He laughs then looks down at his hands, flexing his fingers absentmindedly, the way he does when he's working through lyrics in his head.
"I had someone like that too. When I was younger. Before all this."
I don't interrupt. Just wait the way he waited for me.
"We grew up together," he says, voice even but deliberate, choosing each word with precision. "Foster system. Same house for a while. The last one before I aged out."
I know pieces of this already—not because Julian overshares, but because over two years of working together, of late nights and honest conversations, he's let me see glimpses of where he came from.
The cruelty. The instability. The way he learned early how toread a room because his safety depended on it. How music became the only language that felt safe enough to speak.
"There was a girl at my last foster home,” he continues. "They fostered her too. She was younger than me by a couple years. Quiet. Took a lot of hits that weren't hers to take. She absorbed everyone else's anger because she thought it might protect her or someone else."
His jaw tightens slightly, and the set of it—I recognize that look. The way you hold yourself when talking about something that still has teeth. I lean forward slightly, elbows on my knees.
"I did what I could," he says. "Tried to keep her out of the line of fire. Made myself the target when I could. Taught her which rooms to avoid, which moods to watch for."
He pauses.
The parallel between what he's describing and what I tried to do for Jake, for Nora, for everyone I loved while simultaneously destroying myself—it's all too familiar.
The savior complex: available in both martyr and messiah editions, neither of which actually work.
"Something bad happened," Julian says quietly. "Bad enough that they split us up. Different homes in different cities and there was no way to stay in touch. The foster system doesn't exactly facilitate those connections. More of a 'good luck with your lifelong attachment issues' kind of exit strategy."
The echo of it hits my chest—the helplessness, the rage you swallow because there's nowhere safe to put it, the way losing someone without warning rewires everything you thought you understood about attachment.
"Have you ever tried to find her?" I ask.
He shakes his head slowly.
"I thought about it. A lot, actually. Especially in the first few years after I got out, when I was still figuring out who I was." He looks up, meets my eyes. "But then I realized something. She needed to become whoever she was going to become without me attached to her worst memories. And I needed tobuild something that wasn't defined by what we survived together."
“Are you sure you’re actually twenty-one-years-old?” I joke.
He laughs softly. "Trauma ages you weird. I think you know that better than anyone."
"Yeah," I agree. "I do. Got the emotional scars and the premature grey hairs to prove it."
"But I think about her sometimes," he adds. “A lot actually. Wonder who she became. Whether she made it out clean. Whether she found people who loved her the right way, without conditions or cruelty attached."
He pauses. His fingers tap against his thigh.
"And I hope like hell that if we ever did cross paths again, I'd be someone she'd be proud to have known. Not the boy trying to shield her, but the man I became because of everything we went through."
The weight of what he's trusting me with settles between us. This isn't just conversation. This is him showing me something he doesn't show many people.
"In some fucked up way, I still kind of hope that one day she'll hear a song or come to a gig and I'll see her and it’ll be like that iconic movie kind of shit. Kinda pathetic right?"
"Not in the slightest."
"Music helped me make sense of it," he says. "It made me feel close to her." He looks up at me. "And it saved me in more ways than one. It gave me a place to put everything I couldn't say out loud."
He picks up his guitar, runs his thumb over the strings without strumming.
"That's why I do this, you know? Not for the validation or the success, though those are nice. I do it because it's the only thing that's ever felt like truth. Everything else is just noise and survival tactics."
"I get it. Trust me, I do." I say, and mean it completely. "That's exactly why I built this place. Why I signed you. I knew youweren't doing this for the wrong reasons. You weren't trying to escape or prove something or fill some void with applause. You were just... doing it because it’s who you are.”
