Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 15: The Journalist
Callum Reid had been covering music for eleven years and he was not, as Maya understood it, a person who missed things.
He’d been on the tour for four days now. She’d been briefed on him by Sandra Kim’s assistant in a terse email that described him as *thoughtful, thorough, from the major outlet, the piece runs in their print edition and online simultaneously, expected length eight to ten thousand words.* Petra had done her own research — Petra always did her own research — and reported that his previous tour profiles had been considered, fair, and had the quality of something that would still hold up on re-reading in five years. “He’s not looking for a scandal,” Petra had said. “He’s looking for the truth. Which is either better or worse depending on what your truth actually is.”
Denver was a Tuesday show, Red Rocks booked out, one of those venues that made the industry do a particular kind of math in its head — the sight lines, the altitude, the history of the space, what it meant to fill it. The Static filled it. They’d sold it out in eleven minutes when tickets dropped, which was a number Sandra Kim had mentioned exactly twice and would probably mention again.
Maya’s set was at seven. Callum Reid was watching from the photographer’s pit.
She knew he was there. It was fine. She had been watched by people taking notes before. She told herself this while doing her pre-show ritual — tuning, the vocal warmup she’d been doing since high school, the three minutes alone that Petra fiercely defended on her behalf — and then she went on and played.
It was a good set. She could tell while she was in it, which was not always the case. The altitude did something to her voice that she’d been warned about and which turned out to be actually useful — a slight rawness, a slightly reduced capacity for the higher register that meant she had to stay in the middle of her voice and the middle of her voice was where she lived best. She played “Borrowed Light” second-to-last instead of last, and ended with a new song she’d only played live four times, and the audience at Red Rocks at dusk — nine thousand people who had come for The Static and were politely willing to give her a chance — went quiet for the last verse.
That quiet. She had been chasing that quiet since she was nineteen.
She came off stage and Petra was there with water and a towel and the brief, targeted look of someone cataloguing everything. “Callum Reid is coming,” Petra said.
He arrived before Maya could fully cool down. Mid-thirties, tallish, a leather-covered notebook in his hand that he clearly actually used — not a prop, the pages were visibly worn at the corners. He had the easy, non-threatening posture of someone who had introduced himself to many people in many green rooms and had figured out that the posture mattered more than the first words.
“Maya Chen,” he said. “Callum Reid. Thanks for the time.”
“Sure,” she said.
They talked for twelve minutes. She’d been warned the tour profile was primarily about The Static, so the opener interview was a courtesy slot — a paragraph, maybe two, probably a mention. He asked about the new song she’d closed with, what its origin was. She told him the true version, which was that she’d been trying to finish it for a year and found the ending recently in a studio in Nashville, working alone. He asked about stage anxiety. She said she had it and dealt with it and it didn’t go away but you learn to perform alongside it instead of trying to perform without it.
He wrote things down. She watched his pen move.
“What’s the best part of the tour so far?” he asked.
She thought about the Studio B floor and Dash’s hand under her jaw and said, without hesitation: “Watching from stage right when The Static closes the show. Every night. It’s still unreal.”
Callum Reid nodded. Wrote something down.
The rest of the day was an exercise in professional precision.
Maya had already understood, in the abstract, that a journalist on the tour meant the tour’s texture changed. It was the difference between living in a space and knowing a camera was running: you didn’t necessarily behave differently, but you became aware of how your behavior read. Callum Reid was not aggressive — he was quiet, positioned, observant in the way of someone who had trained the instinct into patience. He wasn’t looking for conflict. He was looking for the moment that told the truth.
She and Dash had one official interaction before the show — at the production meeting in the afternoon, which all the leads attended: Dash, Joss, the production manager, the lighting designer, and Maya because her monitor issue from three shows ago still had a follow-up note in the log. She sat at the opposite end of the table from Dash. She had a notepad. He had a coffee and a setlist that he and the production manager were working through.
They spoke exactly once directly to each other.
*”The cue on ‘Undertow’ is still a half beat late at the lights,” Dash said, to the room.*
*”Has been since Louisville,” Maya said, because she’d been watching from the wings and she happened to know.*
He looked at her — the production meeting look, collegial, functional — and said: “Noted. Good catch.”
That was it. She wrote something in her notepad that was not actually about the lighting cue. She was aware that Callum Reid was in a chair against the wall taking notes.
The show itself was extraordinary.
She watched from stage right, as she had told Callum Reid she watched, and it was genuinely still extraordinary even eighteen dates in. Dash on a stage of that size was a different entity from Dash in a hotel corridor — not a false version of either, just a different one, the way something looks different at different scales. He had a quality in an arena that she’d been trying to name and couldn’t. Not charisma, which was too small a word. More like: he made the space reorganize itself around where he stood. You watched him and the rest of the world got compositional.
At the encore break, Joss came off stage for a towel and water and passed her in the wing.
“You’re doing the staring thing,” he said pleasantly.
“I’m watching the show.”
“Sure.” He drank his water. “He’s doing it too, for what it’s worth.”
She didn’t turn to look. “Doing what.”
“Watching from stage right,” Joss said, and went back out.
She kept her face completely neutral for the rest of the set.
Afterward, the green room had fifteen people in it and Callum Reid was among them, speaking to the drummer, notebook closed but she clocked that he used his phone too, probably for audio. She and Dash passed each other near the craft services table. He said something about the altitude affecting the vocals, was her monitor okay. She said it was fine, she’d compensated. He said good, that sounded right. She said thanks for the heads up earlier about stage right position.
She did not say: *Joss told me.*
He did not say: *I watched every song.*
They talked about monitors for forty-five seconds and went their separate ways.
She was aware, walking to the bus afterward, of what the day had cost. Not in grief, exactly. In a specific kind of muscular effort, the effort of holding a true thing at arm’s length and presenting it as neutral, repeating this every time someone new walked into the room, and doing it well enough that it looked like nothing at all.
She got on the bus. Petra was already there with two cups of something hot.
“You were good today,” Petra said. Not the show. The day.
“Was it obvious?”
Petra considered. “Not to anyone who wasn’t already watching.”
Maya took her cup. “Do you think Reid was watching?”
Petra looked at her over the rim of her own cup. “Baby. That man watches everything.”
Outside the bus window, Red Rocks receded into the Colorado dark. The altitude at this elevation made stars more visible than anywhere on the tour so far — more numerous, more specific, closer than they had any business being. Maya watched them and drank her tea and thought about what *watching everything* meant, and what it meant that being watched had been the most electrically charged part of a day that had included kissing Dash Wilde goodbye in the wings of a Nashville studio three days ago.
She was not going to think about that last part.
She thought about it for another hour.
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