Page 142 of One Last Encore

CHAPTER 37

BECK. END OF JANUARY, FIVE YEARS AGO

The city pulsed around him, neon lights casting broken reflections across rain-slick pavement. Taxi horns blared, sharp and relentless, slicing through the cold, indifferent night. The streets were alive, moving, feeling. Everything he wasn’t. Beck felt like a shadow, drifting through a world that had long since left him behind.

The weeks after Ingrid left had blurred together, melting into a shapeless haze of empty bottles and sleepless nights. What was supposed to be a short trip stretched longer and longer until there was no denying it: She wasn’t coming back. Not to Juilliard. Not to him.

He chased the void with whiskey, but the burn faded too fast. Tried to drown her absence in the amber depths of a glass, yet every sip only sharpened the silence she left behind. Alcohol was a liar—warm in the throat, cold in the heart. It numbed, never healed. And in the quiet spaces between each drink, the ghosts came crawling. Unresolved traumas. Broken relationships. The suffocating weight of his own inadequacies. His past clawed athim, Ingrid’s absence cracking open wounds he had spent a lifetime trying to ignore.

He could hear Rodney’s voice sneering in his head, feel the distant sting of his mother’s indifference. They would have told him to take another drink, to quiet the noise, to sink.

And for a while, he did.

Nights blurred into mornings, indistinguishable save for the number of empty bottles left in his wake. He drank until the ache dulled, until his limbs felt weightless, until sleep pulled him under like a slow-moving tide. But the moment his eyes opened, whether in the stale quiet of his apartment or slumped in some dimly lit bar, the weight came crashing back.

One drink turned into two. Two into three. Eventually, counting stopped mattering.

He woke slumped against the frozen brick outside a bar, pavement biting into his back. His breath came in shallow, uneven puffs, mingling with the dawn mist curling over the city streets. The bar was closed, its windows dark. He had no memory of when the night had ended or when his legs had given out beneath him.

His fingers ached from the cold, stiff and barely responsive as he tried to flex them. A crinkling sound met his ears.

Beck blinked, vision slow to focus. He looked down at his hand.

A five-dollar bill.

For a second, he didn’t understand. Then, realization struck with sharp, brutal clarity. Someone had mistaken him for a man without a home.

A hollow laugh rasped from his throat, half a sob, half a breathless, bitter sound. The crumpled bill in his palm felt heavier than it should have, as if it carried the weight of every choice, every mistake, every piece of himself he had let slip away.

Staring at the bill, he felt her again. Not the real Ingrid, the one who had walked away, but the Ingrid who had cared. The Ingrid who had once believed in him, even when he couldn’t believe in himself.

And suddenly, that five-dollar bill wasn’t just a bill. It was a choice.

He could take it and numb himself all over again, lose himself in the only thing that had ever made forgetting easy. That’s what Rodney would have done. That’s what his mother would have done.

His fingers tightened around the bill. His knuckles ached, his hands shaking from the cold or maybe from something deeper, something raw and clawing at his ribs. His chest felt too tight, too full, and then it ruptured like something inside him finally gave out.

Tears burned hot against the frigid air, slipping down his cheeks, his shoulders shaking with sobs he had buried for too long. The grief, the guilt, the unbearable weight of not being enough, it all crashed over him in violent, gut-wrenching waves.

For the first time, he didn’t fight it. He let himself feel it all–the past, the pain, the realization that he couldn’t live like this anymore.

Through blurred vision, Beck looked down at the crumpled bill again. It was nothing, just five dollars. But right then, it felt like the whole damn world had been folded into that scrap of paper.

Slowly, shakily, he pushed himself to his feet. His body protested, weak and unsteady, exhaustion sinking into his bones like cold water. But he kept moving. Step by step. Breath by breath.

Not toward the liquor store.

Not toward another night lost in oblivion.

But toward the nearest subway station.

Toward the closest rehab center.

CHAPTER 38

INGRID. MID DECEMBER, PRESENT

"How lucky I was to matter to you, even if only for a moment."

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