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Anger began to chip away at the numbness, igniting a firestorm of rage within me. How dare he? How dare he lie to me for so long and then lack the decency to confront me with his cowardice face-to-face. To look me in the eye and see the destruction he’d caused.
My eyes fell upon the gorgeous sapphire ring adorning my finger, the very symbol of his broken vows, and I wanted to vomit. With an inhuman scream tearing through my chest, I wrenched the ring from my finger and hurled it across the room, not caring to see where it landed. If he thought he’d get it back after this, he was fucking delusional.
The sheer force of my fury demanded movement, so I staggered to my feet, propelled by an overwhelming need to do something, anything, to quell the turmoil raging within. My gaze landed on the bottle of gin tucked behind the fruit bowl in the kitchen. I’d never been a drinker, a conscious decision shaped by the addictive genes I feared lay dormant in my DNA. The alcohol wasn’t even mine; it had been a gift from the label when I signed my official contract. Initially kept as a reminder of my journey from my shitty childhood, where a bottle of gin was synonymous with a Tuesday morning bender, it now offered solace in its numbing embrace. Grateful that I hadn’t relinquished it to Carl, I reached for the bottle, craving the oblivion only mind-altering substances could provide—something to drown out the betrayal and heartache consuming me.
Already feeling intoxicated, I unscrewed the cap and took a swig directly from the bottle. The liquid burned like a motherfucker, and an unexpected fit of coughing threatened to expel the entire mouthful. Damn, that tasted like paint thinner. I couldn’t comprehend why people drank for pleasure. But desperate times called for desperate measures. I took another mouthful, then another, until the acrid taste became somewhat bearable.
As warmth began to suffuse my veins, I started to understand the allure. With each gulp, my mind grew fuzzier, the spiteful thoughts slowing to a crawl. In that haze, a newfound empathy for my mother emerged. A recognition that if she’d endured even a fraction of the pain I felt tonight, I could understand her reasons for never wanting to be sober. And, if drugs were the only escape from such agony, I’m not sure I could blame her anymore.
Because my heart, shattered beyond repair, would never recover from this. In this moment, I wanted to despise Gray, to dismiss the love I’d harbored for him as a cruel illusion. But I couldn’t. Despite his betrayal, he would always be the love of my life. The intensity of my feelings remained stubbornly unchanged. My heart would forever belong to that overgrown country boy with the dimples, even though it shouldn’t. Even a decade from now, I knew, my soul would remain tethered to him, a prisoner of love’s cruel grip.
With tears flowing freely down my face and an overwhelming need for comfort, I reached for the only thing that had ever brought me solace: my guitar. Not the old, battered one I’d kept since childhood, but the beautiful vintage acoustic in cherry red that Gray had surprised me with on our wedding night.
I remembered his bashful expression as he presented it to me, likely afraid I wouldn’t want to replace my worn-out instrument, even though it had only been two hard strums away from falling apart completely. Gray had always had a way of thinking about sentimental gestures like that, something that rarely occurred to me. Opening the case, he’d explained that he wanted to start our life together by giving me a symbol of how proud he was of me. He said he wanted to be the one to provide the instrument with which I would write songs to inspire countless hurt and lonely souls, much like mine had once been. My breath hitched on a sob just thinking about it.
In my inebriated state, fueled by anger and sorrow, a part of me urged to smash the guitar to pieces—to spite him, to show that if I wasn’t good enough for him to keep, then his meaningless gifts weren’t worth keeping either.
But I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it. Instead, I wanted to prove him right. I wanted to show him that I could thrive without him, that his absence wouldn’t diminish my worth. And if, by some chance, he ever removed his head from his asshole and realized what a mistake he’d made, I wanted to be able to show him that the only meaningful thing he’d ever given me was my guitar.
So, with snot and tears drying on my face, eyes red rimmed and puffy, and the world spinning, I took my guitar out of its case, grabbed a pen and paper, and poured every ounce of emotion, pain, and memory into my music. That night, I channeled my heartbreak into over a dozen songs, replacing tracks I’d already recorded and forming the core of my debut album. These songs would come to resonate with millions of people, fulfilling what I’d set out to do. What Gray had driven me to do: become a star.
Overnight, I became a household name.
And I’d never been more miserable to get everything I ever wanted.
It was all a mistake.
20. “Waves”
Grayson
Inching the door closed with a feather-light touch, I held my breath as I braced for the inevitable. Just when I thought it might be safe to relax, I was swiftly reminded of my naivety. Rookie mistake.
A siren-like wail shattered the silence, penetrating the flimsy barrier of the bedroom door with ease. Lesson number twenty-seven in parenting: children can smell your fear, and they will exploit it without mercy. Clearly a lesson I had yet to master.
My emotions, tightly locked down, threatened to overflow. Tears of sadness, loneliness, frustration, and grief welled up, burning behind my eyelids.
With a trembling breath, I composed myself as best I could and returned to the bedroom, only to be met with a gut-wrenching reminder of my inadequacy. The plaintive cry that underscored my current state of helplessness.
“Mommy! I want my mommy!” Violet screamed, her tiny face tear-soaked and turning an alarming shade of purple.
I couldn’t take it anymore. My tears fell in sync with hers. After all, I intimately understood the agony of screaming out for the person you loved more than anything in the world, knowing that they were never coming back.
As I gathered my distraught baby sister into my arms, her screams echoing in the room, a wave of guilt washed over me for even daring to draw parallels between our circumstances. This innocent soul had lost both her parents in an instant, too young to comprehend why her world had been upended so cruelly. And in their place, she’d been left with nothing but a bumbling, emotional mess of a half-brother as her new Wish version of a parent to fill the void.
Together, we settled into the worn embrace of the rocking chair Brenda had unearthed from storage for us, clinging to each other in our shared turmoil. Tears mingled as I murmured what I hoped were comforting words, knowing it would be some time before Violet settled enough to drift back to sleep. As awful as it sounded, over the past three weeks, I had become a master at drowning out her relentless cries, those agonizing echoes that seemed to haunt every corner of the house. Moments of silence had been rare ever since the social worker had dropped her off at my house, fleeting respites when exhaustion finally overtook her enough that she slept fitfully for half an hour or so.
I was woefully unprepared to be a parent. Still practically a child myself, I found myself thrust into the role of caregiver, tasked with the daunting responsibility of keeping another human alive and trying not to monumentally fuck her up. Which, given how fucked up I was at the moment, seemed unlikely.
Grief had rendered me adrift, unable to navigate the currents of life as a functional human being. The funeral had been a harrowing ordeal, a procession of mourners offering hollow condolences. Bombarded by dozens of my father’s old friends remarking on my red rimmed eyes and praising me for being such a good young man to take in my baby sister. I felt like a fraud. Because my grief didn’t follow the expected script; I hadn’t been crying over my dad’s death, like a normal person would. I was grieving a terrible loss, just not the one they assumed.
The searing ache in my chest threatened to consume me as the memories of that callous phone call I had made clawed at the edges of my consciousness. No. I couldn’t let them in. Not now, not when I was barely managing to hold it together for Violet’s sake.
My emotions swirling around my father’s death were a tumultuous mess. We’d never been particularly close, even during my parent’s marriage. Things took a drastic turn when I turned ten; that’s when Mom came out as bisexual and requested a divorce, citing her need to explore her identity without the constraints of marriage and motherhood. Dad, ever the workaholic, had been ill-equipped to navigate single parenthood. So he didn’t. Instead, he relied on my Grandma Betty to supervise me after school until he deemed me old enough to fend for myself. Then, at the ripe age of seventeen, he arranged for me to move out into my own place, preaching the importance of independence despite me still having years of high school remaining. Barely a month later, he vanished to St. Louis with his new wife June, and I hadn’t laid eyes on him in person since. Doing the math, June would have been pregnant months before they moved, meaning they’d deliberately excluded me from Violet’s life.
So questioning the rationale behind my father’s decision to entrust Violet’s care to me might make me an asshole, but then again, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? The man was a self-absorbed prick through and through. He couldn’t muster feigned interest in my life, not even bothering to stick around town until I graduated—another event he was notably absent from.
I used to feel a sense of relief, even gratitude, that my parents weren’t like Colt’s, ensnared by their own demons. Yet, it was becoming painfully clear that our situations weren’t all that dissimilar. While Colt’s parents had succumbed to their addictions, mine had chosen themselves over parenthood. The initial wounds may have been shallower, but the scars still ran deep, leaving a raw and festering cut in its wake.
