I wrote that song at 3 AM on a Tuesday in February.
Damien was asleep. I was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor with a cup of jasmine tea going cold beside me, pencil moving across staff paper in the dark. The melody came the way they always did—sudden and inevitable, like a sneeze. I had the whole thing finished by sunrise. Every word. Every chord. Every breath of it.
Now I sat in row seven of the Staples Center in a black dress I'd spent three weeks picking out, watching Damien hold it up to the lights.
The Grammy was gold. It caught the spotlight and threw it back at the audience in small, scattered pieces.
He thanked his manager. His label. His parents. Standard. I folded my hands in my lap and waited for my name. Eight years. Surely eight years earned a single sentence.
Then he looked directly into the camera.
"And Kaiya." His voice dropped. Soft. Deliberate. The voice he used when he meant something. "My true muse. The woman who makes me want to write."
The camera cut to the front row. Kaiya Martinez—twenty-four, luminous, wearing a dress the color of champagne—smiled like she'd been expecting this. Because she had been.
The applause was enormous. It rose up around me like water. I sat very still and let it fill the room.
I didn't cry. I just stopped breathing for a moment.
Then I breathed again, and the world was different.
---
The apartment was quiet when I got back. I hadn't changed out of the dress. I don't know why. Maybe I thought if I changed, I'd have to admit the night was real.
My phone buzzed. Unknown number.
I picked up.
"Hi, Elise." The voice was sweet. Theatrical. Like candy with something sharp inside. "I figured you deserved a call."
Kaiya.
"You've been his little helper for what—eight years?" She laughed softly. "That's so sad. You know that, right? You're like a ghost. You don't even exist."
I stood in the middle of the living room and said nothing. My fingers were numb.
"Disappear," she said. "Like the nobody you are."
She hung up.
I stood there for a long time. Then I walked to the coat rack and picked up Damien's jacket—the one he'd worn to the pre-show dinner. I don't know what I was looking for. Maybe nothing. Maybe proof.
The second phone was in the inside pocket.
I sat down on the floor and read everything.
Months of messages. Photos. Plans. A whole other life, running parallel to mine the entire time, close enough to touch.
At some point I stopped reading. I just sat there with the phone in my hand, looking at the staff paper on the coffee table. The song I'd written last week. His handwriting in the margins, changing one word.
Eight years.
I put the phone down very carefully, like it might break. Then I got up and went to bed.
---
I found them at Nordstrom the next afternoon.
Damien was at a display case near the entrance, Kaiya beside him with her hand in the crook of his arm. She saw me first. Something shifted in her expression—not surprise. Amusement.
I walked straight to him.
"I need you to tell me the truth," I said. My voice was steady. I was proud of that. "I need you to say it out loud."
Damien glanced around. His jaw tightened.
"You're making a scene."
"Tell me the truth."
Kaiya stepped forward. She tilted her head, smiling. "You're obsessed," she said lightly. "It's honestly a little scary."
I looked at her. "I'm not talking to you."
"Elise." Damien's voice dropped. Warning. "Walk away."
"No."
He hit me.
The back of his hand. Open. Fast. My head snapped to the side and for a moment there was just white—white and the sound of blood in my ears and the cold store air on my cheek.
"You're embarrassing yourself," he said.
I stood very still. I pressed two fingers to my cheekbone. It was already warm.
Something inside me went quiet. Not broken—quiet. Like a door closing.
I looked at him. I looked at him the way you look at something you're memorizing for the last time.
"We're done," I said.
Then I walked out.
---
The bench outside was cold. I'd left my coat somewhere. I sat with my hands in my lap and my mascara dry on my face and nowhere to go. Eight years of my life and I had nowhere to go.
A black car moved slowly past the curb. Once. Then again. Then a third time.
It stopped.
The door opened and a man stepped out. Tall. Dark coat. He looked at me with an expression I couldn't read—not pity. Something quieter than pity.
I'd seen his face in industry photos. Mael Jacobs. Legendary producer. The kind of name people said carefully.
He didn't say anything. He just took off his coat and draped it over my shoulders, opened the passenger door, and waited.
I got in.
No questions. No explanations. Just the city moving past the window and the coat still warm from his body and the slow, strange feeling that something—somewhere, somehow—had just begun.
