The heavy door slams shut with a finality that cuts through my fog, dragging me from dreams where Rhea’s fingers still trace the scars on my chest.

“Hey, man. You can’t be here.” The voice belongs to a stranger, but it might as well be God himself pronouncing judgment.

My eyelids feel like they’re made of concrete as I force them open, squinting against light that stabs through my skull. A man of African American ancestry crouches ten feet away, his brown eyes holding the kind of wariness usually reserved for wild animals or men who’ve lost everything.

“What time is it?” The words scrape against my throat like I’ve been gargling gravel.

He glances at his watch. “Nine.”

Nine what? Nine in the morning? Evening? Nine days since Rhea walked out of my life and took every reason I had for drawing breath with her?

I struggle to sit up, my body protesting every movement as I take in the green dumpster that has been my pillow, the red brick walls closing me in like a tomb, the concrete that has left my bones aching in ways I didn’t know were possible. Nothing looks familiar, but then again, nothing has looked familiar since she left.

“Where am I?”

“You’re behind The Gallery.”

“New bar in town?” Maybe if I can piece together where I am, I can figure out how the hell I got here. Maybe I can figure out how to get back to her.

His frown deepens. “No, it’s been here for a few years. Man, are you okay?”

Am I okay? The question is so absurd that I almost laugh. No, I’m not okay. I haven’t been okay since I watched the woman I love pack her life into bags and walk away like the three years that we spent together meant nothing—like I meant nothing.

I try to push myself up, using the wall for support, but my limbs betray me. Everything hurts. It’s just as much as the physical ache in my body, but it’s also the soul-deep agony of losing the only person who ever saw something worth saving in me.

“Can you point me in the direction of Broadway? I can find my way home from there.”

“I don’t know of a Broadway around here, man.

Where the fuck am I? How far did I run this time? How many miles did I put between myself and the empty house that still smells like her perfume?

Pain shoots through my ribs, stealing my breath as I drop to my knees.

The stranger rushes forward, his concern genuine and unwanted. “You don’t look so good. Let’s get you lying down again, and I’ll call an ambulance.”

“I’m fine.” The lie tastes bitter, but not as bitter as the truth. I’m anything but fine, but I’m broken in ways an ambulance can’t fix. “I have people I can call.”

People. Person. There’s just one person who matters, and she’s probably changed her number by now.

My hands shake as I fumble for my phone, squinting at the screen through the haze of whatever the hell I did to myself last night. Before I can make the call, nausea hits me like a freight train. I toss the phone to the stranger just as my stomach empties itself of whatever poison I’ve been drowning in.

“Who can I call for you?” the stranger asks, sounding genuinely concerned.

“Rhea.” Her name falls from my lips like a prayer, like salvation, like the only word that matters in any language. She’ll come. She has to come. She’s the only one who knows how to put me back together when I fall apart.

“Rhea didn’t answer.”

The words stop my heart. She didn’t answer. She saw my name on her screen and chose to remain silent. She chose to let me drown in whatever mess I’ve made this time.

Where the fuck is Rhea? The question burns in my chest. Is she safe? Is she thinking about me? Or has she already started forgetting the way I take my coffee, the way I sing off-key in the shower, or the way I used to hold her when the nightmares about her mother’s death came?

“My brother, Andrew. Put it on speaker,” I manage through gritted teeth.

Andrew answers on the first ring, his voice tight with worry and barely contained rage. “Jesus, fuck, you’re alive. Where are you?”

The stranger explains we’re located at a bar behind the CNN Center in Atlanta.

Atlanta.

I’m five hours from home, five hours from everything that matters.

“In fucking Atlanta?! How did you end up in Atlanta, Gray?” Andrew’s shout makes my head pound worse.

How did I end up here? How did I end up anywhere without her?

The last clear memory I have is watching Rhea’s taillights disappear down our street, taking my future with them.

“Does it really matter right now, man? I need to get back to Nashville.”

Back to what? The empty mansion? The silent phone? The bed that’s too big, cold, and too full of her ghost?

Another wave of pain doubles me over, and I can’t hold back the scream this time. The agony is nothing compared to the ache in my chest where my heart used to be.

“What’s wrong with him?” Andrew’s tone changes, fear creeping in.

The stranger examines me as concern creases his brow. “Looks like someone beat the hell out of him and left him for dead.”

I laugh, because what else can you do when your life has become a country song cliché? “I feel this way most mornings when I wake up. I’m a hangover professional.”

Andrew starts throwing money around, trying to buy his way out of another mess I’ve created. He puts out the exorbitant amount of twenty thousand dollars to the stranger to babysit me, his fuckup brother.

“That’s Gray Garrison. Look him up on the Internet, call an ambulance, and please don’t tip off the media,” Andrew tells him.

The stranger holds up a photo from his phone, comparing it to my face.

What does he think is the difference between the man on his screen and the broken thing bleeding on the pavement in front of him? Does he see the moment everything went wrong? Can he pinpoint exactly when I lost her?

The world starts to fade around the edges, noise around me becoming distant echoes. My name is being shouted in the background, but it’s not the voice I want to hear. It’s not Rhea whispering that she’ll come bacK

“Mr. Garrison? Can you hear me?”

Bright lights stab through my eyelids. Harried, worried voices are asking questions I don’t have answers to.

“Mr. Garrison, can you tell us what you took?”

What did I take? I took her coffee mug, favorite sweater, and the book she was reading with the bookmark still on chapter three.

What did I take?

Not enough to make it stop hurting.

“I don’t—” The words are cut off by another wave of nausea.

“Rhea,” I call out, because even here, even now, she’s the only name that matters. She’s the only one who can save me from myself.

The steady beep of a monitor pulls me back to consciousness, each sound a reminder that I’m still here, still breathing, and still existing in a world without her.

“Fucking turn it off!”

“Can’t. It’s how they know your dumb ass is still alive.” Andrew’s voice cuts through the haze. He’s sitting beside my hospital bed like a guard dog, full of anger and disappointment, wrapped in concern he doesn’t want to show.

“Where am I?”

“Emory Hospital in Atlanta.” His jaw ticks with barely controlled rage. “You’ve been missing for three days, Gray. How the hell did you end up five hours from home?”

Three days of my life are gone, erased by whatever cocktail of poison I used to try to forget her. Three days passed, and she probably didn’t even notice I was missing.

“Did we play a show?” Maybe there’s a reason I’m here that doesn’t involve the fact that I’m falling apart without her.

“No, we haven’t played a live show in six months. You’ve been missing for three days, Gray.” His exasperation is palpable.

I scan the room, looking for the only face that could make any of this bearable. “Where’s Rhea?”

The question hangs in the air like smoke, toxic and choking.

“What do you mean? Rhea’s gone.” Andrew’s expression shifts from anger to pity, and I hate him for it.

Gone.

I try to sit up, but my ribs scream in protest, and the machines tethering me to this bed remind me that I’m trapped in this room, in my broken body, and in a world where my girl doesn’t want me anymore.

“Where is she?” Surely, I’m not the only one lost without her.

“Don’t know. She disappeared and won’t answer our calls or messages.” He’s clearly not happy about being locked out by Rhea, too.

The words don’t make sense. They can’t make sense. Rhea doesn’t just disappear. She doesn’t ignore calls. She’s responsible and caring, everything I’m not, which is exactly why she left me.

“I’m not following.” I can hear the confusion in my words.

“You don’t remember her leaving you last week?”

The memory hits me like a sledgehammer to the chest. Her suitcases were by the door. Her keys are on the kitchen counter. The way she looked at me was with resignation. Like she’d finally given up on the idea that I could be saved.

Andrew doesn’t give me time to fully process the memory. “You’re a fucking mess, little brother. Your band is about to kick you out, your girlfriend left you, and now you’ve landed yourself in God knows what trouble. You were hanging on by a thread when they brought you in from the street.”

The words wash over me like accusations, each one a reminder of everything I used to be. But I’ve got nothing left to lose now, so I shrug with a bravado I don’t feel. “I’ll go solo. It’s not like I can’t make it on my own.”

The laugh that escapes Andrew is bitter and sharp. He stands abruptly, getting in my face and grabbing my hospital gown.

“Rhea is gone, Gray! Are you getting that through your thick head? Without me and her to clean up your messes, you’ll never make it to the studio to record an album. She was gone one day, and you ended up in another state with alcohol poisoning. You were also mugged and beaten within an inch of your life with no memory of it. You think you can do this without us? Go right ahead!”

His words hit harder than any fist ever could. She was gone one day. One day, without her safety net, I nearly killed myself. One day without her voice reminding me to eat, to sleep, to choose life over the bottle, and I ended up broken and bleeding in an alley five hours from home.

The nurse who enters breaks up our confrontation, her presence a reminder that I’m in a place where my name and my money can’t buy me the kind of help I really need.

“Is everything okay in here?”

I force a smile. “Everything’s fine, ma’am. Can I get something for pain? My ribs are killing me.”

“You can have ibuprofen.” The nurse places a hand on her hip as if she’s challenging me to protest.

The dismissal in her voice grates against my nerves. I’m Gray Garrison. I’ve sold millions of albums, filled stadiums, and had presidents request private concerts. And yet none of that matters now. None of it can bring her back. “Since when?”

Her brow lifts in defiance. “Since you came in half dead with a blood alcohol content of .34 and a multitude of narcotics in your system.”

The number should shock me, but it doesn’t. What surprises me is that I’m still here, breathing, and hurting. Part of me has to think about whether I wanted to join my mother, if somewhere in my blackout brain I thought death might be easier than living without Rhea.

“I’d like to speak to your supervisor.” The words come out automatically, my celebrity armor clicking into place even as it’s cracking around the edges.

Her sardonic smile tells me she’s dealt with rich, entitled, broken men who think their money can fix everything before. “Sure, let me get right on that.”

I throw the remote at her because it’s the only weapon I have left, because I’m angry at the world that let Rhea walk away, and because I’m angry at myself for not being worth staying for. “Pain relief! Isn’t that what I just fucking asked for?”

“Mr. Garrison, if you have another volatile outburst, I’ll be forced to restrain you.”

I flip her off because I’m five years old and thirty-six at the same time, because I’m too broken to care about consequences anymore.

“Go fuck yourself. Do you know who I am?” But even as I ask the question, I realize I don’t know who I am either. Without Rhea, without the band, without the anchor she provided, I’m just another addict in a hospital bed, raging at the world for not caring that my heart is bleeding out onto sterile sheets.

Andrew shakes his head with disappointment so heavily I can feel it pressing down on my chest. “I’m here to issue an ultimatum. Get sober and get your affairs in order. Not only is Case in Point without our lead singer, but we’re also without our personal assistant, whom we count on far more than we should. If you fail to get clean, you don’t have a place in Case in Point anymore. You don’t have a place with me either.”

Each word is a door slamming shut, cutting off another escape route.

“Rhea is long gone, man. This is the end of the line for you, little brother. This is rock bottom. Blacking out for days and ending up almost dead isn’t funny, Gray. It’s fucking pathetic.”

Pathetic. The word lodges in my chest like shrapnel.

“I get that bad shit happened to us when we were kids. No child should ever lose their mother, especially not the way she went right in front of us. It wasn’t your responsibility to save Mom, Gray. We were too little to help. Drowning it in a bottle isn’t helping you, and it’s not the answer to your problems. It’s keeping you in the past.”

The mention of our mother opens wounds that never properly healed. I can still see her face, still hear the gurgling sound she made as the water filled her lungs while I stood frozen, seven years old and helpless. Rhea knew about that night. She was the only person I ever talked to about finding Mom in the bathtub, about the way her eyes looked when she saw me, about how I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t save her.

“It’s not your fault, baby. You were just a little boy. You couldn’t have saved her,” Rhea used to whisper when the dreams came.

But Rhea isn’t here to whisper comfort anymore. She’s not here to hold me when the memories get too sharp, when the guilt gets too heavy, when the bottle seems like the only way to make it stop.

“It’s time for you to make a decision. You have two choices, live or die, but the decision is yours and yours alone.” Andrew picks up the remote I threw and places it back on the bed. “Call me when you’re ready. We’ll get you set up in a nice rehab somewhere you can heal.”

He turns to leave, and I can’t let him walk away, either. I can’t be alone with the weight of everything I’ve lost. In one last desperate attempt to have the last word, I yank my pillow from behind my own head and chunk it across the room. It hits him in the back—a pathetic gesture from a pathetic man who’s lost everything that mattered.

“Mr. Garrison!” The nurse returns with reinforcements, and suddenly, the room is full of people in scrubs reaching for me with restraints.

“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” Andrew says as he walks away, and the words cut deeper than any physical pain could.

I don’t know who I am either. I was Rhea’s boyfriend, the band’s frontman, and Andrew’s little brother. But strip all that away, and what’s left? Just a broken man in a hospital bed, fighting against restraints like an animal in a cage.

“Let me go! Fuck you! Stop! Do you know who I am?!”

But as the sedatives flow through my IV and my muscles begin to fail, I realize a terrible truth. I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m nobody without her. I’m nothing without the band. I’m just another cautionary tale about what happens when you love the bottle more than you love the people trying to save you.

As consciousness fades, my last thought is of Rhea, not as she was when she left, tired and defeated. I go back to her in the beginning, when she still believed I was worth saving. When she still believed in us.

The darkness that claims me is merciful, because in it I can pretend she’s still here and haven’t lost everything that ever mattered.

I can pretend I’m not alone.