Abel swirled the liquid in his bottle, his eyes fixed on the growing fire.
“Fine. We’re making good progress.”
“It’s been…fun, hasn’t it?” Cole piped in, giving me a knowing look.
“Sure.” Abel shrugged. A moment later, he turned and squinted at us. “I think you’ve been having a good dose of extracurricular fun as well.”
I ignored the insinuation. “We’ll be finished on schedule, and I’ve started to think about what’s next. Have you?”
Abel’s tongue skirted across his teeth. “I’m staying in River Valley for a while.”
“Doing what?” Cole pressed. I couldn’t blame him. Abel wasn’t exactly helping the conversation flow.
“Starting a fucking family,” he snapped. “Jesus. I don’t know. Trying to figure shit out, I guess.”
I scrubbed at my chin. We had to stop beating around the bush.
“Abel, I think we should give Bleeding Moonlight another chance. Hear me out,” I rushed to say, seeing the flash of anger across his face. “This recording has been going so well. The material sounds as good as we could ever hope for. And I’m having fun being back in the studio together. Cole agrees, and so does Silas. It feels like we’re giving up on something that’s still working so well. Why?”
Abel sucked on his beer and then put it down on the ground beside him. “We had an agreement.” His voice was too neutral.
“I know. But that was then, and this is now. When Charlie died, we had no idea what we could still do together. Now we do. If we can record this album without him, why can’t we write a new one a year from now? Why can’t we go on tour?”
“What changed for you?” the singer snapped. “We were on the same page about the band for a long time. You were ready to walk away.”
I held his gaze. If I expected him to open up, it was about time I did the same thing. “I wanted to walk away because I felt guilty for leaving Charlie to fend for himself. He was toxic, and I thought I was doing the right thing by setting firmer boundaries, when in reality, I should have tried harder to help. When he died and we found out about the drug use, I felt so worthless. I didn’t think I deserved to keep making music without him.”
Abel watched me, his face not betraying his thoughts. If he thought I was a piece of shit, I wouldn’t blame him. I could work on forgiving myself, but I couldn’t demand forgiveness from him.
“You’ve always shouldered responsibility for us,” he finally said. “But his death wasn’t your fault.”
I bit on my bottom lip, relief and sadness surging through me at the same time. “I appreciate you saying that. It means a lot. And now you know why I was on board initially with breaking up the band, but after talking to Cole and Silas, and having this experience working together without Charlie…”
“You think we can still have a future together,” Abel completed my thought.
“I know it’s hard, dude,” Cole jumped in. “We all miss him. I feel his absence in that studio every single day. But it still works. We still work.”
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about how things would be between us if we ended up staying together. Could we work this well when Adeline was no longer with us? When her enthusiasm and passion wasn’t there to awaken the same in us?
I had no sure answer, but I wasn’t ready to retire just yet. Music, after all, wasn’t a choice for any of us. It was our lifeblood, and without it, I wasn’t sure who any of us would be.
“Working together with Adeline reminded me why we do this,” I said. “We’ve got art that we need to share with the world. We’re not asking for forever, Abel. We can take it a year, a month, a week at a time.”
Abel cracked his neck. His gaze was fixed on the flames, but I thought he heard me.
Silence didn’t exist this far out in the wild. The forest was alive with sounds—grasshoppers, the rustle of branches, and the sound of the river rushing nearby. We sat there for a few long minutes, just listening and thinking.
Finally, Abel cleared his throat. “Fine. I don’t know how well I’ll be able to write on my own, but we can give it a try.”
A smile spread across my face and a weight I didn’t know I had carried for the past few months lifted.
We were starting to find our way back.
19
ADELINE
Thirty minutes after Ezra called,I was knocking on Silas’s door after finally convincing the security guard downstairs to let me come up. I was lucky he remembered me from the time before, and when I showed him the warm soup I had with me, he seemed to understand I wasn’t some obsessed fan.
