Page 75 of Always Been His

I know this. I’ve told myself the same thing every morning. The work is the work. The company runs because of the people in it; I make the calls that need making, and the rest of it is administrative.

I just never expected to take over so fast. My father was supposed to have another decade, or three. Sometimes I feel like I’ve so much to learn still, and I know he has so much more to say.

I am twenty-nine years old, my father is dying upstairs and doesn’t even know my name.

And I would like him to hand his business over to me. Is that too much to ask of him?

Maggie refills her coffee without getting up, reaching for the pot on the trivet between us, and fills a cup for me too.

“You know he still has good days,” she says to her coffee. “Last Thursday, he knew the name of every plant in the back garden. He told me which ones your mother planted and which ones he planted after.” She pauses. “He remembered your mother liked blue flowers, and that he asked me to marry him because I love blue flowers too, and it made him think of her.”

I nod, running my tongue along the inside of my cheek.

“He is in there,” she continues. “But the fog is coming a lot more than it goes now, and it’s staying longer. You may never hear those words, Gray, but you have to know he would’ve said them if he could.”

“End of the month, Maggie,” I murmur, sucking in a sharp breath. “I’ll get back to Henry by then.”

“Fine, but Grayson.” She waits until I look at her. “If the moment comes before then, I need you to be ready.”

“I am ready,” I tell her. “I just want him to know.”

She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she nods again and doesn’t push any further, because Margaret Douglas has always known exactly where the line is, and she has never once crossed it.

19

SIENNA

I’ve been sitting on the floor of the guest bedroom for forty minutes with my keyboard across my lap, and my phone propped against the wall, and absolutely no plan.

Well, that isn’t entirely true. I have a plan. The plan is to press ‘live’, say something true, and not throw up. Two out of three so far.

The keyboard is the small travel one I’ve had since I was fourteen. It has a crack running across the bottom left corner from my first concert in Amsterdam, three keys that stick in high humidity, and is the first instrument I bought with my own money, which means it’s the only thing in my music career that has never belonged to anyone but me. That feels important tonight.

I love music. It’s the thing I keep coming back to whenever I sit still long enough to hear myself think. I love it in a way that has nothing to do with stadiums or contracts or Nicki Campbell or a fifty-million-dollar buyout. I love finding a chord that sounds like the inside of a feeling I don’t have words for yet. I love the way a song can move through a room full of strangers and make every single one of them feel less alone for three minutes and forty seconds. I love writing at two a.m., when it is just me and the keyboard. I love the girls who leave comments every few days to check on me, and the boy with the concert ticket stub, and echo_forever_and_always, who has never once asked me to be anything other than who I am.

I don’t love what it costs.

The idea of being Echo again sits in my chest like lead; it twists down to my bones making it hard to breathe. Not because Echo isn’t me. She is. She has always been me, same personality, same voice, and the same songs, just with the volume turned all the way up and no room left over for the quieter version. The problem is, that for the last eight years, the Echo persona has been so loud that the person underneath it forgot who she was.

I put the keyboard on the floor beside me, pick up my phone, and open Instagram.

I haven’t been online as Sienna in years. My Insta is filled with everything Echo from shows to celebrity parties.

But Sienna, bare-faced and unscripted, sitting in front of a camera without a team behind her and a look approved by three different people, hasn’t gone live since I was twenty-one years old and still so new to the whole fame thing that I didn’t understand how much I was going to have to protect myself from everyone. Even those who love Echo.

Because right now, this is about me and the person I want to be. Echo can keep going. She doesn’t need friends, family, water, or food. She doesn’t even breathe. She is everything the fans want from me, even if it destroys me.

Deep breath. I go live.

The screen goes blank for a half-second, and then the counter appears.

Zero viewers. Then twelve.

Then a hundred and forty, the number ticking upward in visible jumps, fifty at a time, a hundred at a time, and then it stops being readable entirely because it is moving faster than my eyes can follow.

I look away from the number and breathe.

I haven’t had to say something true in public for years, everything is normally scripted and prepped, but right now, my whole nervous system is shocking me into submission.