Page 92 of The Sound Between Us

“Yes, you are,” Jamie grins. “You’re playing all of us.”

Harrison catches my eye. The look he gives me isn’t collaborative. It’s something deeper. Reverent. Not Damon Rogers’ daughter. Not Faith Jones’ legacy. Just me. Just Seren. Just this moment of pure, unfiltered creative truth.

“You know what you are?” Dex sets his sticks down slowly. “You’re a producer.”

“I’m absolutely not.”

“Yes,” Harrison’s voice is low, certain, weighted with something that sounds dangerously close to worship. “You are. And you’re fucking brilliant at it.”

The words land deep. Not because they’re flattering—I’ve heard flattery before, hollow and calculated. Because they’re true. Because they see me, not the ghost of someone else’s success, not the careful façade I’ve built to stay safe, but the thing I’ve been hiding even from myself.

This isn’t Dad’s world, I realise, as the feeling settles.

This is mine.

Harrison reaches for my hand.

This time, I let him.

His fingers are rough, warm, callused with years of chords and heartbreak, and the contact sends a shock straight up my spine. But it’s not just chemistry, though Christ knows there’s enough of that to power half of Los Angeles. It’s more dangerous than that.

It’s artistic recognition. It’s shared breath. It’s knowing.

“I think I understand now why you couldn’t write without me,” I say softly.

“Why?”

“Because you forgot who you were trying to be.”

It hangs in the air like prophecy. Or warning.

Mark saves the session with a few precise clicks, already knowing he’s caught lightning in a bottle for the first time in months.

And I know, deep down in the part of me I’ve spent years trying to bury beneath record shop shifts and safe, small choices, that if this is real, if we truly need each other to create like this, then everything we’ve built to stay safe isn’t going to survive.

Maybe it’s not supposed to.