Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 18: The Other Side
He didn’t go after her that night.
He sat in the lounge with his book face-down on his knee for another hour after she’d gone back to her bunk, thinking about whether going after her was the right move. He decided it wasn’t. She’d needed to say what she’d said and she’d said it and now she needed the night, and going to her bunk in the next hour would be about his discomfort rather than anything she needed. He’d made that mistake before in his life — the going after as relief, as his own pressure releasing, disguised as care. He was trying not to do that anymore.
In the morning he knocked on the bunk frame.
She pulled the curtain. She looked like she hadn’t slept much. He probably looked the same.
“I want to apologize properly,” he said. “Not through the bunk curtain. Is there somewhere.”
They ended up on the rear deck of the bus at a rest stop in Nevada. The tour had pulled in for forty minutes — fuel, coffee, the mechanical necessities of something this large moving this far — and the landscape outside was flat and white and so enormous it had a kind of neutrality, a not-caring about what two people said to each other in front of it that was actually useful.
She leaned against the railing. He stood a few feet away. Neither of them were looking at the other.
“I was wrong,” he said.
She looked at the horizon.
“I want to say it came from admiration and not ownership. I want to be clear about that. I was listening to the stems and I heard something and I followed it, and I didn’t stop to ask because I wasn’t — I was inside the song. I was thinking about the song and not about what the act of doing it meant.”
“I know,” she said.
“That’s the wrong thing to be thinking about.”
“Yes.”
He’d worked through this in the night, trying to find the actual truth of it rather than the version that would make the conversation end. Those were different things and he knew the difference. “Your creative work is yours to control,” he said. “What happens to it, when, how, under what production — that’s not mine to decide. Regardless of what the collaboration was. The collaboration doesn’t entitle me to the next step.”
She was quiet.
“You’re apologizing correctly,” she said, after a moment.
“I’m trying.”
“I can tell.” She turned to look at him. Her eyes were a little tired and the Nevada light was doing something specific to them. “I need you to say why. Not just that you know you shouldn’t have done it. The why.”
He’d been working on this too. He wanted it to be true rather than constructed, and there was a difference in the quality of the thing when it was true, and he thought she’d hear that difference. “Because you gave me access to something that’s central to you,” he said. “The studio session was a choice you made. You let me in. And I took what you’d given me inside that choice and moved it to somewhere else, somewhere further, without asking you if you wanted to go there.” He paused. “That’s not how you treat a thing that was given to you.”
She waited.
“And because you’ve been careful about your music your whole career. Not careful like precious — careful like principled. It’s a practice. You’ve made decisions about what you give and to whom and when, for years, for reasons that exist completely apart from me. And I walked past that like it was a preference instead of something structural.”
The wind at the rest stop moved some dust across the asphalt. Somewhere ahead on the road another bus was pulling out. The tour had its own rhythms and they moved inside them, even stopped.
She looked at him for a long time. He held still.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay you accept it, or okay you heard it.”
“I need a day.” She looked back at the horizon. “But I heard it.”
He nodded.
He wanted to say more and didn’t, because what he’d said was the right amount and saying more would be about his need for the moment to resolve rather than hers. He’d gotten good at identifying the difference even when it was difficult. He looked at the landscape instead — the flat white of it, the way it went on past any reasonable distance — and he stood there with her until the tour manager’s voice came over the radio and called the bus to roll.
She went back inside. He followed. They didn’t sit next to each other.
He gave her the day.
At nine that evening she came and sat across from him in the lounge and picked up the book she’d been reading the day before and opened it. She didn’t say anything. Neither did he. Joss came through and looked at the two of them and went and made coffee without comment, which was the most diplomatic thing Joss had done in recent memory.
An hour passed.
“Who else has heard it,” she said, without looking up from her book.
“Just Joss.”
“Okay.” She turned a page. “I want to hear the full version. Tomorrow.”
He said: “Okay.”
It was not forgiveness yet. It was a door left open the specific width of one word, and he understood that was what it was, and he didn’t push it any further than that.
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