The Ex-Change novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Song

Jude walked to the edge of the barge with the microphone in one hand and said nothing for a long time.

The grandstand waited.

The sound tech wheeled out a stool, and somebody from the crew ran up with Jude's guitar in its case.

He sat down on the stool and opened it himself.

"I fix other people's gear," he said, into the microphone.

"I've done it for twelve years, and I never wrote a song about it."

A few people laughed, softly.

"I wrote this one on Tuesday night, in a villa, on the floor, with a pen shaped like a key."

He looked straight at me.

"It isn't finished, and I'm going to play it anyway."

He plucked four notes, and they climbed, and then they stayed put.

I knew them.

I had heard them once, half asleep in the dark, and thought I had dreamed them.

He sang low and a little rough, and he didn't perform it.

"I have fixed a thousand things that were never mine to fix."

"Collars, cords and mic packs, and a few other people's lives."

"Then a woman in a plain coat took the earpiece out of her ear."

"She told two thousand strangers what was true."

"Nobody falls, she said. Nobody falls."

"I fell in a stairwell, and I'd fall again."

My throat closed.

He sang the rest of it to me, and the whole lake listened, and for once nobody was counting the cameras.

When the last chord died, there was a silence.

Then Jude set the guitar down, stood up and crossed the deck.

"Callie," he said. "There's something I should have done on the first night."

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