Instead of opening Chloe’s new file, though, Emeline scrolled all the way to the bottom of the list, stopping at a familiar password-protected folder.
The folder was full of her old songs, many she’d written as young as fourteen, before she’d ever driven away to the city with a dream in her heart and a tune in her throat and the stubborn belief that she could find success playing her own music.
The songs in that folder were less polished than her current sound. If she could even call it her sound.
A few months after moving to Montreal, when she was feeling the weight of her choice, struggling to pay her bills and two months late on rent, her manager convinced her to use a writer.Someone with a commercial ear who could write more marketable songs.
Emeline was reluctant. She wanted to sing her own songs. Ones thatmeantsomething. But her bills were piling up. She’d nearly maxed out her credit card simply by keeping her car insured and putting gas in the tank. Emeline didn’t know how much longer she could keep herself afloat.
She finally understood how young and unprepared she was. So she caved.
Her sound changed overnight. She started getting more gigs and exposure. People liked her new music. She signed with a small label and put out a professional album. Suddenly, Emeline could keep her bills paid. Suddenly, she was on an upwards curve instead of a downwards spiral.
Suddenly, she could breathe.
Back then, Emeline had recorded rough tracks of all her old songs, uploaded them into the folder, and locked it. Hoping that maybe, one day in the future, she would come back to those and sing them again.
Ironically, in the time since she’d locked them away she’d forgotten the folder’s password. Probably her subconscious telling her tolet go and move on.
But sometimes—if she had time to kill before a gig and needed to calm her nerves—Emeline would open up Elegy, scroll to the bottom, and try guessing the password until it was time to go onstage.
Nothing she thought up ever worked. She couldn’t even remember why she’d titled the folder “Forgetting Is So Long.”
Emeline tapped on the locked folder. A notification popped up.
You haven’t accessed FORGETTING IS SO LONG in 546 days. Do you want to delete?
She hit NO.
This folder is password protected. Enter the password now.
Emeline’s fingers hovered over her screen.
In the end, she didn’t guess it. Just canceled and returned to Chloe’s new song. Hawthorne hadn’t arrived yet. She might as well listen to the file. She had a tour soon—one she fully intended to go on, the Wood King be damned—and she needed a few more songs to add to her set list.
This song could be just what she needed.
Before her phone’s battery croaked, Emeline found the new audio file and tapped PLAY.
Chloe’s raw, smoky voice came through the phone’s speaker as she crooned long and low about an unrequited love. It was classic Chloe. Contemporary pop, with a dash of country drawl. It wasn’t Emeline’s style, but she understood why people liked it. Emeline smiled as she listened once, twice, three times, then started making edits in her head.
Soon, she was singing along, tweaking the song as she watched the sun rise over the King’s City below. As she sang, her gaze wandered over the shining white walls of the palace beyond the dome. She thought of the Wood King sitting on his white throne. Of candlelit halls and attendants fluttering like moths. Of Claw’s silver snout emerging from the shadows, and Rooke falling to his knees before Bog, and that creepy wall of skulls in the crypt …
It was habitual. Whenever she sang a song for the first time, she sealed a memory inside the melody. Like a gift she was packaging for her future self. She’d been doing it for as long as she could remember.
From now on, whenever she sang this song, she would come back to this moment, looking out over the King’s City. She would remember the things that happened here.
If she survived, that is.
When she’d fashioned Chloe’s song into a shape she liked, Emeline sang it back one more time—without Chloe’s original cut—hitting RECORD as she did, then uploaded the file to her set-list folder.
“Did you write that?” said a voice from behind her.
Emeline spun. Hawthorne stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms crossed firmly over his chest.
Her insides sparked at the immediate tension in the room. She felt exposed beneath his piercing gaze. Tucking her phone into the breast pocket of her rose sweater, she forced the tone of her voice to match his: cool and uncaring. “I didn’t realize I had an audience.”
He remained in the doorframe. “That song isn’t you.”
