The days that followed weren't really days at all. They melted into one another, indistinguishable in color or shape—a gray, formless smear. Time lost its edges. There was no morning, no night. Just a single, suffocating stretch of suspended existence, lived entirely within the four walls of Alex's bedroom.
He had sealed the room like a tomb.
The curtains were drawn tight, locking out the sunlight, the world, the expectation to function. What had once been a creative engine—bursting with sound, light, rhythm—was now a place of stillness. The air was stale and unmoving, heavy with the scent of sweat, dust, and something harder to name. A grief that had taken physical form. It clung to everything.
His phone lay abandoned on the nightstand, face-down, battery long dead. Once, it had been his lifeline. A constant stream of alerts, demands, applause. Now it was just a lifeless black brick, a relic of a former life. He hadn't charged it since the funeral. Notifications—dozens, hundreds—hung in the ether, unheard and unacknowledged: messages from Finneas, from his manager, from interviewers and friends and followers and strangers. The world kept spinning. Alex had stepped off.
His room had stopped in place.
The guitars stood like ghosts in the corner, their strings slack, their bodies gathering dust. His keyboard slept beneath the desk, powered down, its once-white keys yellowed in the half-light like crooked teeth. They were no longer instruments. They were memorials. Inanimate witnesses to a silence they couldn't fill.
By the door, still partially entombed in its bubble wrap, leaned the gold record for Lost Boy.
It was gleaming, flawless, polished to a mirror shine. The name Alex Vance etched in proud lettering. A reward. A monument. A cosmic taunt.
He couldn't look at it.
Couldn't bear the way it glinted in the gloom, reflecting nothing but a boy who wasn't here anymore.
He turned his head every time he passed it, as if it might sear his skin if he looked too long.
But none of it held as much weight as the envelope.
The letter.
It sat facedown on his desk, exactly where he had placed it days ago. He hadn't touched it since. And yet, it dominated the room. Not in size, but in gravity. It had become the center of his orbit, a quiet black hole pulling everything inward. He couldn't look at it for long. Couldn't walk near it. The sight of it made his stomach twist and his hands go cold. Still, he felt it—always. Like a splinter in the fabric of the room. A pressure. A presence.
It was Leo's voice, sealed in paper. A final thought. A judgment. A goodbye.
He was terrified of what it might say.
And more terrified of what it might not.
Sleep came in long, dreamless chunks. When he woke, it was with a crushing sense of disorientation—mouth dry, body heavy, heart racing for no reason at all. Daylight or darkness made no difference. He'd lost the thread. When he was awake, he was motionless. Not resting. Just… stalled. Sometimes he lay on the bed, watching the cracks in the ceiling paint, tracing them like fault lines. Other times he sat in his chair, staring at the blank wall like it might eventually speak.
When his thoughts stirred, they didn't comfort him. They played on a loop, merciless and precise.
The cafeteria.
Leo's voice, tight and small.
His shoulders, slumped just a little too low.
The way Alex had glanced at his phone.
I gotta take this.
The buzz of the incoming call.
The clatter as the phone fell.
Leo's voice—cut off.
That silence.
It was all there, again and again. A memory stripped of sound and color, projected on the inside of his skull.
Somewhere inside him, buried deep in the static, the older version of himself—the 25-year-old, the confident, careful producer—was quiet. Not gone, but silenced. There was no plan for this. No strategy, no checklist, no fallback. The ghost who'd once navigated meetings and deadlines and delicate emotional landmines with ease had nothing to say now. It had never known this kind of grief. This wasn't a missed opportunity or a bad deal.
This was final.
This was death.
And worse—this was his failure.
Outside the room, life trudged forward. He could hear it sometimes: the clinking of plates, his mother's voice in hushed tones, the faint sound of footsteps, the soft knock before a tray of food was left outside his door. He rarely touched it. The weight of eating felt impossible.
He didn't cry.
Not because he didn't want to. But because the sorrow was too thick, too dense. It had congealed inside him, a leaden fog pressing against his lungs and ribs. Even tears couldn't get out.
He lay in bed, unmoving, shadows stretching slowly across the room as the days passed. The silence pressed inward, filling every crevice of the space, of him. And in that stillness, Alex Vance wasn't writing songs. He wasn't answering calls. He wasn't healing.
He was slowly, quietly, erasing himself.