Page 228 of Bend

There it is.

I don’t rush to answer.

Echo’s fingers trace the strings without playing them.

“I keep trying to write around it. Make it about what it was before. Me finding the team. My brothers. Tampa. Whatever. But he’s in all of it now, so every time I try, it just sounds fake.”

“Then stop writing around him.”

She looks at me.

“I don’t want the whole song to become about someone dying.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

Her expression tightens.

I gesture toward the notebook. “It can still be about home. He was part of that.”

She looks away almost immediately.

Fuck.

There’s the wound.

“He was supposed to hear it finished.”

Her voice changes on that sentence, turning smaller.

Rougher almost.

I don’t say anything because there’s nothing useful I can say to that.

“He told me I had time.”

That one hurts worse.

Echo laughs under her breath, but there’s nothing funny in it.

“Pretty shit advice, apparently.”

“Echo.”

“He was supposed to fucking come home, Draygon.”

The words crack out of her before she can stop them.

She stares down at the guitar while her eyes fill.

“He was supposed to be sitting right there annoying me while I tried to finish this. He was supposed to tell me the lyrics were too dramatic and then ask me to play it again anyway. He was supposed to keep leaving his shit all over this place and forgetting to water that fucking plant.”

Her voice keeps climbing until it breaks.

“He was supposed to hear the whole fucking song.”

I reach over and take the guitar before it slips from her lap, setting it carefully against the couch.

Then she folds.