The coroner’s pronouncement of death in absentia six months later—due to the suicide note, the clothes left on the bank of the river, and the witness—killed any hope that Aish had that he could make amends.
“So they’re not wrong,” Aish said, staring at the veins Sofia liked to caress on the back of his hands, thinking about the blood pumping through them. “My hands are all over John’s back. That’s the guilt I’ve been trying to hide from. That’s my fucking legacy: lead singer pushes best friend to commit suicide.
“I’d sit in my basement studio and think about that, think about how I owed him a whole life, and I tried to squeeze that debt onto a fourth album.” He huffed a humorless laugh. “No wonder I was a little blocked, right?
“And the funny thing is, now that I know what he did to Sofia, he wouldn’t have had to jump into that river.” He squeezed his hands into bloodless fists. “I’d have thrown him in myself.”
“Wait...what? What did he do to Sofia?”
Aish swung his head up, let Devonte see how far the last year and yesterday’s revelations and his own self-disgust had pushed him from that golden California rocker everyone loved. “Haven’t you figured it out, yet, man? That phone call Sofia said she made from the hospital? The guy she said she spoke to? That wasn’t me. I might be a fuckup in all ways, but I loved her. I never stopped loving her. That first year of Young Son’s debut, right on the heels of our breakup, when ‘In You’ was this phenomenon and we went from playing bars to stadiums in six months and I should have been on top of the world, I was fucking miserable. If I’d known she needed me, if I’d gotten a chance to hear her voice again, I would have tossed everything away. John, the band, the songs, the tour...everything.
“John knew that. I thought he was taking care of me, the way he pushed girls and guys and booze and drugs on me to fix it.”
“And you two sounded so much alike.” Devonte looked at Aish, thunderstruck. “She was talking to John.”
Hearing Devonte give voice to the realization that Aish had woken up gasping to made his heart pound and his stomach roil, made fury build in his head and disgust burn in his soul. He’d been so willfully stupid for so fucking long.
“John would fuck with my phone. Steal it. Forward my number to his. He’d say he did it so I could concentrate on the music. Let me handle the creative side while he handled everything else. I let myself believe him. I let myself be grateful. And he told Sofia to handle the fact that she might die, all alone.”
“Holy fuck,” Devonte breathed.
She’d almost slipped away from him. She would have been alone and scared and so young and so undeserving of Aish’s actions and inactions.
Suddenly, his friend had a hold of his biceps. “You’ve got to tell her,” Devonte said, only the chair keeping his manager out of his face. “You’ve got to tell her, everyone knew you sounded alike when you were talking, you’ve got to explain to her—”
“No,” Aish said, shrugging out of Devonte’s hold and stepping back from the chair. “No, I’m not going to tell her. And you aren’t either.”
Devonte’s powerful arms fell to his side. “What the fuck?”
Aish stared at his friend’s bewilderment and had to shake his head. People had been giving him a pass for so long.
“I’m a thirty-one-year-old man who’s just come to the realization that I let my best friend manipulate me for the better part of my life. I allowed him to manipulate me and use the glow he got off me to hurt other people. My rich, good looking, and popular were his tools. Do you think he got to do that because I was too stupid to know better? You think he took advantage of me? ’Cause that’s a story we could go with and maybe I could keep making music. But it won’t get me back Sofia. She knows better. She’s been calling me on it since the second I showed up here. Called me a man-child who blames everything on others, and she’s right. John manipulated me because I let him. I can be pretty fucking wily when I want to be—ask Sofia—but it was a fuck-ton easier to let him push me where he wanted me to go than to plant my feet in the sand and take control of my own fucking life.”
Maybe he was shouting a bit, but it wasn’t at Devonte.
“Yeah, John pushed, fuck knows he pushed, but I chose to dive in. I chose to pick the music over Sofia and not do the work to have both. I chose to put ‘In You’ on the album and I chose to ignore the rumors about stolen songs and I chose to reveal Sofia on that video and I chose to come here even though she made it clear she didn’t want me.”
His words were heaving out.
“I’ve made choices and the worst one was to keep my head in the clouds. People got hurt because I’m a passive, childish, entitled, lazy asshole. I’m the worst thing that ever happened to Sofia. The only way I can make this right is by giving away the best things that ever happened to me.”
Devonte had sat back down on the couch during Aish’s diatribe. He stared at him now.
“You’ve changed this month, man,” he said.
Drained, Aish huffed. “Yeah? Losing your career and your one true love can do that to a guy.”
“I like you better now.”
Aish rolled his eyes. “That’s good. Since I’m probably not going to be able to pay you for much longer.”
Devonte shrugged those massive shoulders. “All I’ve got
