wow.

I had no idea he’d been replacedthatquickly—their PR team must have buried that detail somehow. They definitely didn’t announce the new guy until some time had passed. I remember because I wrote one of the “breaking news” articles that went viral. The band didn’t last much longer after that, though, so the replacement—Adrian Silva—didn’t make a lasting impression on most of the fandom.

“I don’t think it really hit me until then how right Jett was about Jason, or that he’d been sincere when pitching the idea to strike all those months earlier. It sounded ludicrous, honestly—we were all under contract, you know? It’s not like we could just say no to stuff. It’s not like we could just walk away from any of it. When Jett disappeared, though—”

He cuts himself off.

“When he disappeared,” Sebastian starts again, “I felt really, really sick. Like maybe if I’d gone along with his idea, maybe things—maybe he wouldn’t have—”

He closes his eyes.

“Maybe he’d still be here.”

His words hang between us, even across the ocean and the internet.

As if he realizes how heavy it sounded, he adds, “I mean, he has to be out there somewhere, right?” What he doesn’t say is that eight years is a long time to stay that far under the radar. “But whatever happened to him… it could’ve been different.”

This is it, I think—this is my opening. Now or never.

“In one of your recordings, you said that his disappearance was one of the best things that ever happened to you,” I say. “What, exactly, did you mean by that?”

His eyes flicker downward, then back up to the camera.

“It was the thing that finally made me wake up and muster the guts to cut ties with Jason. Best career choice I ever made.”

He pauses, bites his lip.

“I hate that it took Jett disappearing for me to do it, though. And sometimes—”

His brows knit together. Gone is the shiny veneer he shows to every camera and anyone else who’ll look: this is the real Sebastian. I didn’t truly believe he had this level of vulnerability in him.

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