I Was Already Gone novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Real Song

I walked out into the light, and nobody laughed.

The stool was waiting at center stage.

I sat, and I set my guitar on my knee, and I put my hand flat on the strings.

Six hundred people watched me do nothing.

I let them.

At the edge of the wings, Brecken stood with his arms folded, as still as a man at a funeral he's paying for.

I tuned the guitar, one string at a time.

In the front row, Laney had her bag open in her lap.

Roxie was in row eight, on the aisle, where she'd told me she would be.

I found her first, and she nodded.

I played the first chord.

It was slow, the way it was written, with every bounce taken out.

"I counted the porch lights," I sang. "I never knocked."

The room went silent at once.

They knew the words.

They knew every word of it, and they had never heard it sound like this.

The chorus came, and a few people sang it, quietly.

"I'm always last at the door."

I sang the second verse, the real one, and I sang it to the front row.

"I lent you a gray sweatshirt in the rain. You wore it home, and I walked behind."

A woman near the aisle put her hand on her chest.

Laney didn't look away.

She had her phone in her fist, and her mouth was moving with the words.

I came to the bridge.

I did not have to think about it.

I knew where the progression dropped and where the melody climbed, and I knew the line.

"And when you came to find me," I sang.

"Stop!"

The shout came from the wings, high and cracked.

Brecken walked out into the light with his guitar in one hand.

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