Page 129 of Crescendo

Natália slumped, shoulders falling, as she shut the book and threw it aside. “Okay, never mind. I thought maybe for a second that you were some kind of songwriting genius when you were drunk and sad. Melinda! What are we feeding her?”

Melinda patted me on the shoulder. “What do you want to eat?”

“I don’t want to eat. I want to be locked up inside an auditorium set ablaze and play the violin screaming for it all to end until the flames consume me and there’s nothing left but the echoes of my last cries out into the world.”

“What do you want to eat?”

“I want ramen.”

She got me ramen. That was really nice of her. It helped ground me enough to come back down from the hazy place I was, but I didn’t really want to come down from that place… didn’t want to face the way my body and soul were built on a crumbling foundation and how I was so damn scared of finishing because I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself once I didn’t have this project to pour myself into.

Melinda and Natália fussed over me, made sure I ate, drank water like a fish, and finally, made absolutely sure I went to bed as soon as they could make me, Melinda lingering in the bedroom to make sure I wasn’t crawling out of bed looking for my notebooks.

“There’s going to be light at the other end of the tunnel, okay?” Melinda said quietly. “Don’t scare us like that again.”

“Thank you. You and Natália. I’m… I’m glad it’s you she picked.”

She softened, even though she furrowed her brow. “Don’t try to get me to overlook this just by being sweet and crap like that.”

“That’s not what this is. I promise.”

And I broke my promise, because the second the two of them were gone, I found myself compelled out of bed, footsteps padding over the carpet as I walked back into the music room and picked up my notebook, flipping to the last used page and reading it.

Damn, my handwriting was bad when I’d been drinking. But maybe I wasn’t completely…completelyoff base.

I Only Meant Well.Turned out Hannah was a seriously damn good songwriter. If she’d tried to write the song for this scene, she couldn’t have done a better job. Hedson, like me, looking at the broken and bloodied results of good intentions, crumbling all around him, and the only way he knew to address it was to go further, to push harder.

I went back to bed. But I took the notebook with me. And even though I tried to get to sleep—really, I did—it haunted me, and I wound up with the bedside lamp on, scratching out notes of the instrumentation, the orchestration. How to blend the sound together.

And I listened to Ella’s arrangement again, the clarinet stirring something deep inside me. I meant to listen to it once, but when it cracked something in me and I found tears hot on my face, I wound up standing in the music room again, lit only in the pale moonlight, headphones on, listening to the song and conducting an orchestra of ghosts, all that was left between me and Ella as this one piece linked me back to her.

It was three in the morning before I knew it. I slipped my headphones off, and I sat back on the floor, surrounded by the scattered papers, and without really realizing what I was doing, I picked up my phone, and I dialed.

It rang twice before it picked up, the voice confused down the line. “Lydia? Aren’t you in LA?”

“Morning, Adam.”

Adam scoffed. “Morning to you too. It’s, what, three in the morning? Are you out of your mind?”

“I had to talk to you. It’s very urgent.”

He paused, his voice hitching down the line, and he said, “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Hannah and Eliza. Have they worked things out between them?”

“That is not remotely where I was expecting this to go. Did you hit your head?”

“Answer the damn question.”

He sighed. “Well, admittedly, it’s always something good when you sound like you’ve lost your mind… I think so, actually. I think Ella helped them out, a lot.”

I laughed thinly. “That’s just like her. Always healing things. To think I’d fall for a doctor, huh?”

“A doctor who’s a composition genius. Seems like exactly the kind of over-the-top person you would gravitate towards. So, what, did you just urgently need to know if Hannah and Eliza are dating? You know there’s reality TV shows if you just want a quick hit of messy dating drama.”

“I need them.”

“Damn, can’t get enough girls, huh?”

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