Chapter Text

Part Two — Chapter One: Arrivals

(Becky’s POV —)

The email lands while I’m half-asleep over a paper cup of airplane coffee: updated promo route, cities stacked like a deck of cards—Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok, Sydney. It isn’t bolded or circled. It just sits there, sure as a heartbeat.

Ten tracks sit in a row on my lock screen, all leading to the same door I’m too afraid to open—because the person behind it holds my heart, not even realizing it still only beats for her. I don’t press play. I look at the titles like old classmates—fond, careful, not ready to talk.

“Cabin crew, prepare for landing,” the PA says, and somewhere a baby makes a gull sound. The man across the aisle slides his wedding ring on, off, on. I wonder how many people on this flight are going home and how many are leaving it.

We kiss the runway and roll. The plane becomes a bus with opinions; the cabin exhales words it’s been holding since Taipei—excuse me, sorry, can I—. I check my hands. They’re doing that hummingbird thing. Familiar. Annoying.

June is where she always is—just past the sliding doors—with my alias on a tablet and the posture of a woman who could personally part traffic. Everyone calls her the Wrangler, even the London team. First glance: hair sharp, eyes sharper, clipboard in a digital world. Underneath: two legs, one very soft spot reserved for me. She saved me from myself before anyone had the nerve to call me “worldwide.”

“Any changes to the rooftop set?” she asks instead of how are you. A mercy.

“Considering an acoustic swap,” I say. “I’ll check with Matt.”

“Noted.” She’s already texting. “Elinor says: radio at eight, rooftop at noon, print at two. No meet and greet. Security tight. If it gets feral, blink twice and we ghost.”

Elinor—my manager, my carbon spine. Everything London is: precise, relentless, weatherproof. She’s the one who sat across from me in a studio kitchen two years ago and said, If you want the world, we can get it. If you want a life, we can build it. Pick first. I picked. She stuck. She’s a ball-buster in steel-toe stilettos who will argue a festival down two points and then make sure I eat something green that isn’t a gummy bear. She has kept the wolves from my door and, when necessary, kept me from walking out into the pack on purpose. Without her, I don’t survive the part where the songs stop being mine and become everyone else’s.

“No meet and greet,” I echo, like a prayer I intend to keep.

Outside, Bangkok exhales in my face—warmth, humidity, a ten-smell blend that refuses to be named. We slip into a car already chilled by someone who loves me. I press my forehead to the glass and let the city hit my eyes: orange-robed monks like parentheses around the morning, a woman pushing buckets of jasmine, a kid dragging a wheeled backpack that does not want to be dragged. June murmurs to her headset, to me, to the schedule. We glide. We stop. We glide. We stop.

I’m not staying with my parents. Logistically, it’s a mess—their place is comfort, but it’s an hour in the wrong direction from everything, and my days here are timed to the minute. Also, home makes me soft in ways a promo run can’t afford. I need central city: elevators that open fast, a lobby that can absorb a small crowd, a service exit no one notices. I need to be close enough to feel here without being swallowed by memory every time I pass the family fridge.

The driver’s radio chatters in the language I learned in kitchens and green rooms and midnight taxis. No songs I know. Good. I’m not ready to be ambushed by anyone else’s memories.

The hotel is marble and hush that feels like it’s doing you a favor. I sign things I don’t read because Elinor has already read them twice. The elevator mirrors insist I exist from three angles; I don’t fight them. In the room, I sit on the edge of a bed too white to be trusted and let my carry-on lean into my shin like a loyal dog.

The schedule is on the desk in my handwriting. I recognize it the way you recognize your face in photographs you didn’t take. Tonight is blank. No cameras. No events. I could call my parents and listen to them try not to cry. I could text Richie and get roast and reassurance in the same breath. I could FaceTime Kit or Maya and gossip about absolutely nothing important.

Kit is eyeliner like armor, a laugh that breaks open rooms, and a voice that always finds the harmony I didn’t know the song needed. She’s the one who shoved a mic into my hand at an open mic, stage-whispered, “Don’t be precious,” and then heckled me in the kindest way when I was. Maya is sunlight in a leather jacket, a chronic plants-adopter, the person who showed up to my flat the first winter with three heat packs and said, “You’re not allowed to shiver alone.” We built a London family out of soup and thrift stores and the kind of secrets you tell when you’re all trying to become yourselves at the same time.

And Theo—impossibly good-looking, sarcastic, no-bullshit Theo—who met me when I was broken and bent and insisted that bent was not a life plan. He doesn’t tiptoe around the thing everyone else does; he keeps a verbal crowbar for doors I refuse to open. He is also the only person who has ever told me to nap in a voice that made me actually do it.

The guitar case is lighter than it should be for something that holds this much. I don’t want to rehearse, but my hands want to be busy and my voice wants to exist in Thai air again before microphones get a say. I tune, play a handful of chords, stop before I hit the measure that still turns my stomach into a fist.

London gave me that—being nobody until I wasn’t. A law library that smelled like old ambition. Lectures where my notes kept turning into lyrics. Open mics under an alias that sounded like a dare. Friends who didn’t know me from a billboard and loved me anyway. A producer who told me to sing quieter. I did. It was the bravest thing I’d done in years.

I sit cross-legged on the carpet because chairs make me talk like a guest. Voice Memos: record. “Day one,” I say. “Bangkok, hi.” The hi comes out like I’m testing whether the city forgives me. I leave it there. I’ve earned the right to be awkward.

Jet lag is petty. I nap in slices and dream in elevators that open onto rooftops. At four, I stand at the window and watch the city rehearse being itself: small lights, soft hums, first-shift people who like being first. I don’t touch the tracklist. I don’t press the song that kept me alive the night the radiator clanked and I thought I would never sleep again.

At eight, the radio station is warm and quick, the kind of place with too many mugs and not enough coasters. The producer’s lanyard holds more keys than a jailer’s. The host knows exactly how much teasing a voice can carry before it cuts. We talk about the album like it’s a flat I’m subletting to strangers. He says there’s “looking back” and “forward motion,” stepping on each phrase like it might crack.

“Hope is cheap to pretend and expensive to keep,” I hear myself say. He whistles in a way he probably doesn’t know I can hear.

“Play us something?”

“Two,” I say. “The lead single, and a quiet lullaby I wrote for nights I couldn’t sleep.” I don’t name the lullaby. I don’t say who it watched over. I never do.

Back in the hallway, I catch a memory the way you catch a falling glass. Studio midnight, London rain, the big room lit like a confession booth. I’m at the mic with red eyes; my producer is hunched over the mixing board, palms pressed to his temples. I finish the take, throat raw, and he looks up at me and says, “It made me feel like my heart was ripped out, stomped on, and then put back into my body only to never beat the same way again—and it has to go on your album. Because the tears you cry every time you sing it mean it’s too special not to be there.”

I had wanted to hide it. He made me choose courage. That’s why it’s Track One.

June texts: Rooftop security good. Wind medium. Mic check at 11:35. Elinor: Asia spike. Rest voice. Proud of you. Eat something that isn’t sugar. I reply with ok and a thumbs-up. She heart-reacts and sends a screenshot of a trending tag I refuse to read.

The roof is left-hand white sky and a horizon that makes everything feel possible. Fans press to the rail with a gentleness that always undoes me. The Wrangler points at her own eyes, then at me, then at the service stair we’ll use if things get weird. I nod. I like horizons. They feel like confession more than performance.

I step to the mic. The wind steals a curl and I let it. “Hi,” I say, and the small crowd hushes in that kind way. “I’m going to start with the first song I wrote alone in my new flat in London. I was scared. I was… still longing for something back home that, for a long time, never had a name.” I don’t look for any particular window. I look at the line where buildings meet sky. “It’s called You’re On Your Own, Kid.”

I don’t belt it. I let it move like something you keep in a pocket—light enough to carry, heavy enough to know it’s there. The words arrive the way they did then, when I was twenty floors up, listening to other people’s parties and trying to learn how to be alone without being lonely:

Summer went away, still, the yearning stays
I play it cool with the best of them
I wait patiently, she’s gonna notice me
It’s okay, we’re the best of friends
Anyway

I hear it in your voice, you’re hanging with your boys
I touch my phone as if it’s your face
I didn’t choose this town, I dream of getting out
There’s just one who could make me stay
All my days

From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes
I waited ages to see you there
I searched the party of better bodies
Just to learn that you never cared

You’re on your own, kid
You always have been

I see the great escape, so long, Daisy May
I picked the petals, she loves me not
Something different bloomed, writing in my room
I play my songs in the parking lot
I’ll run away

From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes
I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this
I hosted parties and starved my body
Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss

The jokes weren’t funny, I took the money
My friends from home don’t know what to say
I looked around in a blood-soaked gown
And I saw something they can’t take away

’Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned
Everything you lose is a step you take
So, make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it
You’ve got no reason to be afraid

You’re on your own, kid
Yeah, you can face this
You’re on your own, kid
You always have been

I let the last line hang until the city breathes in again. Polite wave, genuine thank you, step back. June escorts me to the elevator before my brain can ask my heart questions in front of a camera.

In the room, I put my head under a pillow and listen to my pulse audition for a thriller. The phone hums with a hundred good intentions. Elinor sends numbers and the words good pull quotes; no walk-ups; hydrate. A cousin who swears he hates pop sends a voice note of himself butchering the chorus in a kitchen. My parents reply with six hearts and a photo of Bonbon asleep on Boba’s tail.

I scroll without meaning to and end up where I always do when I’m not careful: the edges of a life I don’t belong to. A market snap of fabric draped like water; a caption from someone on her team: first run of the new line—dreaming in silk.Another story from a gallery friend: a photo of a white wall with one of her prints centered like a breath. None of these are hers. She stopped feeding the public machine; she let the door close, and the world learned to look through the windows of the people who love her. I’m one of those people, except I’m not allowed to knock. Seeing her through other people’s lenses is safer and crueler at the same time. Safer because I can pretend she doesn’t see me seeing. Crueler because it confirms she still exists in full color without me.

“FaceTime?” Theo texts, his bubble popping up like he pays rent in my phone.

I answer before I can invent a reason not to. He appears immediately—impossible cheekbones, shirt unbuttoned one too far, eyebrows that could start a fight. Behind him: a robe draped over a chair, a stack of case notes pretending to be a plant.

“Well, well,” he says. “Look who’s in the same city as her unsung thesis.”

“Hi to you, too,” I say, propping the phone against a water bottle and folding onto the carpet. “How’s work?”

“Glamorous. Paper cuts and fluorescent lighting.” He narrows his eyes at me like I’m a witness. “How are you?”

“Functional.”

“Non-answer.” He tilts his head. “Say the thing you’re avoiding.”

“I’m… excited to be here and terrified to be here and both are allowed.”

He softens—only his mouth. “I met you when you were barely breathing and calling it personality. You did the work. You rebuilt. But you keep saving a room in your chest like a hotel for a ghost. It’s poetic. It’s also a half-life.”

He’s right, of course. When the pain wouldn’t move with whispered songs in kitchens, I let the world hear them—because maybe the person I wanted to hear them most would know that distance is a trick of maps. That no matter the time or the ocean, she had never stopped mattering to me. She was still my entire heart. I had hoped she would hear, and one day show up on my doorstep like a scene I used to rehearse before sleep. When she didn’t, I told myself my life wasn’t a movie. I told myself she had her own life now—colorful, full, private—and I had no right to knock.

“You think my life is a film,” I say, aiming for light and landing a little crooked.

“I think your life is a life,” Theo says. “And lives require risk. You don’t have to marry her. You can send ‘Hi. I hope you’re well.’ You can send a sticker of a frog in a hat. But if you’re going to keep writing her into existence, perhaps let her see the draft.”

“Good. At least you know you’re lying.” He drops into his chair. “So. Why haven’t you texted?”

“Because she has a life,” I say, the neat explanation I’ve practiced. “A beautiful, built one. She closed the door and stopped letting strangers peep through the keyhole. I respect that. I don’t want to kick the door just because I—” I stop before miss her falls out without my permission.

“You won’t ‘kick the door,’” he says. “You’ll knock. Two syllables. Hi. Even you can manage it.”

“What would I even say?” I hear the panic before I feel it. “Hi. Hope you’re sleeping. I’m in the city, not to make trouble, just to—” To what? See you? Breathe near you? Find out if you’ve been waiting for me all this time? “It all sounds like a trap.”

“For who?” Theo asks.

“Both of us.” I stare at the carpet pattern like it can give me a script. “She didn’t come knocking either. For three years.”

“Because you left,” he says, gentle as a scalpel. “On purpose. Because you had to. Because staying would’ve broken you in a way that writing couldn’t fix. You asked for space and she gave it to you, like you asked. You don’t get to be mad at her for honoring the boundary you drew.”

“I’m not mad,” I say, and even I don’t believe me. “I’m… scared that if I open it, I can’t close it again. And scared that if I don’t, I’ll never stop wondering.”

“Good,” he says. “Now we’re talking about real things. Here—let me translate your brain into bite-sized: Fear A: She doesn’t reply. Result: you feel like your lungs forgot the trick for a day, then you live. Fear B: She replies and it’s polite. Result: you want to throw your phone into a canal; you don’t; you live. Fear C: She replies and it’s real. Result: you have to stop being theoretical and start being honest.”

I groan into my sleeve. “Why are you like this?”

“Because you hired me as a friend,” he says, unrepentant. “What would you want her to say if she texted first?”

I don’t have to think. “Hi. I’m here. Are you okay?”

“Great,” he says. “So you send Hi. I’m here. Hope you’re okay. Look at that—cause and effect.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is also not that complicated.” He leans closer. “You’ve built a life. You have friends who cook for you when you forget. You have a team that can turn a stampede into a polite queue. You wrote an album instead of writing yourself off. And still—what? You’re saving your heart like a seat at a table? Fine. Save it. But don’t stand in the doorway forever because you’re scared of the view.”

I’m quiet long enough that he lets the silence sit. He’s good at that, the not-filling. He’s the reason I learned to let a chorus end on air and not apologize.

“I keep up with her,” I admit, soft because it feels like a confession. “Through other people. Her line expanding. The exhibit that looked like breathing on a wall. Someone’s dog in her lap—also Fluffy—with his stupidly cute face. Friends posting dinner in a garden, laughter I can hear without sound. She looks… calm. Private. I don’t know what her days look like. I used to. I could tell you which café she was boycotting because they burned the milk. Now I’m guessing.”

“And that bothers you,” he says, not unkind.

“It scares me,” I correct. “Because what if I knock and find a life I don’t fit in anymore. Or worse: what if I do.”

He smiles just with his eyes. “Then you’ll be two grown women making choices with your whole mouths. Imagine.”

“Ugh.” I rub my forehead. “Elinor would tell me to schedule my feelings between segments.”

“Speaking of: how is our overlord?”

“A menace,” I say, fond. “A necessary one. She told a stadium, ‘No pyro, my artist has lungs,’ and then bought me tea. She’s the reason the hotel has a service exit and a chef who understands ‘plain rice, not sad rice.’ She’s also the reason the schedule is not a suggestion.”

“Good. You need her.” He glances away; someone calls his name offscreen. “All right. Closing arguments: send the text, or don’t, but make it a decision. And stop pretending the album wasn’t a love letter.”

“I never said—”

“You never had to.” He points. “Homework: write the first line of the text you’re too scared to send. Do not send it. Yet. Put it in that little notes app you think I don’t know you use. Then eat, shower, and sleep. Court adjourned.”

“I hate you,” I tell him again.

“You adore me,” he says, blowing a ridiculous kiss. “Tell June I said hydrate or I’ll fight her for custody. Night, songbird.”

He hangs up. I rest my phone on my stomach and stare at the ceiling until the pattern becomes stars.

What would I even write?

Hi. (Too small.)
Hi. I’m here for a few days. No pressure. (A liar.)
I’ve thought about texting you every day for three years and the days I didn’t it was because I was pretending to be brave.(Too much.)
I wrote you an album. Track One was the night I learned how not to dissolve. (…Dangerous.)
Are you okay? (True.)
Would you like to get a matcha and ignore the past for ten minutes then maybe stop ignoring it for the next ten? (Honest.)

And then a pettier question I don’t want to look at: why didn’t she knock? The answer arrives like a mirror: because I was the one who flew across an ocean and never came back. Because I made distance a verb and she respected it. Because love without respect isn’t the thing I want, and she knows me well enough to know that.

I stand, because sitting feels like sinking. I shower the rooftop off my skin. The mirror fogs; I draw a circle with my knuckle and meet the version of me I brought back to this city on purpose—older by three years and also the same kid who learned to whisper and still be heard.

On the carpet, back against the bed, I open the spiral notebook I bought on my first day in London—cheap cover, dent from dropping it on the Tube. I write a list, because lists are smaller than feelings:

• street sounds outside the window
• wind that kept the mic honest
• Elinor’s text: proud of you
• June’s steady hands
• Kit: “Send me roof hair pics”
• Maya: “Your voice sounded like good tea”
• market fabric with her stamp (I didn’t run)
• the sky was kind
• I did not fall apart

Under the list, I write one true sentence because Theo will ask tomorrow: I am excited to be here and I am terrified to be here and both are allowed. Then another: I want to text her. Then the one I don’t let myself say out loud: If she says nothing, I will not die, but I might wish I did. Then: What does her morning look like now? Does she still water plants before coffee? Did she ever fix that wobbly chair or did she keep it because it was ours?

Elinor texts one last time: Curfew. Your voice is currency; spend it wisely. I send back a photo of herbal tea to prove I’m trying. She replies with a thumbs-up and Proud. Sleep.

I don’t open the album app. I don’t draft the text. Not yet. I open Voice Memos, because habit is a spell.

“Bangkok, day one,” I whisper. The silence that follows isn’t empty. It’s a bookmark. It’s a compass. It points where it points.

For the first time in a long time, I let it.