The balcony became our place. Mornings before soundcheck, coffee at the railing, watching the strip perform its strange daytime act — neon less convincing in sunlight, the city underneath looking tired and human. The residency was winding down. Three shows left. The world that had felt like a siege for weeks had started to feel like a room that had finally made space for me.
"I want to keep writing." Aiden said it to the skyline, both hands around his mug. "Not because I have to. Because the songs are there now and if I don't get them out they'll eat me alive." He glanced at me. "My own words. Even when they stumble."
"You should." I leaned against the railing. "You're good, Aiden. Not polished-good. Raw-good. The kind that matters."
"Raw." He smiled — the real one, the one that still surprised me. "You make it sound like a compliment."
"It is." I sipped my coffee. "I want a solo tour. My own material, my own stage, my own name on the marquee."
"I'll be in the front row," he said. "Every show." He said it like a fact, like gravity, like something that didn't require decision because it had already been decided.
"You'll be insufferable. You'll critique the setlist and argue with the sound engineer and tell everyone within earshot that you knew me before I was famous."
"Probably." He set his coffee down and kissed me — slow, morning-flavored, the kind of kiss that doesn't lead anywhere but doesn't need to. The kind that says I'm here and I'm not leaving and the coffee can wait.
The days that followed were a blur. An interviewer from Rolling Stone leaned across the table and asked, "Do you forgive him?" and I said, "Forgiveness isn't a light switch. It's a season. We're in it." She wrote that down like it was the pull quote of the year. Lawyers appeared — royalty splits, songwriting credits, the architecture of undoing eight years of stolen property without destroying the catalogue.
I was writing my own material now. Not for Aiden, not for the deal, not for Otis. For myself. Songs about laundromats and balconies and the violence of being seen for the first time at twenty-five. Karen Voss had connected me with a producer named David — quiet, analog equipment, the patience of someone who knew that rushing a voice was the fastest way to ruin it. He'd listened to my demos in his studio in East Vegas and looked at me over the mixing board with an expression I couldn't read.
"When can you record?" Four words that changed the shape of my week.
"Tomorrow." I said it before I could second-guess. "I can come tomorrow."
"Good." He pulled off his headphones. "Bring that song about the laundromat. That's your single."
The studio was small and warm. David adjusted levels, positioned the mic, stepped back behind the glass. His voice came through the monitors: "Whenever you're ready. Don't perform it. Just sing it like you're telling someone a secret."
I closed my eyes. Opened my mouth. And sang my first song — mine, entirely, every word from my own chest — into a microphone that would carry it into the world.
The last note faded. Silence from the booth. Then David's voice, quiet and certain: "That's the one. Don't touch it. Don't re-record. That take is alive and if you try to polish it you'll kill the thing that makes it breathe."
I walked out shaking with a feeling I'd only felt once before — the night Aiden pulled me onstage and handed me a mic. I sent him the recording immediately. My phone rang thirty seconds later.
"Allison." His voice was wrecked in the way it got when something hit him in the chest. "I've played it three times already. This is — how did you —" A breath. "This is everything. You are everything. I'm sitting in the green room and Jude just asked me why I'm crying and I told him to shut up and listen."
I laughed. The sound was wet because I was crying too, standing in a parking lot in East Vegas with the sun on my face and my own song in someone's ears for the first time.
The nausea hit in the car on the way back. Not dramatic — a slow roll in my stomach I attributed to adrenaline and skipped lunch. I pressed my forehead against the window and breathed. It passed. Came back. Passed again and left behind a residue of wrongness I couldn't name.
The second wave hit in the hotel lobby. I made it to the bathroom and stood over the sink with my hands braced on the counter and the room tilting. And then — not a thought. A calculation. The nausea. The heaviness. The fact that I couldn't remember when my last period had come. The timeline assembling itself with the quiet precision of a clock nobody had wound.
The pharmacy was three blocks from the hotel. I walked there in the late afternoon heat with my sunglasses on and my heart in my throat and bought the test from a cashier who didn't recognize me and didn't care and whose indifference was the kindest thing anyone had given me all day.
The hotel bathroom. The test. The two minutes that lasted longer than any two minutes have a right to last, sitting on the edge of the bathtub with the strip glittering through the frosted glass and my whole life balanced on a piece of plastic.
Two lines. I stared at them. The bathroom was silent except for the air conditioning and my own breathing and the distant hum of a city that didn't know and didn't care that a woman on the thirty-second floor had just had her world split in two.
A baby. From the man I loved — the man who'd stolen my words and confessed to a duck and held still and said tell me when and burned his career to the ground in front of twenty thousand people for me. The joy of that hit first — a wave, bright and enormous, the feeling of something being created inside me that belonged to both of us in a way no song ever could.
Then the fear. My career had just started. The recording was hours old. Karen Voss's development deal was on my nightstand waiting for a signature. The solo tour was a dream that had barely begun to have edges. And now — this. A thing that would change everything. A thing that required decisions I wasn't ready to make and conversations I wasn't ready to have.
I sat on the bathtub edge and thought about Aiden's face. How he'd look. What he'd say. Whether the boy from the kitchens who'd spent his life in rooms that didn't belong to him was ready to build one of his own. I wanted to tell him — run down the hall, put the test in his hands, watch his face do the unguarded thing.
But I didn't. Not yet. Not like this — not breathless and terrified in a hotel bathroom with mascara under my eyes and the nausea still lurking. This deserved a moment. A real one. The bus was leaving for the next city in two days. I'd tell him then — on the road, in the quiet, in the space between cities where the world outside couldn't touch us.
I wrapped the test in tissue and tucked it into the cosmetics box on the bathroom shelf — hidden but present, a secret that weighed nothing and everything. Then I checked my phone. An email from David: Can you come to the studio tomorrow afternoon? Want to polish the mix before we send to Karen. Bring your notes.
I typed yes and set the phone down and pressed my palms against my stomach — flat, unchanged, giving nothing away — and sat with the biggest secret I'd ever carried. Bigger than the deal. Bigger than the notebook. A secret that was growing.