CHAPTER 2: THE BACK HALLWAY

Elena made it halfway down the back hallway before her mouth got ahead of her brain.

She turned around.

He was already there. Leaning against the hallway entrance like he'd known she was going to turn before she did. Headphones still around his neck. Hands in his pockets. Calm in a way that made her teeth itch.

"You touched the board."

Not a question. She said it flat, arms crossed, the tip jar with its pathetic three dollars pressed against her ribs.

"I did." He didn't apologize. Didn't even shift his weight. Just stood there in the bad fluorescent light looking at her like she was the most interesting problem he'd encountered in months.

Something about that made her jaw tighten.

"You don't touch someone's sound without asking. That's the rule. The only rule."

"There are actually a lot of rules about sound engineering."

"Did I ask?"

His mouth closed. Then one corner did something that wasn't quite a smile. More like the ghost of one. Like he was fighting it and losing.

"Your low end was feeding back," he said. "The monitors were set wrong. Whoever ran this board before me had the gain so high it was eating your mids. You were competing with your own reverb the entire set."

She stared at him.

She understood maybe forty percent of that.

"Your voice was doing all the work." Quieter now. "It shouldn't have to. The room should work with you, not against you."

Something shifted behind her ribs. Small. Warm. She crushed it before it could settle.

"I didn't ask for your help."

"No."

"I don't need it."

"Okay."

"I've been singing here for seven months without anyone touching that board and I've been fine."

"You've been incredible," he said. Like a fact. Like gravity or weather. "But you haven't been fine. That system was robbing you of about thirty percent of your range."

Silence. The hallway smelled like mop water and whatever died behind the walls last winter. Glamorous.

Elena shifted the tip jar to her other hand. Three dollars clinked against glass. She wanted to say something sharp, something that would make him stop looking at her like that, but her brain was buffering.

"What's your name?"

It came out softer than she wanted.

"Danny." He put his hand out. "Danny Miller."

She looked at his hand. Clean fingernails. No calluses. His watch was plain but something about it looked expensive in a way she couldn't pin down. She filed that away without knowing why.

"Elena."

She didn't shake his hand. After a beat he lowered it. Didn't seem offended. Just patient. Like he had all the time in the world for her to decide whether he was worth trusting.

Men who seemed patient made her nervous. In her experience, patience was just a prettier word for a longer game.

"You wrote that song." Not a question.

"Yeah."

"The bridge. Where your voice cracks on the word 'morning.' That's intentional."

Something cold and hot at the same time ran through her stomach. Because nobody had ever caught that. The crack was the whole point. It was the morning she woke up and her mother's smell was gone from the apartment and the word "morning" became something that meant loss instead of beginning.

Seven months of singing that song. Nobody caught it. Not once.

"I should go." She stepped back. "Three buses."

"At eleven at night?"

"No, for fun. I ride the bus recreationally. Really clears the head."

There. The smile he'd been fighting. Full now. It changed his whole face, made him look younger, made him look like someone she could...

No. She wasn't doing that.

"Goodnight, Danny Miller."

She turned before he could respond. Pushed through the back door into the alley where November hit her like a slap. She sucked the cold in and let it scrub her lungs clean of whatever had just happened in that hallway.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus.

Seriously Ella it's fine. I can defer a semester. Don't worry about it.

Her brother. Nineteen years old and already learning how to swallow what he needed so she wouldn't choke on it. Just like their mother. Just like every Cross who ever lived.

She typed back: Don't you dare. I've got it handled.

She did not have it handled. She had three dollars and a fridge with nothing but peanut butter in it.

The bus was twelve minutes late. She stood under a streetlight that kept flickering like it couldn't commit, and she replayed every word Danny Miller had said. She hated that the thing lodged in her chest wasn't anger or suspicion or anything useful.

It was the way he'd said "incredible" like it cost him nothing. Like it was obvious.

Nobody had ever said that word to her and meant it.

She had $847 to find in six days and a stranger's voice living rent-free in her head.

One of those problems she knew how to solve. The other one scared her more.