Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 20: Two Weeks
Two weeks left.
He’d been doing the count for a few days now — noting it and then trying not to note it, then noting it again. It was the kind of math that operated on its own, underneath other things, surfacing when the bus was moving and he had nothing to look at except the landscape.
California south of San Francisco had a particular quality in the early morning: the hills going gold and the Pacific appearing in gaps between them, present and then gone, present and then gone, like something that was deciding whether to commit. He’d been watching it for an hour. The notebook on his knee was open.
He’d been thinking about names.
Specifically: the difference between Dash Wilde and Daniel Walsh, and what it meant that the difference still existed after eleven years of closing that gap.
Dash Wilde had been useful. He wanted to be precise about that — not ungrateful, not dismissive, not doing the thing where you rewrite the past so it supports where you’re standing now. Dash Wilde had been constructed carefully at twenty-two from pieces that were real: the stage instinct, the magnetic quality that he hadn’t chosen but had learned to use, the performance of presence that made arenas make sense. None of it was false. It was a true version of himself, just — edited. Emphasis-adjusted. The parts that moved well in public, moved well under lights, moved well in the specific gravitational pull of being watched.
Daniel Walsh was everything before the adjustment.
Daniel Walsh was nineteen with two hundred euro and a guitar case and the memory of his mother’s kitchen in Cork where there was a piano in the corner that he’d taught himself on, picking out melodies at six in the morning while she slept. Daniel Walsh had a handwriting that was too small, a habit of going quiet in large groups, a reaction to music that he’d never fully performed for anyone because it was too specific, too private, too much of the thing underneath.
He’d been Daniel Walsh in the stairwell in Chicago, in Studio B in Nashville, in every conversation with her that had happened after the official day ended.
She’d been talking to Daniel Walsh this whole time without knowing that was what she was talking to.
He looked at the Pacific.
The problem he kept arriving at was not the label rule, though the label rule was real and was not going away. The problem was structural. Dash Wilde and Maya Chen made professional sense — headliner, support act, industry-logical. Daniel Walsh and Maya Chen were something else, something that required a different set of decisions, decisions that existed outside the tour and outside the label and outside the careful professional maintenance they’d been doing for weeks. Those decisions required him to be specific in ways that Dash Wilde didn’t have to be.
He wrote in the notebook: *It’s not the wanting that costs anything. It’s the choosing.*
He looked at it. Underlined it twice.
Then, because the sentence had opened something, he wrote four more lines — not for a song, not structured toward anything, just the shape of what he’d been carrying. Her name wasn’t in it. It didn’t need to be. Everything in those four lines was specific to one person and that specificity was its own kind of declaration, written in a notebook on a tour bus while the Pacific appeared and disappeared between California hills.
He closed the notebook.
Joss appeared from the bunk corridor with coffee, already dressed, functioning at an hour that Dash had never understood. He dropped onto the couch across and looked at the notebook.
“Writing again,” Joss said.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
Joss drank his coffee. “She played ‘Fault Line’ last night.”
“I know. I was there.”
“I know you were there.” He was quiet for a moment. “The room went still. That kind of still.”
Dash looked out the window. “Yes.”
“She didn’t introduce it.”
“She didn’t need to.”
Joss nodded. He looked at his coffee and then at the window and then at Dash with the expression of someone who had considered the timing carefully and decided.
“Two weeks,” Joss said.
“I know.”
“And then what.”
Dash looked at the hills. The Pacific came back into view — a line of it, specific and silver and enormous — and then the hills closed over it again.
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
Joss nodded slowly. That was the answer he’d expected, probably. He didn’t push it. He drank his coffee and they sat together in the early morning quiet of the bus moving south, and after a while Dash opened the notebook again and looked at the four lines he’d written.
He crossed out one word and replaced it with a better one.
San Diego was next, then Los Angeles. But first Portland — her city, her parents’ restaurant, the piano she’d learned on, the beginning of her. He hadn’t thought about the Portland show much. He thought about it now.
Two weeks was not very long.
Two weeks was also, depending on what you did with it, enough.
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