“You told me it was my problem,” she’d said. “You told me to handle it.”
He put his hand against the glass to steady himself as nausea churned through him, but then quickly took his hand away from the warmth. He stepped just out of the rays of her rising sun; he didn’t deserve to feel anything but cold and empty.
“What time is it?” Devonte croaked from the couch.
Aish shrugged and then nodded at the steaming cup of coffee he’d already placed near him. They had work to do.
He continued drinking his coffee, let his manager spend a few minutes mainlining his, as he watched sunlight grow across vineyards he would never get to see ripen again. Then he sat in a chair across from Devonte, who was hunched over his cup in an undershirt and jeans.
“So how do we make me the bad guy of this story instead of Sofia?”
Devonte huffed humorlessly into his cup. “After all the motherfucking time we spent trying to make you look like a knight in shining armor,” he said, mournfully shaking his head.
Aish grabbed the nearby coffee pot to refill Devonte’s cup. “I looked like the douche in shining armor. Remember that metallic vest your stylist tried to put me in?”
Their chuckles had no laughter in them. Last night, he’d shared everything Sofia had revealed: the pregnancy, the miscarriage, her alone and bleeding in an American hospital believing Aish had turned his back on her. Devonte had needed a breather on the balcony after. Now, both of them understood how revolting their rock star display was when Aish first showed up in the Monte.
“You deserve your knocks but you know who the bad guy should be?” Devonte said. “John. He’s the one who stole the fucking songs.”
“I know,” Aish said, slumping back in his chair. “But I can’t get her off the hook by blaming a dead guy.”
Devonte looked at him funny.
“What?” Aish asked.
Devonte’s dark eyes narrowed. “When I said that John was the bad guy, you just said ‘I know.’ Like you just didn’t throw away the last year of your life and almost torpedo your career defending and mourning him.” Anger and a bit of hurt started to build up in Devonte’s broad forehead. “I told you about John making me pay off that family and you let me leave here without knowing if I had a job the next day, much less my friend.”
Aish shoved off the urge to blame shock or surprise. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You were never going to lose your job or your friend. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I’ve known for a while. John was a piece of shit.”
Devonte opened his mouth but no sound came out. Aish realized his leg was jumping up and down like crazy. He stood, circled behind the chair for a little room to walk. He had to be moving to tell the rest of this story.
“You know all those rumors, that I was involved in John’s death, that I somehow got him to kill himself.” He turned back to Devonte, put his hands on the back of the chair, and forced himself to face him. “They’re true.”
He had to press on, get it all out now, and finally deal with what he’d been pushing away for a year.
“I found out John had stolen songs. I confronted him about it in Memphis, told him I was going to tell you and the label. I knew the label would get squirrely, maybe even try to pay off the bands and suppress the info. But you...you would keep us on the straight and narrow.”
Devonte scoffed, and Aish knew it was self-mocking. Devonte had already known about the plagiarism, had already been manipulated by John to do something that went against his nature. And that was John’s gift wasn’t it? Using people’s weaknesses against them. Aish’s greatest weakness was his arrogance, the belief that he was perfect and would always remain so. It had made it so easy for John to do whatever he wanted in the gutters while Aish kept his head up in the clouds.
When he discovered the plagiarism—when he’d walked into that bar in Santa Rosa, near his uncle’s winery, and faced the lead singer who jumped off the stage snarling at him about how he’d stolen their song, when the singer played him an early recording and talked him through how they’d developed the song and showed him the cease and desist letters from Young Son’s attorney, an attorney Aish had never heard of—he waited a month to confront John. He didn’t want it to be true. Because, if it was true, then John had tarnished the fame Aish had traded in the love of his life for. Aish didn’t want to believe he had this darkness woven into a glow that he needed to be pristine.
Ultimately, though, it had been thoughts of Sofia that had forced him to confront John. She’d always demanded the best out of him; no way he’d ever get her back if he let this slide.
So, in Memphis, he told John that he knew and that he still loved him and that he understood the pressures of creating a hit and that he would stand by his friend. But they had to make this right.
“It was the first time I ever saw John cry,” Aish said. “He begged me to wait a week. Let him get his finances in order, tell his parents. The morning his week was up, you came pounding on my door.”
John’s body was never recovered from the Mississippi River. But a
