Page 89 of I Would Die for You

“Can I help you?” he asks nervously, clearly unused to visitors coming all this way into the Hollywood Hills without good reason. I daren’t tell him that I’ve driven two and a half hours just to see him.

“Ben?”

He cocks his head, as if it will help, but his eyes—in which I can see no semblance of his old self—are still unable to recognize me.

“I’m sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong address,” he says, going to close the door.

“Ben, it—it’s me,” I say, putting a hand out to stop him. “Nicole.”

He freezes. “Nicole?”

I nod and tears immediately spring to his eyes.

“Can I come in?”

For a moment, he looks as if he might say no, but then the door opens a little wider and he silently beckons me in, his voice shocked into silence.

“I’m sorry to show up like this… I didn’t know how else to—”

“It—it’s OK,” he manages. “I guess there’s a part of me, deep down, that’s always been expecting you.”

“You know why I’m here?” I ask, his revelation only adding to my sense of foreboding.

“I’ve got a good idea,” he says, turning away. “Although you’re five years late.”

I choke at the reference, unable to believe that he’d remember our pact to meet in Los Angeles twenty years on.

“I guess neither of our lives panned out quite how we expected,” I say.

“So, what took you so long?” he asks, as he leads me down the hall.

The living room is in total disarray: paperwork is piled in towering mountains; the mail lies unopened on the sofa, on the table, behind the clock on the fireplace; and vinyl record sleeves form abstract patterns on the floor.

“I was never brave enough,” I offer quietly.

“So, why now?” he asks, going to the sideboard and pouring himself a double measure of whiskey into a tumbler. He knocks it back in one, scowling as the heat of the liquid hits the back of his throat.

“Because I need to tell you something,” I say, before I have a chance to change my mind.

He waits with raised eyebrows, refusing to make this easy for me. I don’t blame him.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am.”

He fixes me with a look so intense that I suddenly see the man I used to know so well. I’m back in that recording studio, our faces so close that our noses are touching as we share the mic, naively daring to believe that the sense of utopia that we’ve inexplicably found, in the music we’re making, could last forever.

“So, finally there’s an apology…” he murmurs, with an air of detachment, as if he’s talking about somebody else’s life. I presume it’s a skill he’s had to employ in order to survive the grave miscarriage of justice that was bestowed upon him.

“It’s been a long time coming,” I say.

“Do you know how many journalists and armchair detectives have come knocking over the years, every one of them looking to unlock therealreason I did what I did?” He laughs falsely. “And yet not one—not one—suggested that perhaps I didn’t do anything at all.”

A viselike grip squeezes my airways, crushing my ribs. “I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have spent all these years being punished for something you had no part in.”

His lips pull thin. “Why are you here, Nicole?”

A single tear escapes and I hastily wipe it away. “Because everything has changed.”

He studies me with suspicion before pouring whiskey into two tumblers and holding one out in my direction. I accept it readily with a shaking hand, needing something,anything, to dull my nerve endings.

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