He Held Her at the Concert novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Nine Hundred Shows

I woke up in a bed that wasn't mine, and for the length of one breath I didn't know whose house I was in.

Then I smelled coffee and heard a guitar, one string, being tuned over and over.

Declan sat at the foot of the bed in his jeans and nothing else, with the guitar across his knee and the scar over his eyebrow catching the gray window light.

He saw me looking.

"Morning," he said. "You snore."

"I do not."

"A little. It's good. It's the first thing I've learned about you that you didn't have to hide."

I pulled the sheet up and sat against the headboard.

On the floor, my phone lay face down.

I turned it over and read Trent's text again.

"Sunday night. I'd hate for anything to happen to what's inside it."

"He means the cassette," I said.

"I know."

"It's the only one."

"Then we copy it today. I have a deck that does it clean."

He set the guitar down.

"First I want to say something while I'm sitting too far away to be forgiven by a hug."

"Okay."

"I have a drawer full of mail," he said. "Four years of it. Fans wrote me about H.B. They wrote me about their own dead girlfriends and sisters and daughters. I answered every one."

"That's kind."

"It's what I'm ashamed of. I wrote back to strangers about a dead girl, and I never once called the label and asked who she was."

My throat closed up.

I had been holding it since the garage.

I hadn't known it was there until he put his hand on it.

"You did that," I said.

"Yes."

"You sang my song four years," I said. "Nine hundred times. You stood in front of forty thousand people, and you never once wondered who I was."

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